ch and even when,
later on, this great tradition is seen disappearing, cloying and insipid,
amidst the mannerisms of the Ming period, it will still retain sufficient
power to carry thus far a reflection of the vigor and vitality attained in
the great periods.

The painting of _Flowers and Birds_, and _Plants and Insects_ appears to
have been already established at this time. The flowers and plants are
drawn according to the methods of _double contour_ and _single contour_,
worked over and brought out with that intensity of analysis to which
allusion has been made. The bird is caught in its most subtle movement,
the insect studied in its essential structure.

Thus we see that Chinese painting had extended its investigations in every
direction and had solved the problems found along its path. It had
absorbed foreign influences, altered its conception of the divine and
found a new type of figure. It had endowed landscape painting with all the
resources of atmospheric perspective and had established the two essential
styles of the North and the South. The painter was master of the visible;
his thought dominated form and was able to express itself with freedom.

V. THE SUNG PERIOD--TENTH TO THIRTEENTH CENTURIES

The T'ang period had been the golden age of Chinese poetry. It had
witnessed an extraordinary outburst of religious fervor, and the
overwhelming domination of Buddhism. It had, moreover, triumphantly
re-established the unity of the empire and to the pride of intellectual
activity it could add the pride of might and dominion. But the same cannot
be said for the Sung period. From a political standpoint its history is
one of cumulative disaster. Ancient China retreated by degrees before the
thrusts of the barbarians, until the great thunderbolt of Genghis Khan's
conquest, reverberating with formidable echoes throughout all Asia,
announced the approaching downfall of culture in the red dawn of a new
era.

The Sung culture, totally different from that of the T'ang period, was,
however, swept forward to its culmination. It would seem as if, under the
menace of the barbarians, the mind had set for its goal the development of
ideas embryonic in earlier work, formulating them in haste and arresting
them finally in perfect yet sad images, in which the heights attained were
haunted by the shadow of impending ruin.

[Illustration: PLATE XI. LANDSCAPE BY MA LIN
Sung Period. Collection of R. Petrucci.]

The dyn