Li Zhi was a literatus of the Song dynasty; details of his life are now difficult to establish, and publicly available information is limited. Judging from the records and works that survive, he excelled in painting and calligraphy connoisseurship and in literati miscellanies, writing in a clear, plain style that valued factual record and critical appraisal. Two of his works are held in this collection: Deyuzhai Huapin and Shiyou Tanji. Deyuzhai Huapin is a work of painting criticism that describes and evaluates individual paintings he saw, attending both to brushwork and technique and to artistic conception and character; it is a primary source for understanding the connoisseurial tastes of premodern painting. Shiyou Tanji records the conversations and observations of his teachers and friends in a natural style, preserving much of their personalities and the discussions of the time, and has value as note-style historical material. One evaluates paintings, the other records speech; though their subjects differ, both reflect the author's emphasis on direct observation and graded judgment, and they are therefore often classed among classic works and cultural reading. Reading Li Zhi today is less a matter of tracing his biography than of experiencing, through his writing, how Song literati looked at paintings, discussed art, and recorded their social exchanges; his connoisseurial eye and descriptive method also offer a model for later catalogues of painting and calligraphy and for literati note-writing.
