Note 207 — Chapter VI · MAKROKOSMOS

O. Fischer, Chinesische Landmalerei (1921), p. 24. What makes Chinese—as also Indian—art so difficult a study for us is the fact that all works of the early periods (namely, those of the Hwangho region from 1300 to 800 B.C. and of pre-Buddhist India) have vanished without a trace. But that which we now call “Chinese art” corresponds, say, to the art of Egypt from the Twentieth Dynasty onward, and the great schools of painting find their parallel in the sculpture schools of the Saïte and Ptolemaic periods, in which an antiquarian preciosity takes the place of the living inward development that is no longer there. Thus from the examples of Egypt we are able to tell how far it is permissible to argue backwards to conclusions about the art of Chóu and Vedic times.