Abstract
The relative status of human bodies as subjects for paintings is very different in European painting since the Renaissance and in Chinese painting from the Yuan dynasty onwards. In Europe the body, and especially the nude body, was a necessary ingredient of the most highly valued type of painting, history painting. Landscape painting had a much lower status and value. In China, the hierarchy of subjects is almost completely the reverse. It is proposed that this state of affairs can be explained by the way in which the choice of subjectmatter by the most important artists, at the moment of the most important change in the selection system dominating art, was linked to the social role and status of the artist in the new selection system.
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