Lives of Exemplary Women (顾恺之列女仁智图卷（宋摹）)

Gu Kaizhi again, and again through a copy. Lives of Exemplary Women is the companion lesson to his Admonitions, a picture built from biographies of virtuous women and the deeds that earned them the name.

The original, attributed to Gu Kaizhi in the fourth century, illustrated a Han dynasty text that catalogued women who behaved with courage, loyalty, or self sacrifice. The Palace Museum holds a Song copy. As with the Admonitions, we meet the master through a later hand that wanted to keep him alive. The copy is the tradition’s act of memory.

These exemplary tales were moral instruction for women of the court, and the paintings made the lessons portable. A girl could be shown a model rather than handed a book. Gu Kaizhi’s gift was to give those models a calm, believable humanity, so the instruction did not read as threat alone.

Seen now, the scroll is complicated. It encodes a narrow ideal of female virtue, and it encodes it with real artistry. The interest is precisely that tension, a great painter lending grace to a strict curriculum. The Song copy preserves both the grace and the curriculum.

We study it for Gu Kaizhi, but we also study it for what the court wanted women to be. The picture carries both intentions, and refuses to separate them.

Image © The Palace Museum. View the original in the Palace Museum collection.