From Han tradition to Tang elegance

This long paper is the comprehensive essay to the exhibition China at the court of the emperors. Unknown masterpieces from Han Tradition to Tang elegance (25-907), held at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, in Spring 2008. It thoroughly explains the development of the arts in China from the Han to the Tang dynasties against the historical and cultural context of the time, underlying the new perspective recently put forward on the basis of the latest archaeological excavations. These have driven scholars to regard the period of division between Han and Tang no longer as a ‘dark’ epoch of unrest, during which the country was politically and culturally fragmented, but instead as a moment of regeneration and flowering of the arts, stimulated by intercultural exchanges with Rome, Persia, India and Central Asia. From this new viewpoint, it appears clear that the great renaissance of the seventh to eighth centuries was the culmination of a long process that had germinated in the second to third centuries.