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What happens when a poet, intent on inscribing his own subjective response to the things of this world, turns his attention to objects that are, themselves, the inscriptions of the responses of others? And, to push the question further, what happens when those objects of his attention are paintings, which strive not to transmit subjective experience, but to transcend it? Until Du Fu (712-770) started writing “poems on painting” (tihua shi), the answer would have been “nothing special.” But in Du Fu’s poetry, painting—or, at least, some paintings—were transformed from marvels of technical prowess into material traces of the human striving for transcendence; and poetry, from a vehicle for the expression of subjective experience into a meditation on mortal subjectivity itself. This paper will explore, not just how such moments of poiesis occurred in specific poems, but also the literary and philosophical conditions that made them possible.