Matteo Ricci in the UCL art collection

At the Public Curating Takeover hosted by University College London last week (a great event, by the way), I was delighted to find this print in the collection. There was no mistaking the image of Matteo Ricci (on the left), perhaps the most famous Jesuit missionary ever to work in China. The figure on the right is named as Paul Siu, about whom more later.

The UCL catalogue does not name the artist, but other sources trace this image to a book (China Illustrata) published around 1668 by a Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher. Whether Kircher actually executed the engraving himself is unclear. Judging from the rather muddled Chinese characters on the altar hangings, I would guess that it wasn’t the work of a Chinese artist.

Ricci first arrived at the fledgling Jesuit mission in southern China in 1582, when Christian missionaries were struggling to gain a foothold. He successfully applied the Jesuit strategy of “cultural accommodation”: adapting to local language and customs to spread the message, while dressing and living as a scholarly Chinese gentleman to win the trust of influential local people. Hence the significance of this image, in which he wears Chinese robes and a Confucian scholar’s hat. By 1601 Ricci had established the first Jesuit mission in Beijing itself and had begun to build direct ties with the Imperial Court, quite a coup by any standards.

For the art world, Ricci was important in at least two ways. First, he laid the way for Giuseppe Castiglione (a Jesuit priest and artist) to become an influential Qing dynasty court painter in the 18^th century. Castiglione became noted for elaborate portraits like the one of the Qianlong emperor, below. His work is sometimes dismissed as trivial but he became a key member of the imperial atelier (pretty amazing for a foreign artist) thanks to foundations laid down by Ricci. These days, no exhibition of Qing art is complete without a few Castigliones – his portraits of imperial pet dogs are especially popular. 

But it is Ricci’s role in the clock-making industry that I find most fascinating. Mechanical time-keeping devices (the kind that run on springs and cogs) didn’t exist in 16^th century China. When Ricci presented a pair of European clocks to the Wanli emperor in 1601, he set off an absolute craze for the devices. It seems the 17^th century Chinese were as keen on modern technology as their modern descendants. And having studied the imported European models, they eventually set up their own clock-making workshops (mainly around Guangdong) which flourished as the growing middle classes all wanted one too. Hardly surprising, as some of the finest Imperial palace clocks looked like this (below), which sold at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2008 for US$4 million.

Best of all, according to the historian Joseph Needham, Matteo Ricci was worshipped well into the 19^th century as a patron deity (pu-sa) of the Shanghai guild of clockmakers, due to his role in bringing modern clock-making to China. Now that’s cultural accommodation!

As for Paul Siu, he was born Xu Guangqi and brought up as a good Confucian. He rose through the ranks of Chinese bureaucracy to become a “first grand secretary” in the Ming dynasty, before converting to Christianity in 1601. According to the historian David Mungello, Xu and two other senior civil servants were Matteo Ricci’s most celebrated converts, later known as the Three Pillars of the early Christian church in China.

So the UCL collection’s print is significant because it illustrates both the strength of Matteo Ricci’s missionary zeal (as reflected in his full Chinese dress), and shows next to him an example of his success in the form of Paul Siu.