葉銘の篆刻史観

―葉銘編纂の印譜と印人伝を中心に―

抄録

Ye Ming 葉銘 was one of the founders of the Xiling Seal Society (Xiling Yinshe 西泠印社), established in 1904, and is known for having compiled several works on seal engraving. In this article I clarify his views on the history of seal engraving and show where his distinctiveness lay.

  In Section 1, I focus on an album of seal impressions in his own collection that Ye Ming compiled. It includes various styles of engraving, but works by seal engravers from Zhejiang 浙江 account for a considerable proportion of the seal impressions, and it is evident that this album was centred on engravers of the Zhe 浙 school.

  In Section 2, I show how in his Guang yinren zhuan 廣印人傳 Ye Ming extracted from Zhou Zaijun's 周在浚 Yinren zhuan 印人傳 and Wang Qishu's 汪啓淑 Xu yinren zhuan 續印人傳 passages showing master-disciple relationships in the history of seal engraving and seal engravers' affiliations to schools of seal engraving, and it is clear that even when enlarging his Zaixu yinren xiaozhuan 再續印人小傳 to produce the Guang yinren zhuan he consistently attached importance to the Zhe school.

  In Section 3, I focus on passages in the Guang yinren zhuan showing master-disciple relationships and engravers' affiliations to schools of seal engraving. It is clear that even as he surveyed the entire history of seal engraving from the Yuan 元 dynasty down to the Republican period, Ye Ming took the view that the Zhe school lay at the centre of the history of seal engraving.

  In Section 4, I focus on treatises about seal engraving written by Ye Ming in the late Qing 清 and early Republican period. Whereas contemporary studies of seal engraving described master-disciple relationships and engravers' affiliations to schools of seal engraving in a fragmentary or purely linear fashion, a distinctive feature of Ye Ming's biographies of seal engravers can be seen in the fact that he turned his attention to the overall history of seal engraving and positioned the Zhe school as the orthodox school, relatively speaking, among the various schools of seal engraving.

  In both his albums of seal impressions and his biographies of seal engravers, Ye Ming turned his attention to a broad range of schools and viewed them in the context of the overall history of seal engraving, as a result of which he clearly showed in his writings that engravers of the Zhe school lay at the centre of the history of seal engraving. His distinctiveness lay in the fact that, while presenting an overall picture of the history of seal engraving, which was difficult to gain solely on the basis of contemporary studies, he showed that the Zhe school had represented a preeminent force in seal engraving.