Calligraphy

Calligraphy, the art of fine and expressive handwriting, developed as an independent fine art in more than one world tradition rather than from a single point of origin. In China, the earliest evidence of writing later prized for its calligraphic form dates to the Shang dynasty, roughly 1600 to 1046 BCE, and by the third century CE calligraphy had become the supreme visual art in the Chinese tradition. During the Han dynasty, 206 BCE to 220 CE, Chinese artisans perfected the four basic materials still used by calligraphers today, the brush, ink, paper and inkstone. The most celebrated Chinese calligrapher, Wang Xizhi, worked in the fourth century CE and is best known for the Lantingxu, or Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion, written in 353 CE, whose fluid running script became a model for later generations. A separate, equally rich tradition developed in the Islamic world from the seventh and eighth centuries CE, as Arabic writing spread with the early Islamic conquests; Arabic calligraphers wrote with a reed pen called a qalam, its tip cut at an angle to produce a thick downstroke and thin upstroke, using ink typically made from lamp soot bound with gum arabic.