중국 明･淸代 고분벽화의 墓主圖

Abstract

Since mural tombs were not preferred when the states institutionalized and implemented Confucian funerary rites and burials, their construction declined gradually from the Ming dynasty. However, the mural tombs survived in the local funeral customs, maintaining their statuses as an unparalleled visual historical material for two reasons. First, the differences in selecting, arranging, and expressing murals from the previous period show the changes in notions about death and the afterlife. Second, as a reproduced world reflecting real life, the motifs and scenes on the mural reveal the social, cultural, and spatial contexts of using particular images of the time. Based on these two points, this paper explores the changes in meanings of tomb spaces by analyzing the disposition and styles of portraits of tomb occupants, the subject matter of great emphasis in the tomb mural of the Ming and Qing dynasties. While comparing with portrait paintings for Confucian ancestral rites of the Ming and Qing, this paper attempts to verify that the portraits of tomb occupants merely mimicked portraits used in shrines, reflecting the changes of recognition toward the afterlife.