One Hundred Horses: An Italian Master in Imperial China

Today, we’ll talk about the Italian Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione, who crossed cultural boundaries to serve three Qing emperors and created a groundbreaking fusion of European realism and Chinese court painting, most famously represented by his masterpiece One Hundred Horses.

Transcript

One Hundred Horses: An Italian Master in Imperial China

Today, we’ll talk about the Italian Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione, who crossed cultural boundaries to serve three Qing emperors and created a groundbreaking fusion of European realism and Chinese court painting, most famously represented by his masterpiece One Hundred Horses.

For many Western visitors browsing the collections of the Palace Museum in Taipei, one painting often stops them in their tracks. It shows a white horse turning its head slightly, its long eyelashes casting a delicate shadow over a calm, almost aloof eye. The muscles beneath its gleaming coat seem to pulse with life. The mane falls softly along its neck, each strand rendered with astonishing precision. It feels less like ink and silk and more like a living creature caught in a moment of breath. The painter was not Chinese. He was born in Milan. His name in Europe was Giuseppe Castiglione. And in China, he became known as Lang Shining.

Lang Shining arrived in China in the early eighteenth century, during the Qing dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911. Born in 1688 into an artistic family in Milan, he received rigorous academic training in European painting, mastering perspective, anatomy, and the careful modeling of light and shadow that had developed since the Renaissance. At nineteen, he entered the Jesuit order. Unlike missionaries who spent their days preaching in the streets, he was able to devote much of his time to painting. His artistic skill soon distinguished him within the Church.

In 1714, at the age of twenty-six, he sailed from Lisbon with other Jesuit missionaries on a long voyage to the East. After arriving in Macau in 1715, he began studying Chinese and learning court etiquette. Before long, he was recommended to the imperial court and summoned to Beijing. There he would serve not one, but three emperors: Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong. Over more than fifty years in China, he rose to an honorary third-rank official position, an extraordinary achievement for a foreigner in a highly stratified imperial system.

At court, Lang Shining became known for painting horses, exotic birds, flowers, and imperial portraits. He introduced European techniques of modeling and realism into the highly refined world of Chinese court art. Traditional Chinese painting prized expressive brushwork and the conveyance of spirit. Western oil painting, by contrast, emphasized the illusion of three-dimensional form through light and shadow. When the Jesuit painters first presented works that relied heavily on shading, some Chinese viewers thought the dark areas looked like stains or dirt. Excessive realism was even criticized as lacking proper brush method, dismissed as mere craftsmanship rather than true art.

Lang Shining adapted. He softened the dramatic contrasts of European chiaroscuro and reduced harsh shadows. He strengthened contour lines in keeping with Chinese gongbi, or meticulous brush technique. Figures and animals in his paintings appear clearly defined, as if illuminated by even, shadowless light. Instead of thick oil paint, he used mineral pigments and fine ink lines on silk. The result was something new: a hybrid style that fused European realism with Chinese aesthetics. His horses have anatomical precision, yet their outlines retain the rhythmic strength valued in Chinese art. His trees and rocks follow traditional brush patterns, while the animals within them possess weight, volume, and presence.

One of the most striking examples of his work is a portrait of a white horse named Wanjishuang, the finest of ten prized steeds presented to the Qianlong emperor by Mongolian nobles. The animal stands in partial profile, revealing only one side of its body and face. Though entirely white, the coat is differentiated by subtle shifts in tone. Muscles ripple beneath the skin. Fine hairs at the base of the legs are individually rendered. Even the slight folds of skin near the joints are visible. The eye, half-veiled by long lashes, conveys an air of composed elegance, with just a hint of disdain. The painting has been used in recent years on exhibition posters and even on the cover of the Palace Museum’s calendar, a testament to its enduring appeal.

Lang Shining and other Jesuit painters at the Qing court, such as Ignatius Sickeltart and Jean-Denis Attiret, introduced knowledge of perspective, anatomy, and color modeling into Chinese figure and animal painting. They were, in effect, cultural translators, bringing techniques developed in Europe into dialogue with long-established Chinese traditions. Yet they had to tread carefully. The emperors admired novelty, but they also cherished the authority of Chinese cultural heritage. Too much Western influence would have seemed inappropriate in the Son of Heaven’s domain.

Perhaps Lang Shining’s most famous masterpiece is “One Hundred Horses,” often called one of China’s great classical paintings. And among the so-called top ten masterpieces of Chinese painting, this is the only one created by a foreign artist. Commissioned in 1724 during the Yongzheng reign, it took Lang Shining four years to complete. Following court protocol, he first produced a detailed ink draft for imperial approval. Only after the emperor authorized it did he create the final, colored version on silk. Today, the finished scroll is housed in Taipei, while the preparatory draft is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The scroll is monumental in size, at roughly 95cm in width and stretching more than seven meters in length. Across its surface unfolds a vast pastoral landscape populated by one hundred horses. Eighty-three are fully visible, while seventeen are partially hidden behind rocks or trees. They represent different breeds, including Mongolian horses and Central Asian varieties commonly seen along the Silk Road. The animals graze, drink, roll on the ground, gallop, nurse their foals, or simply stand at rest. No two are identical. Some have just emerged from water, their wet coats clinging to their flanks, droplets poised as if about to fall. Others are lean and withdrawn, their ribs faintly visible beneath taut skin. A few appear tired or pensive, set apart from the robust majority.

The composition reveals Lang Shining’s mastery of both traditions. The foreground figures of herders are constructed with anatomical precision, their proportions carefully observed. The middle ground is arranged according to harmonious spatial principles that echo both European perspective and Chinese compositional balance. In the distance, mountains rise in forms shaped by traditional Chinese brush techniques for rocks and texture strokes. Pine needles are defined by ink outlines. Grasses are indicated with calligraphic flicks of the brush. The painting contains areas of open space that allow the eye to rest, a hallmark of Chinese landscape art.

At the same time, the modeling of the horses demonstrates a clear understanding of European light and shadow. There are transitions from highlight to midtone to shadow that give the bodies convincing volume. Yet these shadows are gentle, created through layered washes rather than heavy oil paint. The overall effect is luminous rather than dramatic. It is as if the scene exists under a bright but diffused sky, without sharp contrasts.

On the surface, “One Hundred Horses” can be read as a celebration of imperial prosperity. In Chinese political symbolism, strong and well-fed horses often represented military power, territorial control, and abundance. By depicting a thriving herd in a fertile landscape, Lang Shining was fulfilling the emperor’s desire for images that affirmed the greatness of the Qing empire.

But a closer look reveals something more ambiguous. Among the muscular steeds are several noticeably thin horses. Their expressions seem subdued, even melancholy. One stands alone. Another lowers its head as if exhausted. Such figures do not immediately align with triumphant imperial propaganda, so why would the painter include them?

In European art, thin horses sometimes symbolized death. In Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcut “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” the rider representing death sits astride a gaunt animal. As a European trained in Christian iconography, Lang Shining would have been aware of these associations. Yet in Chinese culture, the image of a thin horse carries different meanings. It can symbolize an unrecognized talent, a loyal but neglected official, or steadfast integrity amid hardship. You may recall in our recent podcast featuring Ren Renfa’s masterpiece called Two Horses, which was painted during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), we explained how the artist contrasted fat and thin horses to express a pointed moral critique.

Undoubtedly, after decades immersed in Chinese culture, Lang Shining also understood the language of visual metaphor; thus, it is tempting to interpret the thin horses in “One Hundred Horses” as subtle self-portraits. Like many missionaries, he had come to China with a spiritual mission. However, disputes between various Catholic orders over how to accommodate Chinese rites led to tensions between Rome and the Qing court. Eventually, imperial restrictions on Christian preaching tightened. Lang Shining was valued for his artistic skill and was retained within the palace, but his missionary work was curtailed. He could not freely evangelize, nor could he easily return to Europe. His identity was divided between worlds.

In this context, the solitary or weary horses take on more poignancy. Surrounded by imperial splendor, they seem slightly out of place. They inhabit the same landscape, yet they are marked by difference. If the robust horses embody the flourishing Qing empire, then with the thin ones, Lang Shining may be whispering, whether consciously or subconsciously, of his personal frustration, displacement, and spiritual longing.

He died in 1766 at the age of seventy-eight and was buried in Beijing. By then he had spent more than half a century in China. His life was one of adaptation, negotiation, and artistic innovation. He never returned to Italy. Yet through his paintings, he built a bridge between civilizations.

Lang Shining’s influence extended beyond his own canvases. Many Chinese court painters conducted experiments that blended Western modeling with Chinese brushwork. The hybrid style he helped pioneer signaled a turning point. It marked both the culmination of classical court painting and the beginning of transformations that would eventually lead to modern Chinese art.

For Western audiences unfamiliar with Dunhuang murals or Qing court paintings, Lang Shining’s story offers an accessible entry point into the broader narrative of cultural exchange. His art demonstrates that the exchanges between China and Europe were not only diplomatic and commercial, but were also visual, tactile, and deeply human. In the careful rendering of a horse’s flank, or the softness of a shaded eye, one can see the meeting of two artistic philosophies.

Standing before “One Hundred Horses” today, a viewer may first marvel at its technical brilliance. But the longer one looks, the more the painting reveals layers of dialogue. It is at once Chinese and European, imperial and personal, triumphant and introspective. It tells the story of an Italian Jesuit who became a Qing court painter, and of a world in which images could cross oceans even at a time when people could not easily do so.

In the end, Lang Shining’s horses still breathe across the silk. They remind us that art can travel further than politics, survive longer than empires, and carry within it the quiet complexities of a life lived between cultures.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Lü Weitao, translator Liu Junhun, and copy editor Pu Ren. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.