Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China

The sixteenth century in China was a period of rapid and unprecedented economic expansion. The period also saw a parallel expansion in the sphere of cultural production, as a growing class of consumers of luxury goods benefited from the formation of one of the classic early modern consumer societies.Pictures were a major source of consumable luxury at this period: pictures not only in the form of independently circulating images classifiable as "art," but also in the form of wall decoration; pic…