明代宫廷书画收藏考略

明代宫廷的书画收藏十分丰富，嘉靖以后虽多有散出，但仍具有一定规模，直至明清鼎革之际宫廷所藏书画才散佚殆尽。明代宫廷所藏书画主要包括接收前代遗存、查抄籍没书画以及帝后臣工新创作书画几个部分。宫廷所藏书画主要由宦官机构司礼监负责保管，存放于质慎库中;另有部分历代帝王、君臣画像由印绶监保管，存放于古今通集库中。明代中叶以后，宫廷收藏书画通过充抵官员俸禄、偷窃等方式大量流散出宫，但同时也存在一定的补充和回流。明清易代之际，宫中所藏书画散佚殆尽，这为明末清初私人收藏家群体的崛起提供了机遇。

A Brief Survey on the Ming Dynasty Royal Collection of Paintings and Calligraphies

The Ming Dynasty Royal Court had a sufficient collection of paintings and calligraphies, but scholars had an insufficient attention to it. Instead, they paid more attention to the individual collections of Ming Dynasty. By combing through the relevant historical documents, the following text has outlined the gathering, the preserving, and the dispersing of paintings and calligraphies by the Ming Dynasty Royal Court, and has made a systematic statistics of the presently remained ones. Different from the traditional points of view, this dissertation holds that the collection still had been opulent till the fall of Ming dynasty in despite of its huge loss since mid-Ming, attributed to the continuous creations and the inverse-flow of artifacts brought out from the royal palace. There are three main sources for the Ming Dynasty Royal collection of paintings and calligraphies. First, the trophies gained from the early Ming dynasty unification wars. The Ming army took over almost all the collections of the Yuan Palace Treasury (neifu) along with the Yuan dynasty capital city Dadu, including enormous paintings and calligraphies from previous dynasties which laid the foundation for the Ming Dynasty Royal collection. The Ming Dynasty Royal Court also attained a large amount of paintings and calligraphies from the Zhang Shicheng regime based in Suzhou which was mostly created by the Yuan scholars.  The second key source was the confiscated individual collections of the disgraced officials that were registered at the imperial affairs department. The first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, successively campaigned the great purge during which countless dignitaries of meritocracy and aristocracy were implicated in the cases of Counsellor Hu Weiyong and the senior general Lan Yv, and in turn, all their luxury collections were sequestrated and listed in the imperial affaires department. During the Jiajing and the Wanli eras, the households of two powerful prime ministers, Yan Song and Zhang Juzheng, were expropriated one after another; thus their tremendous paintings and calligraphies along with other collections were listed into the Ming Dynasty Royal collections. The third main source was those created by the Ming emperors, empresses and consorts as well as the court painters and calligraphers. Besides the above-mentioned three main sources, the gifts given by the courtiers formed even another source.  It was the job for artisans from the Directorate for Imperial Accouterments (yuyongjian) and court painting artists to mount, restore, file and identify paintings and calligraphies. Court painting masters Sheng Zhu in the Hongwu era and Bian Jingzhao in the Yongle era used to work on restoring and identifying for the Palace Treasury of the Imperial Affairs Department. The Ming emperors would often appreciate paintings and calligraphies collected by the Palace Treasury at leisure. This kind of appreciation might often be rendered with some political meanings. That was to caution themselves and the lieges or to educate their offspring. In the Ming Dynasty Royal Court, paintings and calligraphies are mainly under the supervision of the Directorate of Ceremonial Affairs (silijian). This duty had been formerly carried out by the Office of Discipline Supervision (jichasi), the predecessor of the Directorate of Ceremonial Affairs, since no later than year 1378, because there are half stamps from ″the Seal of the Discipline Supervision Office″ (jichasi yin) on the paintings and calligraphies collected by the early Ming Dynasty Royal Courts. According to statistics, there exists over 140 pieces of work as a whole with such stamps of pre-Ming dynasties, which implies the abundance of the early Ming collection in the Palace Treasury. Each painting and calligraphy was coded and stored in the Prudent Mortgage Warehouse (zhishenku), which was supervised by a senior eunuch. Moreover, the Directorate for Seals and Ribbons (yinshoujian) had been responsible for keeping court archives as well as part of the court collections, namely the portraits of the previous emperors, which were kept in the General Storehouse (gujin tongji ku) at the southeast corner of the Forbidden City.〖JP〗 After the Jiajing era, the Ming Dynasty Royal collection of paintings and calligraphies were dispersed out of the palace through awarding as benedictions, offsetting for salaries, and stealing of the eunuchs. It boosted the rise of private collection activity in late Ming times. Amongst the war chaos at the end of Ming dynasty, the paintings and calligraphies from the Ming Dynasty Royal Court were all gone, mostly being lost for the arson by Li Zicheng. Some of the dispersed artworks later showed up on the markets, laying foundations for the mass emergence of private collectors in the early Qing dynasty.