The Global Renaissance
PETER BURKE
Cambridge University
LUKE CLOSSEY
Simon Fraser University
FELIPE FER N A N D E Z 'A R M E ST O
University of Notre Dame
In t r o d u c t io n
On the flyleaf of his copy of Vitruvius’s work on architecture, Antonio
de Mendoza, first viceroy of New Spain, recorded that he “read this
book in the city of Mexico” in April 1539.1At the time, Franciscan
professors in nearby Tlatelolco were teaching young Aztec nobles to
write like Cicero. Later in the same century, Jesuits presented Akbar
the Great with prints by Diirer for Mughal court artists to copy. Within
little more than a generation’s span, Matteo Ricci introduced Chinese
mandarins to Renaissance rhetoric, philosophy, astronomy, geography,
and the art of memory as well as to the Christian message.2Previous
intellectual and artistic impulses had spanned Eurasia, especially
in the first millennium b.c.e. and the Song and Mongol eras, but the
Renaissance can fairly be called the first genuinely global movement
in the history of ideas—the first, that is, to resonate on both hemispheres
and to penetrate deep into continental interiors on both sides
of the equator.
1 J. J. Lopez-Portillo, “'Another Jerusalem’: Political Legitimacy and Courtly Government
in the Kingdom ofNew Spain (1535-1568)” (PhD dissertation, University of London,
2012), 294.
2 ]. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (London: Faber, 1984).
Journal of World History, Vol. 28, No. 1
© 2017 by University of Hawai'i Press
2 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
The so-called “global turn” in the writing of history today involves
increased interest not only in the rest of the world on the part of Western
historians, hut also in the global context of what used to be seen as
European movements, among them the Renaissance, a term we use here
not to denominate a whole period but to refer to the fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century movement to revive the culture of classical antiquity,
Greek and Roman.’ The period term that will be employed in the
pages that follow is “early modern,” running roughly from the early
fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, when the American, French,
and Industrial Revolutions inaugurated the late modern era.
In this article we will not be discussing the idea of “Renaissances” in
the plural—Chinese, Islamic, and so on—as has been done by Arnold
Toynbee, Erwin Panofsky, and more recently by that vigorous opponent
of Eurocentrism, the late Jack Goody. Instead we focus on the relation of
the European Renaissance to the wider world, viewing that world as both
stimulating and responding to cultural developments in Europe. Many
valuable studies of aspects ofthis global context for the Renaissance have
appeared in the last generation. The purpose of this study is not to add
to their number but to attempt a synthesis, a big picture very different
from the one that predominated thirty years ago (let alone sixty years
ago, when one of the authors was studying the Renaissance at Oxford).
In some ways, the Renaissance is best understood as an acceleration
of longstanding or intermittent interest in reviving the supposed glories
of antiquity in the medieval West, but for present purposes, we treat
it as a single, continuous episode, first clearly detectable toward the
middle of the fourteenth century, fully discernible in Italy in the quattrocento,
and then generalized and in some fields dominant in much
of Europe in the sixteenth century. We propose to take account of the
specificity of the Renaissance, like that of other movements of cultural
revival, as we try to position the Renaissance in the contexts of other,
farther-flung cultures, exploring the problems of where it came from,
where it went, how it got there, and what happened to it on arrival.
Eurocentrism has long been in retreat.34 Yet the importance of the
Renaissance in the “rise of the West,” the origins of “modernity,” or
3 Previous work in print on the subject includes J. Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 33-61; P. Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres
and Peripheries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), a comparative study focused
on creative reception; C. Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1995), discussing global perspectives; and S. Gruzinski, L’Aigle et le dragon
(Paris: Fayard, 2012), 405-15, emphasizing connections between Mexico and China.
4 See for instance Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy ofan Interpretation
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Peter Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism:
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 3
the vanguard of cultural “globalization” (more precisely, in the conquest
of much of the world by values and practices of Western origin) still
has powerful academic advocates and tenacious popular appeal.****5 If the
Renaissance arose independently within Western tradition without
decisive input from elsewhere, the potential implications are arresting:
The claim that the Renaissance was an entirely home-grown movement
becomes inseparable from the case for what is commonly called
Eurocentrism— the assertion of uniqueness of Western achievements
and their unparalleled impact on the rest of the world. The Renaissance,
in such circumstances, would have to be seen as one of the West’s gifts
to the rest. But would that be a valid or useful vision? Would it be consistent
with the evidence? It is time to put the doctrine of the centrality
of the Renaissance in global history to the test of conformity or variance
with the facts.
Pa r t I: O r ig in s a n d D e v e l o p m e n t o f t h e R e n a is s a n c e
The first really influential attempt to view the movement in a global
perspective was launched in 1954, when Arnold Toynbee, the scholar
who, perhaps, did most to encourage historians in the comparative study
of civilizations, denied that the Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento
was “a unique occurrence.” According to him, it was “no more than
one particular instance of a recurrent historical phenomenon.”6 Subsequent
researchers discovered or asserted revivals of classical ideas,
style, and imagery in just about every century from the fifth to the fifteenth.
As renaissances multiplied in the literature in the West, so they
appeared with increasing frequency in scholars’ accounts of culture in
other parts of the world. For Jack Goody, the Renaissance was part of a
a New View ofModem World History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996); James Blaut,
Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guildford, 2000); Jack Goody, The Theft of History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism: Modernity,
Religion, and Democracy—A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism (New York: Monthly
Review, 2009); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).
5 John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and
Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). For a study of the abiding
prevalence of Eurocentrism in academia, see Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt, “It’s a Small
World After All: Tire Wider World in Historians’Peripheral Vision,” Perspectives in History,
May 2or3, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectiveS'On-history
/may-2013/its-a-small'World'after-all.
6 A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 9:4-
4 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
family of renascences.' All cultures have their own “classics,” and retrospective
values become fashionable or popular or influential almost
everywhere from time to time.
Orbiting the core meaning of the Renaissance as a revival of the
classical world are closely associated ideas that have burnished the
reputation of the Renaissance in a broader sense, as well as reinforcing
the conceit that the Renaissance, and the Europeans who created it,
were exceptional. Revived interest in a classical past does have parallels
outside Europe, but what of those quattrocento breakthroughs
that supposedly pushed Europe beyond the achievements of antiquity?
To give the Renaissance a role in our narratives that is not just classicizing,
hut modernizing, we may find it helpful to explore not only
revival movements in general but also specific parallels and precedents
in what are commonly itemized as peculiar features of the Renaissance:
textual criticism, skepticism, and linear perspective.***8
Philology
Keen interest in manuscript transmission helped spark the Renaissance.
The first humanists’local and regional travels in pursuit of manuscripts
fundamentally informed the development of their ideas, in a
way that foreshadows how global travellers’ reports would inform the
ideas of the developed Renaissance in the sixteenth century. Ancient
scholars, too, had done philological work, hut with Lorenzo Valla (1407-
1457) and Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) philology moved explicitly
beyond the accomplishments of the ancients. Poliziano took up common
practices such as distinguishing between direct and indirect quotation
and, following Petrarch, preferring older sources, but to impress his
Medici patrons, he went beyond this in two ways.
The first is understanding the value of errors: in what would become
known as lectio difficilior potior, the more difficult reading is preferred
because it is less likely to have been the result of editors’polishing. By the
end of the early-modern period this idea would become widely accepted in
philology in general and in biblical scholarship in particular.9 Although
' J. Goody, Renaissances: The One and the Many (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009); P. Burke, “Jack Goody and the Comparative History of Renaissances,” Theory,
Culture and Society 26 (2009): 16-31.
8 Self-fashioning, a fourth feature often linked to the Renaissance, might be gainfully
relocated to an earlier, Islamic tradition. See Felipe Femandez-Armesto, 1492: The Year the
World Began (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 268-71.
9 Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 112-93; Anthony Grafton, Defenders
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 5
we associate this kind of sophisticated appreciation of the relationship
between a text and its manuscript history with modernity, the lectio
difficilior potior principle is actually a bit older. In tenth-century India,
Vallabhadeva wrote commentaries on the fifth-century Raghuvamsa
(Lineage of Raghu) by Kalidasa, a text that existed in a problematically
high number of variations from a problematically wide range of regions.
Vallabhadeva preferred a certain manuscript as the oldest because its
meaning was the most aprasiddha srafeg, unusual or obscure. 10 At least by
the Song Dynasty, Chinese scholars of the Book of Documents would
take as older and more authentic those chapters that were more difficult
to read, in terms of either the language generally or, paleographically, the
very forms of the characters. Already in the twelfth century Wu Yu
found value and authority in text that was “query-curling and
tooth-twisting.” *11
In addition to lectio difficilior potior, Poliziano developed a second
breakthrough, a genealogical method, called eliminatio codicum descriptorum,
which takes into account the relationship among sources—that
is, the cause-and-effect-history of the textual transmission. Poliziano’s
contemporaries tended to ignore the genealogical approach—simply
going back to counting texts— and it had to wait for a half century after
Poliziano’s death to become common practice.
A similar, but more obsessively analytical, approach to the genealogy
of knowledge had already arisen in Islam: Concern for sources,
their transmission, and their reliability followed quickly on the birth of
that religion. For centuries Muslim scholars guaranteed their accounts
of sayings of the prophet by the device of the isnad, which lists out the
transmission history of each specific saying (hadith). (These writers were
aware of and perhaps indebted to. Herodotus, who foregrounded his
own decisions weighing historical sources.) As Muslims occupied much
of the heartland of classical antiquity in the Hellenistic world and the
former Roman Empire, they had access to the same legacy as Latin
of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1991), 27, 47-75; E. ]. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Edit'
ing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 4-T0, 43,
49-51; L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of
Greek and Latin Literature, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 140-64.
10 Vallabhadeva’s Kommentar (Sarada-Version) zum Kumarasambhava des Kalidasa, ed.
M. S. Narayana Murti (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1980), 27. See Sheldon Pollock, “What Was
Philosophy in Sanskrit?” in World Philology, ed. Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin A. Elman, and
Ku-ming Kevin Chang (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 121.
11 YeGuoliangljtiSI jTSongren YyfngGoijingKaoTASilliiXIM^j (Taipei: Guo li Taiwan
da xue chu ban wei yuan hui, 1980), 49. Thanks to Bruce Rusk for his generous and learned
assistance here.
6 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 1 7
Christians: Indeed, the availability of texts and intact monuments from
Greco-Roman antiquity was superior in the Islamic world, which covered
relatively less despoiled and ravaged parts of the region. Goody
drew attention to the “humanism” of a series of scholars,12starting with
the ninth-century 'Abdallah ibn Qutaybah, who applied to governance
the insights of a philological program that anticipated later intellectual
developments in the West. By the ninth century Muhammad ibn 'Isa
al-Tirmidhl (824-892) moved beyond a good/bad binary to classify
each isnad in one of three categories of probable reliability.13 By the
thirteenth century, Ibn al-Salah had supplemented these three grades
with sixty-two other categories or disciplines (now'), including five types
of transmitters and seven types of transmissions, indicating tremendous
precision in the study of transmission. One category, for exampie,
is the munqati', a hadith the isnad of which has adjacent transmitters
who could not have met in person.14
Compared to the sophistication of medieval Islamic and Indian
philology, the breakthroughs of the European Renaissance might
best be described as little more than catching up to the world’s best
scholarship.
Skepticism
Our next idea, skepticism, is an attractive index for intellectual deftness
as it demands a certain detachment and sophistication—not just
knowledge, but knowledge about knowledge. Neither Pyrrho nor
Sextus found much love in the early Christian world. Gregory of Nazianzus
(died 390) complains that “ever since the Sextuses and the Pyrrhos
have . . . infected the churches [like a vile and malignant disease],
babbling has been regarded as culture.” At the same time, the emperor
Julian (died 363) rejoiced that “the gods have already in their wisdom
destroyed their works, so that most of their books are no longer available.”
Pope Leo I (ca. 440s) mentions the Pyrrhonists in his attack on
Manichaeism, which may be the last reference to them or him in the
Latin West for a millennium.15
12 See Goody, Renaissances.
13 ‘All Nasirl, An Introduction to Hadith: History and Sources, trans. Mansoor Limba
(London: MIU Press, 2013), 188.
14 Scott C. Lucas, Constructive Critics, Hadith Literature, and the Articulation of Sunni
Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 28, 29-33, 288-89.
15 Luciano Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12, 22.
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 7
Skepticism returned in the Renaissance as a byproduct of the
humanists’ interests in obscure ancient texts. We see it become dangerously
important in its own right by the end of the fifteenth century,
in, for example, the fate of Savonarola, who aimed to use Sextus to
destroy Aristotle and all Greek “invented” knowledge, leaving intact
only Christian revelation and the voices of inspired prophets, like
Savonarola himself. His convent of San Marco had five manuscript
copies of Sextus, and Savonarola asked three of his confreres, including
Giorgio Antonio Vespucci (the uncle of Amerigo), to translate Sextus
into Latin. His antagonist, Gioacchino Torriani, the Dominican general,
was consulting the Vatican’s copy of Sextus at the same time.16
Issues of certainty proved decisive in resolving Savonarola’s case. The
jurist Ormannozzo Deti preferred the “certain” over “what was not certain”:
W ith all the turmoil and chaos surrounding the friar, it seemed
safer to agree with the pope. The ambassador Guidantonio Vespucci
argued that if it were “certain, completely certain” (he begins in the
Italian subjunctive “si fussi certo” but switches to Latin “omni certitudine”)
that Savonarola were sent by God, then better to allow him to
preach; since they had no such certainty, it was better to side with the
pope.17The translations Savonarola had ordered did not come in time
to save him, but we know what he was thinking through the works
of his defender and biographer, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola
(1469-1533), the less famous nephew of Giovanni (who also happened
to own a copy of Sextus). According to Gianfrancesco, Savonarola had
been recommending reading Sextus as a good introduction to Christianity.
Gianfrancesco’s Examen Vanitatis built on Savonarola’s idea.18
Did Renaissance skepticism have precedents in other cultures? The
idea of uncertainty thrived in medieval India. Texts copied as late as the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries attacked the pramanas as the means
of true knowledge. Jayarasi’s (ca. 800) Tattvopaplavasimha (The Lion that
Devours All Principles) is indiscriminate in its offense, which it selfidentifies
as “terrifying” or “dreadful.”19 The KhancEma-khanda-khadya
(The Sweets of Refutation) of Srlharsa (ca. 1150) begins by wishing,
“O men of intelligence, may you attain to the joy of universal conquest,
even by merely repeating parrot-like this work of mine—rendering
16 Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),
3-7, 19-29; Floridi, Sextus Empiricus, 30-33.
17 Denis Fachard, Consulte e pratiche della Repubblica Fiorentina, 7498-1505 (Geneva:
Droz, 1993), 60, 51.
18 Popkin, History of Scepticism, 19-29.
19 The main monograph in English is Eli Franco, Perception, Knowledge, and Disbelief: A
Study ofJayarasi’s Scepticism (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas, 1994).
8 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 1 7
‘speechless’ all your proud opponents by utterly demolishing the possibility
of either words or the things discussed by them.”After explaining
why specific arguments are “as worthless as chewing on dried grass” or
“as useless as looking for a crow’s teeth,” he concludes with generalized
strategies for destabilizing any apparent knowledge.20
Muslim thinkers, meanwhile, had greater access to Greek skeptical
texts than did the Christians, although no specific references
to Pyrrho are known. The Kitab aLMandzir (Book of Optics) of Ibn
al-Haytham (died ca. 1040), which was very influential in Western
Europe, reviewed a series of optical illusions and cast light on some
of the cognitive processes that subvert our sense of certainty.21 alGhazall
(died 1111) had his own skeptical experience, recorded in the
Munqidh min al-Dalal (Rescuer from Error):
This disease defied all cure and lasted for almost two months, during
which I embraced the [skeptical] creed in actual fact, though not in
speech or expression. Eventually, God cured me . . . and my mind was
restored to health and balance. The rational necessary beliefs were
once again accepted and trusted, both securely and certainly. This did
not come about by composing a proof or by an arrangement of words,
hut rather by a light that God almighty cast into my breast.22
So, like advanced philology, Renaissance skepticism, rooted in an ancient
import from India to Greece, had precedents in medieval Asia.
Linear Perspective
Finally, perhaps most iconic to the Renaissance is the convention of
linear perspective. Seeing a perfectly worked out image gives one a
powerful impression of space seen, as in real life, from a single point at
a single time. This appears to be an innovation unique to the Renaissance,
and it is indeed difficult to find a precedent outside Europe.
20 Srlharsa, The Khandanakhandakhadya of ShrLHarsa, an English translation, trans. Ganganatha
Jha (Delhi, India: Sri Satguru, 1986), 3, 704-5; Phyllis Granoff, Philosophy and
Argument in Late Vedanta (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978), 143-46. See Ben-Ami Scharfstein,
A Comparative History of World Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1998), 233-73.
21 David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), 18-32; Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham
(Leiden: Brill, 1988), 4-43.
22 Al-Ghazali, “The Rescuer from Error,” in Medieval Islamic Phibsophical Writings, ed.
Muhammad Ali Khalidi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 63.
Burke, Clossey, and Femandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 9
This absence, it turns out, is the result not of the inability of
non-European artists, but of their artistic sensibility. Li Cheng
(919-967), for example, painted images with something like linear
perspective. Although these have not survived, we have evidence of
them thanks to the eleventh-century Mengxi Bitan (The
Dream Pool Essays), by the Song dynasty statesman and polymath Shen
Guo /jfcfS, who writes, “W hen Li Cheng paints mountain pavilions
and edifices he paints the eaves from below. He believed that looking
in an upward direction one perceives the eaves of a pagoda as a person
on the even ground and is able to see the beams and rafters of its structure.”
Using Li’s perspective, Shen continues, one sees “one layer of the
mountains at one time.”
The Chinese discovery of linear perspective did not revolutionize
Chinese art, and it failed to impress Shen Guo:
If we apply Li’s method to the painting of real mountains, we are
unable to behold more than one layer ... at one time. . . . Similarly
we would be excluded from a view into all things ... in the valleys, in
the chambers of houses and their courtyards. If we stand in the east of
the mountain, its western part would be a far-off scene, and standing
on its western part, the eastern mountain scene would likewise be a
view into distance. Could that be called art?. . . His measurement of
height and distance certainly is a fine thing. But should one attach
paramount importance to the angles and comers of buildings?... Li
Cheng surely does not understand the principle of “viewing the part
from the angle of totality.”23
Linear perspective was condemned in China, though it was celebrated
in Italy three centuries later—but even the Renaissance had
some awareness that linear perspective is less the ultimate goal than a
pragmatic compromise, and an expensive one in terms of what is lost.
Donatello (as recorded by Vasari a century later) complained that an
obsession with mathematical precision made Paolo Uccello “leave the
certain for the uncertain.”24 A long-lived chorus raises doubts about
linear perspective, throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
23 Tsung Pai-hua, “Space-Consciousness in Chinese Painting," trans. ErnestJ. Schwartz,
Sino-Austrian Cultural Journal 1 (1949): 27. On the comparative history of visual perspective,
see Jean-Yves Heurtebise, “Comparative Aesthetics: The Construction of Perspective
in Chinese and European Paintings,” in Artistic Traditions of Non-European Cultures, ed. B.
Lakomska (Turon: Tako, 2013), 2:49-75.
24 “Lasciare il certo per l’incerto.” Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’piu eccellenti Architetti, Pittori,
et Scultori Italiani (Rome: Pagliarini, 1759), 205; Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans.
Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 75.
10 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 1 7
centuries.25 On the other hand, Renaissance Europe did make use of
something akin to the Chinese-style “angle of totality,” for example in
the design of fortresses, or in describing the ability of Jesus in heaven
to see on earth.26 The use of linear perspective in Renaissance art was
not an unprecedented discovery, but a convention that found ways to
be useful.
Part II: Extra -Eu ropean Influences
Extra-European analogies, parallels, and precedents are not evidence
of extra-European origins. Parallels are one thing, influence another.2'
Similar episodes in the history of different cultures may arise independently
or be traceable to common causes rather than to the diffusion
of influence from place to place. Great cultural movements, however,
do not usually happen by parthenogenesis. Cross-fertilization nearly
always helps and is usually vital. In classical antiquity Helicon had an
“east face”: Ancient Greeks shared much of their lore with, and got
some of their learning from, cultures on the eastern shore of the Aegean
or in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Greek skepticism gained momentum from
Pyrrho of Elis, who picked up ideas in India while in the train of Alexander
the Great (and Greek skepticism may have returned to India to
influence Nagarjuna [fl. ca. 200], whose teachings in turn would exert
a tremendous influence on Chinese thought) .28 Logic, philosophy, science,
art, and religious thought in the first millennium b.c.e. exhibited,
from East Asia to Mediterranean Europe, continuities so strong as to
suggest that some content, at least, must have been transmitted along
25 For examples, see Antonio Filarete, Trattato di arclutettura [ca. 1465], ed. L. Grassi,
(Milan: II Polifilo, 1972), 2:657; Baldassarre Castiglione, 11 libro del cortegiano (Venice:
F[ederico] T[orresano d’Asola], 1538 [1528]), Aiii; Daniele Barbara, Died libridell’architettura
di M. Vitruvio (Venice: Senese, 1567), 321; Giovan Battista Belici (Belluzzi), Nuova inventione
difabricarfortezze (Venice: Baglioni, 1598), 88; Emanuele Tesauro, UCannocchiale Aristotelico
(Turin: Sinibaldo, 1654), 89, 127.
26 Michael Baxandall, Paintingand Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972), to4- Examples of this kind of fortress design run from Jacques
Androuet du Cerceau, Les plus excellents bastiments de France (Paris, 1576) to Moritz von
Prittwitz und Gaffron, Lehrbuch der Befestigungskunst und des Festungskrieges (Berlin: Flerbig,
1865).
27 We omit as well known and ancillary for present purposes the Byzantine influence
on the Renaissance in Latin Christendom. See D. J. Geanokoplos, Interaction of the Sibling
Byzantine and Western Cultures (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), emphasizing
Byzantine elements in the Renaissance; K. Setton, “The Byzantine Background to the Italian
Renaissance,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100 (1956): 1-56.
28 Christopher I. Beckwith, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in
Central Asia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 11
the trade routes that spanned or looped the landmass. In the case of
the high Middle Ages, it is hard to accept that the florescence of ideas
and technologies in Western Europe was unstimulated by influences that
flowed with the “Mongol Peace.” The period of acceleration in science
in early modern Europe owed some of its urging to the discoveries
explorers, scholars, and specimen-hunters made in the Americas,
Asia, and Africa. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, we
increasingly acknowledge, borrowed aesthetic and political models from
China, India, and Japan and relied on contacts with remoter cultures,
in the Americas and the Pacific, for such influential notions as those of
the noble savage and what has been called “green imperialism.” If the
Renaissance were to have happened in Europe without comparable external
influences the anomaly would be startling.
Nonetheless, the case for seeing the Renaissance as an event severed
from extra-European sources of influence is, on the face of it, strong.
From the mid-fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries, in the very
period when the Renaissance, as we define it, took shape, “The West”
had few or none of the enriching direct contacts with China, central
Asia, and India that had inseminated earlier movements with exotic
notions and representations or equipped them with useful knowledge
and technology or inspiring ideas.
Islam
The rupture of trans-Eurasian contacts occurred just as the Renaissance
was becoming discernible. In 1342, a newly appointed archbishop of
China was sent east, never to be heard from again; after enough time
had passed to presume death, a new archbishop was sent, and this pious
human sacrifice was repeated eleven times before 1490.29 No further
individual cases of European travelers successfully crossing Eurasia
overland are known before the sixteenth century. W hen Columbus
set out for China on 1492, his royal masters’ information about that
country was so out of date that they furnished him with diplomatic credentials
addressed to the Great Khan.
The culture from which the Christian world appropriated most in
the interim was Islam.30Renaissance painting would have looked very
29 Joseph Sebes, “Jesuit Attempts to Establish an Overland Route to China,” CanadaMongolia
Review 5 (1979): 67; Kenneth S. Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in
China (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 71-72.
30 The scholarship is extensive. To single out a few: H. Belting, Florence and Baghdad:
Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011);
L. Darling, “The Renaissance and the Middle East," in A Companion to the Worlds of the
12 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 201 7
different without objects and pigments imported from the Dar ahIslam:
the turquoise and Turkish red that colored canvases in unprecedented
hues; the textiles and carpets that added texture to the scenes; the Kufic
and pseudo-Kufic inscriptions painters added to lend an illusory air of
authenticity to their depictions of the Holy Land in portrayals of
sacred history. Demand for exotic types and settings in sacred painting
drove artists to Islam (as well as to Tatar slaves, when available) as
a source of inspiration and of models. In architecture, it is clear that
influences from Islam were at least as important as in painting. The
early-fourteenth-century dome of Soltaniyeh, the mausoleum of the
Ibkhan Oljaitii, may have inspired Brunelleschi’s design of the dome
of the Florence cathedral: Each structure used herring-bone brickwork
as well as two nested domes sandwiching ribbing supports.31 Perhaps
the biggest debt of Renaissance artists to Islamic culture was to the repertoire
of decorative motifs, floral, calligraphic, and geometrical, that
we still describe as “arabesques.” In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
carpets and metalwork in this style (ewers, dishes, and so on)
were fashionable items in Venice. It used to be thought that these
forms of metalwork were made in Venice, and the style of decoration
was labelled “Veneto-Saracenic.” It is now believed, however, that
these objects were made in Damascus and other places in the Middle
East, often to order, complete with the coat of arms of the future owner.
From the later fifteenth century onward, Italian artists drew on this decorative
repertoire.32
In the age of the uomo universale, what happened in visual arts
had inescapable parallels in what we would think of as mathematics,
science, and technology. Piero della Francesca’s understanding of
Renaissance, ed. G. Ruggiero (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); D. Gutas, Greek Thought in
Arabic Translation (London: Routledge, 1998); D. Howard, Venice and the East (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000); G. Makdisi, The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the
Christian West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), which notes Europe’s intellectual
debt to Islam; J. Raby, Venice, Diirer and the Oriental Mode (London: Tauris, 1982)
on Islamic influences on Europe; G. Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European
Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); N. G. Siraisi, Avicenna in
Renaissance Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), which argues that the
revival of Greek medicine did not drive out Arab traditions.
31 Piero Sanpaolesi, “La cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore ed il mausoleo di Soltanieh:
Rapporti di forma e struttura fra la cupola del Duomo di Firenze ed il mausoleo del Ilkhan
Ulgiaitu a Soltanieh,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz 26 (1972):
221-260.
32 Sylvia Auld, “Veneto-Saracenic,” in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York:
Grove, 1996), 32:160-62; Stanley Morison, “Venice and the Arabesque Ornament,” in
Morison, Selected Essays, ed. David McKitterick, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 1:142-58.
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 13
perspective derived in part from his reading of Euclid in a translation
from Arabic. The Franciscan mathematician Fra Luca Pacioli, who is
credited with the first complete expositions in the West of doubleentry
book-keeping and of triangulation and who collaborated with
Leonardo, relied heavily on Arabic treatises in composing his works.
Copernicus was only one in a long line of the Western m athematicians
and astronomers who drew on work compiled in Persia in the
thirteenth century; the exact means of transmission is unclear but
the echoes are unmistakeable.33
In the case of literature, Boccaccio and Chaucer were representative
examples of Western writers who had access to many tales stemming from
the East. There is a remarkable parallel between the lyrics of Petrarch
and his followers and the ghazals of the Islamic world, evoking the
sweet pain of love, the cruelty of the beloved, and so on. In any case,
Petrarch was familiar with the poetry of the troubadours, who were in
turn familiar with the poetry of Al-‘Andalus (the very name “troubadour”
is derived from the Arabic taraba, “to sing”). Western accounts of
the tricks of beggars and thieves, going back to the fourteenth century
and reaching their climax in the sixteenth, follow Arab accounts of
the urban underworld, the Barm Sasan, from the ninth century onward.
The picaresque tradition is a continuation of an earlier Arab tradition,
that of the maqamat, going back to the tenth and eleventh centuries.
This should not surprise us, since the growth of large cities in the
Middle East, such as Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, also preceded the
growth of cities in Western Europe.34
In the domain of intellectual history, we have only fragments of
information, fascinating as they are. Muslim skeptics perhaps bridged
the gap between ancient Greece and Nicholas of Autrecourt, the most
skeptical of the medieval Christians.35The commentary on Aristotle’s
Poetics by Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was published in Latin translation in
Venice in 1481; Regiomontanus transcribed the Algebra of Al-Khwarizml;
Georg von Peuerbach knew the work of the ninth century Arab
George Saliba, A History of Arabic Astronomy: Planetary Theories during the Golden
Age of Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Joseph T. Clark, ‘“ Something
Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue’ in Copernicus, Galileo, and
Newton,” in Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences, ed. Everett Mendelsohn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 67-80.
54 Enrico Cerulli, Petrarca e gli arabi,” Rivista di cultura classica e medievale 7 (1965):
3 3 1 - 3 6 ; Jareer Abu-Haidar, “Maqamat Literature and the Picaresque Novel,” Journal of
Arabic Literature 5 (1974): 1—10; Clifford E. Bosworth, The Medieval Islamic Underworld, 2 vols.
(Leiden: Brill, 1976).
35 For a cautionary note, see Taneli Kukkonen, “Al-GhazalT’s Skepticism Revisited,”
in Rethinking the History of Skepticism, ed. H. Lagerlund (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010), 121-39.
14 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 1 7
astronomer al-Battanl; and Avicenna (Ibn Slna) was studied in the
Renaissance as he had been in the later Middle Ages.36In his famous oration
on the dignity of humanity, Pico della Mirandola quoted a remark
by “Abdala the Saracen,” as he called him (more exactly Ibn Qutaybah)
to the effect that “nothing is more wonderful than man.”
South and East Asia
Still, the input from the Islamic world seems too limited, selective, and,
in some cases, late to compromise the case in favor of the homegrown
Renaissance. The most problematic provenance of possible influences
in the making of the Renaissance lay farther afield in India and China,
which had contributed so much to Western arts and thoughts in antiquity
and the Middle Ages and would do so again in the Enlightenment.
Early in the twentieth century Renaissance scholars searched for
Chinese origins. In 1910 the critic Oskar Miinsterberg noticed the similarities
between Leonardo’s landscape style and Chinese precedents,
arguing that the correspondences were too exact to be coincidental.
Two years later Aby Warburg discovered an Indian astrological image
in the frescoes in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara (transmitted to Italy via
the Arab astrologer Abu Ma'shar or Albumazar).’1In the early 1920s
Gustave Soulier, who had made a reputation as an expert on Cimabue,
claimed that much that was innovative in Western painting of the
late Middle Ages and Renaissance resembled Buddhist models from
China and India: The similarities, he argued, in themes, gestures,
the rendition of flesh, the etiolated complexions, the diaphanous textures,
the delicate hands, the long fingers were so marked as to make
it unthinkable that Westerners could have developed them by coincidence.38
At about the same time Yukio Yashiro was drawn to study
Botticelli because he perceived an affinity—not, however, alleging any
connexion—between the work of Botticelli and Japanese traditions,
from picture scrolls to the woodcuts of Utamaro.39In the next decade,
a Russian expert on Renaissance philosophy wove the evidence into a
general theory: The Renaissance, at least in painting, was the result of
36 Siraisi, Avicenna.
37 Oskar Miinsterberg, Chinesische Kunstgeschichte, 2 vols. (Esslingen: N. Neff, 1910-
1912); Aby Warburg, “Italienische Kunst und Internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoja
zu Ferrara,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1932), 2:459-81.
38 Gustave Soulier, Les Influences orientates dans la peinture toscane (Paris: Laurens,
1924).
39 Yukio Yashiro, Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Renaissance (London : The Medici
Society, 1929).
Burke, Clossey, and Femandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 15
Chinese influence.40 Under the scrutiny of Leonardo Olschki toward
the end of the Second World War, however, the sum of these early
enquiries did not seem to amount to much. Most of the alleged Asiatic
exoticism, he averred, was of Italian origin, both technically and stylistically.
“There is no trace of East Asiatic influence.”41 Since then,
scholars rationally interested in the similarities between Chinese and
Western art in the fifteenth century have focused on the development
theories of common or universal sensibility, rather than on arguments
for cultural transmission.
Technology, as far as we know at present, was the field in which medieval
Europeans were keenest to appropriate Chinese influence. Technologies
that we now associate with “the rise of the West” to global
hegemony originated in China and reached Europe in the course of
the cultural transmissions of the high Middle Ages: nautical technologies,
such as the separable bulkhead, the rudder, and direction-finding
devices; key ingredients of early capitalism and industrialization, such
as paper money and the blast furnace; and gunpowder, the key element
in military firepower. The temptation to seek continuations of
Chinese influence in the fifteenth century is therefore strong. There
are suggestive similarities between the engineering devices depicted in a
section on implements in the early-fourteenth-century Chinese treatise
on agricultural improvements, the Nong Shu—gears, for instance,
and devices for pumping, bridging, scaling, boring, and grinding—and
drawings in quattrocento Italian designers’ notebooks, from Mariano
di Jacopo il Taccola, the Sienese Archimedes,” and his fellow-citizen
Francesco di Giorgio Martini to Leonardo. No text of the Nong Shu,
however, or anything similar, is known to have existed in Europe, and
there are equally convincing precedents in fourteenth-century European
works.42
Printing continues to provoke speculations. Was movable type a
Western innovation or a case of the transfer of technology from East
Asia? Printing was invented in China, in the seventh century c.e. or
soon after, but usually took the form of block printing, which was better
suited to Chinese writing. All the same, the Chinese did experiment
with moveable type from the eleventh century onward, while in Korea
founts of moveable type were cast and a twenty-four-letter alphabet
40 I. V. Pouzyna, La Chine, I'ltalie et les debuts de la Renaissance (Paris: Les Editions d’Art
et d’Histoire, 1935).
Leonardo Olschki, Asiatic Exoticism and the Italian Art of the Early Renaissance,”
Art Bulletin 26 (1944): 105-8.
Roxann Prazniak, “Menzies and the New Chinoiserie,” Medieval History Journal 13
(2010): 115-30.
16 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
was devised by order of two successive rulers in the first half of the fifteenth
century, leading to a system of book production with what the
French scholar Henri-Jean Martin has called “an almost hallucinatory
similarity to Gutenberg’s.”43
Albert Kapr has linked Gutenberg with the Byzantine world, through
a probable partnership with Nicholas of Cusa—who spent considerable
time in Mainz and would have seen the printing press as a godsend in
his quest to standardize liturgical handbooks—and through Nicholas’s
known friendship with Basilios Bessarion. Thanks to these two cardinals,
Kapr speculates, Gutenberg may have received news of the
remarkable Korean press.44A geographically closer, and thus perhaps
more likely, inspiration may have been the moveable-type press used
by the Uyghurs in Central Asia from around 1300;45 certainly in the
century and a half before Gutenberg technical intelligence could have
traveled the three thousand kilometres across the Il-Khanate or its successor
states to Christian populations in the Caucasus and beyond, but
as with the Korean case there is now no evidence beyond coincidence
and conjecture. Printing looks like one of those technologies, including
farming, writing, and metallurgy, that arose independently in different
places.
Still, despite the interruption of former trans-Eurasian contacts,
some transmissions did happen across Eurasia, or substantial parts of
it, in the fifteenth century by credible, documented means, via Islam.
The Muslim world filled and to some degree bridged the gap between
Europe and South and East Asia. Chinese and Indian artefacts, which
became models for European imitators, arrived in European courts as
diplomatic gifts with embassies from Muslim potentates. Porcelain is
recorded in gifts from Egyptian rulers to European counterparts from
1442 onward. It is impossible to say how much ofthis material was either
genuinely porcelain or genuinely Chinese: Factories in Samarkand and
other centres produced imitations good enough to impress European
clients. One way or another, however, porcelain or pseudo-porcelain
objects, conveyed in embassies, could transmit images of Chinese origin
45 Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 225.
44 Albert Kapr, “Gab es Beziehungen zwischen Johannes Gutenberg und Nikolaus von
Kuesr Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 47 (1972): 32-40; Albert Kapr, Johann Gutenberg: The Man and
His Invention, trans. Douglas Martin (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1966), 62-63.
45 A century ago this was removed, for safekeeping, to Paris, where it was lost. T. Francis
Carter and L. Carrington Goodrich, Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread West-Ward
(New York: Ronald, 1955), 143-48, 218; Tsuen-Hsuin Tsien, Paper and Printing, vol. 5,
part 1, of Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
18, 304.
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 17
to Europe. The effect on Western artists and their patrons did not take
long to register. Lorenzo de’ Medici accumulated fifty pieces, which he
kept locked in his bedchamber.46
The Mamluk sultan Qa’it Bey, was perhaps the most important middleman
between China and the West. Leonardo sought his patronage
in the 1480s and was well placed to know the Chinese artefacts
that had arrived among the sultan’s diplomatic gifts. The embassy the
Egyptian ruler sent to Florence in 1487 brought gifts that featured in
paintings by other artists. Mantegna showed an interest in imitating
Chinese porcelain from the 1450s, when he worked at the ducal court
of Mantua, where some porcelain vessels were among the treasures
of the Gonzaga dynasty. In an early depiction of a porcelain object in
Western art, one of the magi in Mantegna’s version of the epiphany
of about 1499 holds a Ming wine cup, painted with blue flowers.47
By the time Giovanni Bellini painted his Feast of the Gods in Ferrara
in 1514, more porcelain had arrived in Venice with further Egyptian
embassies in 1498 and 1508. He could include a copious set of blueand-white
china in casual use among the revellers—but perhaps the
vessels in question were modeled on relatively inexpensive European
or Islamic imitations of Chinese ware: If so, antique, early Ming
designs inspired them.
The porcelain items that Qa’it Bey and his like sent to Europe
introduced Westerners to Chinese painting, albeit of a specialized and
limited kind. Muslim taste favored stylized floral motifs, and these are
apparent in the samples that appear in Western paintings. No inventory,
as far as we are aware, describes the materials in sufficient detail
for us to know how wide a range of images was available to Western
artists, and most European ceramicists imitated the widely available
wares from the Islamic world. To judge, however, from the way European
potters decorated their attempts to imitate porcelain in the fifteenth
century, they had a wide range of examples at their disposal;
the fairly frequent occurrence of Chinese motifs, especially dragons,
in other arts suggests the same inference. A Florentine chest, or cossone,
of 1448 has many Chinese motifs, including a cloud-dragon. If
there was any direct Chinese impression on Renaissance artists’ imagination,
porcelain is the most likely medium for it. By the sixteenth
century, Genoese craftsmen were producing good imitations of Ming
46 R. E. Mack, From Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300-1600 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 21-24; R Burke, Hybrid Renaissance (Budapest: Central
European University Press, 2016).
47 Mack, From Bazaar to Piazza, 105.
18 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
porcelain, though by then direct contact with China had reopened
by way of the Cape route across the Indian Ocean.48
Part III: D issemination and Reception of th e R enaissance
Innovation is usually the result of either social change or encounters
with other cultures. In the case of the Renaissance, the urbanization
of Europe was making the example of urban cultures such as Rome
and Athens more relevant to Europeans than it had been. We have
already seen what Renaissance art, literature, and ideas owed to other
cultures, especially the world of Islam. It is time to examine the extent
to which and the ways in which the Renaissance and its products
spread beyond Europe.
Both people and things played important parts in the process of dissemination.
Travelers, missionaries, conquerors, settlers, works of art,
and other objects of material culture transmitted ideas and images. By a
remarkable coincidence, the ocean-spanning reach of European navigations
came just at the moment when the printing industry was beginning
to boom in the voyagers’ homelands. Books bore explicit ideas;
engravings could transmit thinking implicitly and acquaint people who
had never met a European with the themes, techniques, and content
of Western art, which captured attention and imagination in regions
it had never previously reached and among peoples whom it had never
previously touched.
Translation, Hybridity
Much of what was transmitted changed in the course of transmission,
whether consciously adapted or misunderstood. Hence scholars have
come to speak of the spread and “reception” of the Renaissance in
terms of domestication, syncretism, hybridity, cultural translation, and
creolization. These concepts have cast so much light on the problems
of how cultural (or, more specifically, intellectual and artistic) movements
happen that it seems possible in principle that they may illuminate
the origins of the Renaissance.
48 Robert Finlay, “The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History,”Journal
of World History 9 (1998): 141-87; Richard A. Goldthwaite, “The Economic and Social
World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica," Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 13-27; S. Pierson,
From Object to Concept: Global Consumption and the Transformation of Ming Porcelain (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013).
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 19
Students of the origins of religions, languages, fashions, artistic movements,
technologies, cuisines, and ideas have successfully applied similar
models of how diverse influences from mutually distinct cultures converge
creatively.49 The idea of cultural hybridity, or metissage, mestizaje,
or mestigagem, is one of the rare successes of what is sometimes called
“Southern Theory,” produced on the cultural periphery, in Havana,
for instance, or Recife, and later adopted by the center, in Paris and
New York. The systematic study of this domain goes back to scholars
working on Afro-American cultures in the Caribbean and Brazil from
the early twentieth century, among them Gilberto Freyre, Fernando
Ortiz, and Alejo Carpentier, the last being the author of an important
study of music in Cuba, which discusses the interaction of musical cultures
on the island as early as the sixteenth century. Carpentier noted
the survival, after the Spanish conquest, and even the employment in
church music, of indigenous instruments such as the maraca (a rattle
made from gourds containing seeds) and the gtiiro (a ribbed gourd that
is scraped with a stick) .50
In the last generation, the older language of hybridity has been
increasingly replaced by a linguistic model, and cultural historians,
like anthropologists, now speak of “cultural translation,” when what is
adopted from one culture is also adapted to suit the needs of the other.
One advantage of this model is that it offers more space for human
agency, for the work and the skills involved in the process of translation.
In an incisive account of the consequences of cultural encounters,
the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins distinguished between
two stages of the process.51 In the first stage, the cultural order absorbs
new elements in fragmentary form, so that we might speak of localization,
or “indigenization.” In a second stage, after a critical threshold
is passed, the cultural order is itself transformed. It is at this point that
some scholars speak about creolization— in other words, the emergence
of a new grammar for a new order. In this context another
term from linguistics may be useful. Students of language contact
speak of “convergence,” both at the level of individual words and
that of entire languages. In the case of lexical development, two similar
words become one, combining the meanings of the original two.
Whole languages also come to resemble each other more closely after
P. Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); S. Gruzinski, Painting the Conquest
(Paris: Flammarion, 1992), emphasizes hybridization in New Spain.
)° A. Carpentier, Music in Cuba (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
51 Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1981); Marshall Sahlins, “Colors and Cultures,” Semiotica 26 (1976):
1-22.
20 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 1 7
contact. In the case of other forms of culture, too, we might speak of
perceived affinities leading to convergence.
A remarkable case of intellectual hybridity—though some scholars
prefer other terms—is that of the “Inca humanist,” Garcilaso de la
Vega, whose mother was an Inca princess, while his father was a Spanish
conquistador. Garcilaso grew up in Peru but emigrated to Spain. He
absorbed much of the culture of the Italian Renaissance, and his library
included books by Ficino and Bembo as well as Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso and Castiglione’s Courtier. His history of Peru before the coming
of the Spaniards expressed his nostalgia for the lost empire of the
Incas. He used the language or languages of Western humanism, from
philology to Neoplatonism, to refute the Spanish claims that the Amerindians
were barbarians and idolaters. He claimed that the inhabitants
of Peru already believed in one God before the arrival of the Spaniards.
His history implied that Peruvian culture fit the pattern of the ancient
theology discussed by Ficino and others. Neoplatonists had a cult of the
sun, but the sun was also worshipped in Peru. In this way one form of
syncretism, between pagan and Christian cultures in the first centuries
after Christ, was used to justify another.52
Spaniards wanted to bring the look of Renaissance to the New
World, following the designs of Serlio, for instance, or decorating
facades with medallions and grotesques. Vitruvian town planning and
architectural precepts stamped the hemisphere with urban grids and
speckled it with stoa and pediments. Indeed, it has been argued that the
classical style of architecture played a political role in Spanish America
because it both represented and reinforced the European sense of cultural
superiority.53 The many new cities in the Americas often followed
the regular grid plan recommended in Renaissance treatises on
architecture which were difficult to achieve in the old cities ofEurope.
However, regular city plans were also part of local traditions, as in
the case ofTenochtitlan, over which Mexico City was built, and military
camps—also, perhaps, influential models in the minds offounders ofearly
colonial towns—were generally laid out on a grid pattern. Conversely,
52 J. A. Mazzotti, Incan Insights: El Inca Garcilaso's Hints to Andean Readers (Madrid:
Iberoamerica, 2008); G. Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque (Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2010), emphasizes the local contribution to the mixture of architectural
styles; D. Brading, “The Incas and the Renaissance: The Royal Commentaries of
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,” Journal of Latin American Studies 18 (1985): 1-23, discusses
Garcilaso’s double heritage.
53 V. Fraser, “Architecture and Imperialism in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America,”
Art History 9 (1986): 325-35; V. Fraser, The Architecture of Conquest (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 21
so it has been argued, Albrecht Diirer’s plan for a symmetrical ideal city
was influenced by what he knew about Tenochtitlan. The rational plan
suggested associations with classical antiquity in the minds of European
beholders and readers, while the lake-bound site of Tenochtitlan
recalled Venice. Both echoes resonated in representations of the Aztec
city in European books and engravings in the sixteenth century.54 Plans
were extemporized by conquistadores or— in his capacity as the least
uneducated person present—a priest; they were not usually, in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the work of professionals. Though
from the 1570s the crown repeatedly issued ordinances endorsing it,
the grid pattern seems to have come almost unreflectingly to untutored
minds. Pizarro, who could barely read, designed Lima himself, as a grid
of 137 symmetrically arrayed blocks. Cuzco was exceptional in retaining
its pre-conquest street plan, but the image of the colonial grid was so
powerful that when the engravers of Civitates Orbis Terrarum depicted
the city, they stamped it, erroneously, with the common pattern. To
Brazil in 1549 with Tome de Sousa, governor of Salvador de Bahia, came
numerous artisans who developed the city, confined by the surrounding
topography, in a triangular but grid-like layout. In 1554, barely a generation
after the conquest, a guidebook to Mexico City, written in impeccably
Ciceronian Latin, praised the main square as the “forum” and the
nascent university as the “House of Apollo, Minerva, and the Muses.”55
Distinctions naturally need to be drawn between the impacts of
the Renaissance in Africa, Asia, and America. In the New World classical
learning shaped Europeans’ perceptions of what they encountered
and the way they behaved in response.56 Fernandez de Oviedo and
Acosta both followed the model of Pliny in their natural histories of
the Indies. Pietro Martire and Joao de Barros both entitled their histories
“Decades” in homage to Livy, implicitly comparing the rising
Spanish and Portuguese empires with that of Rome. Knowledge
of Greek and Roman paganism occluded missionaries’ understanding
of indigenous religions, few, if any, of which were best understood as
enshrining pantheons of personal deities each with responsibility for
his or her own department of nature. The grammars of non-European
languages—Nahuatl, Quechua, or Tupf—produced by missionaries with
54 David Y. Kim, “Uneasy Reflections: Images ofVenice and Tenochtitlan in Benedetto
Bordone’s ‘Isolario,’” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49-50 (2006): 80-91.
Fraser, Architecture and Imperialism,” 325-35; Fraser, Architecture of Conquest;
F. Fernandez-Armesto, “Latin America” in The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History,
ed. P. Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 20.
56 D. P. Abbott, Rhetoric in the New World: Rhetorical Theory and Practice in Colonial
Spanish America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996).
22 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
a humanist training followed the model of Latin grammars, despite the
structural differences between those languages and Latin. Latin schools
were established in Mexico City, in Michoacan, and most famous of
all, in Tlatelolco. Some of the masterpieces of Renaissance literature,
notably Utopia and Don Quixote, were well known in the New World.3'
Some humanists arrived from Spain, among them Francisco Cervantes
de Salazar, who taught at the newly founded university in Mexico
City in the middle of the sixteenth century. Humanist academies were
founded on the European model, notably the Academia Antartica in
Lima in the 1590s. Contributions to Renaissance literature were also
made in the New World. Petrarch’s lyrics were translated into Spanish
in Peru, and a member of the Academia Antartica, Diego Davalos y
Figueroa, published poems in a Petrarchan style. The Spanish poet
Alonso de Ercilla wrote his famous epic, the Araucana, in South America,
describing the resistance to the Spaniards by the indigenous people
of Chile (then a remote part of the viceroyalty of Peru) and presenting
this resistance in a heroic style inspired by both classical epic and Ariosto.
Gaspar de Villagra began his epic on the conquest of New Mexico
with the words “Arms and the heroic man I sing.”’8
Until quite recently, it was assumed that there was nothing to say
about the Renaissance in Africa, except perhaps for the ill-documented
work that Portuguese craftsmen put into the building of a new palace for
the ruler of Kongo in the early sixteenth century. But “Afro-Portuguese”
ivories echoed themes prominent in Europeans’minds. Hence, African
craftsmen might be said to have participated in the Renaissance without
knowing that they were doing so.’9
In East Asia, Jesuits brought the Renaissance along with the Counter-Reformation.
(In Europe, by contrast, Italian Protestants brought
the Renaissance along with the Reformation!)60The many studies of the
Italian missionary Matteo Ricci make it abundantly clear that he
introduced Chinese mandarins to Renaissance rhetoric, astronomy,
geography, and the art of memory, as well as to ancient philosophy.
57 Silvio Zavala, Sir Thomas More in New Spain (London: Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian
Councils, 1955); Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
58 Miguel Encinias, Alfred Rodriguez, and Joseph P. Sanchez, eds. Historia de la Nueva
Mexico, 1610 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 1.
59 William Fagg, Afro-Portuguese Ivories (London: Batchworth, 1959); E. Bassani and
W. B. Fagg, Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory (New York: Center for African Art,
1988).
60 For the global Counter-Reformation, see Simon Ditchfield, “Catholic Reformation
and Renewal,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation, ed. P. Marshall (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 152-85.
Burke, Clossey, and Femandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 23
The Jesuits’ approach to scholarship may have contributed even to the
important kaozheng Tygig philological movement.61 As in Mexico and
Peru, Jesuits imported religious prints into China, and as art historians
going back to Munsterberg have pointed out, these prints made
a considerable impact on Chinese art, on landscape painting in particular.
Chinese landscape painters did not imitate Western models,
but awareness of an alternative to their own tradition helped them to
innovate.62
In Japan, the penetration of both Christianity and Renaissance culture
was deeper than in China. Francis Xavier arrived with religious
images and noted that they helped awaken interest in Christianity.
Another Jesuit, the Italian Antonio Valignano, founded colleges at
Arima (now part of Minabi Shinamara) and Azuchi. As in Mexico,
Ciceronian Latin was taught in these colleges, using local editions of
classical texts. Painting and engraving were also taught there. Some
secular as well as religious paintings followed the models provided by
European prints, including a screen with a battle scene based on a print
of Lepanto.
The New World registered so much of the impact of the Renaissance
because it was easy to reach from Europe, and because many or
most indigenous cultures were hospitable to strangers and their ideas.
The relative importance of the Renaissance in Spanish America owed
a good deal to the Spanish expatriates who were trying to reproduce
their home culture in their new home, whereas in most of Asia, outside
the Philippines and a few relatively defensible enclaves, Europeans
were present on sufferance and more or less at the mercy of indigenous
states, with only selective opportunities to change the prevailing programs
in aesthetics or education. East Asia, remote and hard of access,
was harder to permeate owing to indigenous contempt for Western
barbarians. But unless and until their European guests offended them
by excesses of zeal or arrogance, Chinese and Japanese elites were disposed
to welcome such useful knowledge and ideas as the Westerners
were able to display. The missionaries believed that they had converted
these elites to Christianity, but scholars who have studied the indigenous
sources for this cultural encounter suggest that for both Chinese
61 Spence, Memory Palace; Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual
and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1984), 46-81.
K L Cahill, The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese
Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), emphasizes the “convergence”
between local and Western traditions. M. Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), provides broad context.
24 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
and Japanese “converts,” the new ideas joined Buddhist and Confucian
traditions, rather than replacing them, in a polytropic multiplicity.
Hence they speak of “Confucian-Christian syncretism,” for
instance, and point out that the late Ming period, in the course of
which the Jesuits founded their mission, was “the heyday of syncretism
in China” in which Judaism and Islam as well as Christianity were
viewed through Confucian spectacles.63 Something similar occurred in
art, where Western forms were assimilated into the traditional order
of painting, whether consciously or as a result of the “habitus,” the
embodied knowledge of the artists, a knowledge that was so much part
of them as to have become unconscious.
The Islamic World
The world of Islam was different, influencing European culture but
responding only very selectively to its allure. In the case of the Ottoman
Empire, half in and half out of Europe, the evidence is particularly
rich, and it has been studied intensively. As we have seen, Sultan
Mehmed II shared the Renaissance interest in ancient Roman models of
government. We now know that the sultan was not only the conqueror
of Constantinople but also a patron of Italian artists such as Costanzo da
Ferrara, who made a portrait medal of the sultan, and Gentile Bellini,
who painted his portrait in oils. When Mehmet the Conqueror began
construction of the Topkapi Saray—his monumental palace complex—
he tried to get leading Italian architects onto his payroll, including
Filarete, who advocated ancient Roman models as the means of building
an ideal city, and Michelozzo, who designed the Medici palace in
Florence. The Greek humanist George of Trebizond and the Florentine
humanist Francesco Berlinghieri were among those who dedicated
books to Mehmed, who, in turn, showed interest in some classical texts,
among them Ptolemy’s geography and the histories written by Herodotus,
Livy, and Quintus Curtius, the biographer of another conqueror,
Alexander the Great. Ottoman rather than European expansion led
to cultural encounters and exchanges, although the examples cited in this
paragraph show the Turks as receiving Renaissance culture rather than
contributing to it.64
63 Jacques Gemet, Chine et christianisme. Action et reaction (Paris: Gallimard, 1982);
Nicolas Standaert, YangTmyun, Confucian and Christian in Ming China (Leiden: Brill, 1988);
Ikuo Higashibaba, Christianity in Early Modem Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice (Leiden:
Brill, 2001).
64 Julian Raby, “A Sultan of Paradox: Mehmed the Conqueror as a patron of the arts,”
Oxford Art Journal 5 (1982): 3-8.
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 25
Mehmed’s successors were less oriented toward Italy, but Bayezid
(to whom Leonardo once offered his services) invited Michelangelo to
Istanbul, while in the earlier part of his reign, in the 1530s, Suleiman
the Magnificent, encouraged by his grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, was a
patron of Renaissance art, including a crowned helmet that he commissioned
from a workshop in Venice and tapestries made by Flemish
weavers who came to Istanbul for the purpose.65
Much less is known about Safavid Persia, but we learn from recent
research that the artist Kamal al-Din Behzad copied Costanzo da Fen
rara’s drawing of a seated scribe, turning him into an artist in the process.
The traveler Pietro Della Valle recorded seeing Italian paintings for sale
in the city of Isfahan. The seventeenth-century painter Muhammadzaman
ibn Hajl Yusuf of Qom made use of Renaissance prints.66
Mughal India was the farthest from Europe of the three gunpowder
empires but it was also the one with the most intensive cultural contacts
with the West, especially in the time of the emperor Akbar.67 Jesuits gave
Akbar paintings and engravings, and Akbar ordered his artists to copy
them. They colored the prints and employed elements from them in
their own work. For example, the miniature painter Basawan, Akbar’s
favourite, adapted prints by Durer. Jahangir, Akbar’s son, delighted in his
copyists’ability to replicate European images accurately enough to confuse
European visitors. The Jesuits introduced Renaissance architecture
into India, where Serlio enjoyed an “afterlife,” like Vitruvius in Mexico.
There are even traces of humanism to be found in Mughal India.
In 1586, for instance, a Florentine merchant in Cochin found a copy of
Castiglione’s Courtier for sale there.68The Jesuit press—starting in Goa,
where operations began in 1556, and spreading beyond India with similar
initiatives in Macau in 1581, Nagasaki in 1592, and the Philippines
from 1593—concentrated on devotional books and translations of
Christian materials into native languages, hut it also produced contributions
to the humanist curriculum, including a digest of philosophy
attributed to St Francis Xavier and a Japanese version of Aesop’s Fables.
Giilru Necipoglu, “Siileiman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in
the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry," Art Bulletin 71 (1989): 401-2; Lisa Jardine
and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London:
Reaktion, 2000), 63-131.
66 Eleanor Sims, “The European Print Sources of Paintings by the SeventeenthCentury
Persian Painter Muhammad-Zaman ibn Haji Yusuf of Kum,” in Le stampe e la diffusione
delle immagini, ed. Henri Zemer (Bologna: CLUEB, 1979), 73-83.
61 G. Bailey, The Jesuits and the Grand Mogul: Renaissance Art at the Imperial Court of
India, 1580-1630 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1998), discusses hybridity in Mughal
painting, M. Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting (Cambridge, 1992), is a general survey.
Filippo Sassetti, Lettere, ed. Ettore Marcucci (Florence: Le Monnier, 1855), n. 102.
26 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
On the fringes of the Mughal Empire and beyond it to the east, scattered
Portuguese dwellers from Cambay to Melaka and Macao built
houses and churches that echoed classicizing features of the architecture
of home. In the Philippines, in the relatively small enclaves Spaniards
settled, a world more like that of Spanish America took shape.
Spaniards could found their own institutions of humanistic education
and impose European-style townscapes on the land. Along with Catholicism,
they introduced church music in Renaissance style. However,
as often happens, what was intended by the Spaniards to be cultural
transfer turned out in practice to be more like cultural exchange. The
conversion of the Filipinos was accompanied by the “philippinization”
of Christianity, while in the case of music, according to a recent study,
the Jesuit strategy of accommodation “ensured the incorporation . . .
into church music” of song in local languages. Indigenous musicians
learned Western music from Spaniards and then passed on what they
had learned, probably adapting it without knowing that they were doing
so, while some indigenous genres were retained “under the guise of
hispanization.”69
The images distributed through the networks developed during the
Renaissance did not themselves all incorporate the visual innovations
of the Renaissance. One of the most frequently and widely distributed,
owing to Jesuit enthusiasm, was Rome’s Madonna with Child known as
the Salus Populi Romani. Versions of this icon, medieval if not Lucan in
origin, reached the Americas, Africa, India, and China, having been
broadcast despite—or perhaps because of—its archaism. Even images
of the Trinity depicted as three identical Jesus-like triplets, once suppressed
in Europe, emerged in Ethiopia and the Americas owing to their
expressive iconography rather than for any Renaissance naturalism. In
some cases the more Renaissance images were less welcome. The archpriest
Avvakum complained of imported images of Jesus “making his
face plump, his lips red, his hair curly, his arms thick and muscular, and
his legs likewise, and altogether they make him look like a German,
only that he lacks a sword at the hip”; his hostility to Italian-German
naturalism was not so unusual.70
The main theme that emerges from our attempt at a bird’s-eye view
of the process is the importance of hybridization. In the case of painting
and sculpture, a byproduct of missionary endeavors to convert the
69 D. R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modem Manila (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), 2010.
70 Avvakum, The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, trans. Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees
(London: Hogarth, 1924), 23.
Burke, Clossey, and Fernandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 27
Indians and to sustain their devotion was what has been described as an
“invasion of European images.” It began with the import of European
religious prints and was followed by the arrival of European painters
and finally the rise of local artists working in a hybrid style and creating
their own local forms (as in the Peruvian paintings of angels carrying
guns). At the Mughal court, for instance, images of Christian saints
and angels were used “to proclaim a message based on Islamic Sufi and
Hindu symbolism and linked with Persian poetic metaphor.”71
Examples of Western art arrived in Japan before they arrived in
China. Early in the T 5 6 0 S , the queen of Portugal sent a painting of the
Virgin Mary to a Japanese nobleman (daimyd). In the 1580s, an Italian
missionary, Giovanni Niccolo, established an academy in Nagasaki to
train Japanese Christians to paint in the Western style. He also taught
the art of engraving. Painted screens that represented the Europeans,
known as “Southern Barbarians” (Nanban), paying particular attention
to details of their costume and their ships, became fashionable in Japan
around the year 1 6 0 0 . 72
In China, examples of Western art were introduced by the missionaries.
Ricci brought paintings in the Western style to Beijing, but a
greater impact was made by Western engravings including illustrations
of the Gospels, the famous atlas of Ortelius, and the views of cities
collected in the C ivitates Orbis Terrarum. The subsequent changes in
Chinese landscape paintings have been described as “a convergence
of old Chinese practice and response to foreign stimuli.”73 The European
engravings impressed the Chinese because, as one Jesuit wrote in
a letter to Rome, they were “considered very artistic and subtle because
they make use of shadows, which do not exist in Chinese painting.”
W ith their strong chiaroscuro, the engravings reminded some Chinese
artists of landscapes painted during the Northern Song dynasty. These
affinities led to a revival of the Northern Song style—with a difference,
due to the new awareness of alternatives to Chinese traditions.
Both Chinese and Japanese artists resisted Western perspective until
the eighteenth century, remaining faithful to their traditional, more
fluid forms of representing space.
In New Spain, Ovid’sMetamorphoses were themselves metamorphosed.
Mural paintings, for instance, might refer both to classical and local traditions,
as in the case of the house of the Dean of Puebla, decorated with
11 Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind (London: Routledge, 2002); Bailey, Jesuits, 35.
72 Yoshitomo Okamoto, The Nanban Art ofJapan (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1972).
Cahill, Compelling Image, 91.
28 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
mural paintings of monkeys and female centaurs.74In architecture, the
Spaniards made few concessions to local tradition. Indeed, it has been
argued that the revived classical style both represented and reinforced
the Spaniards belief that their culture was superior to that of the Aztecs
and Incas. All the same, some churches were built on the site of earlier
temples and even used the same stones, as in the case of the cathedral
of Cusco, built from 1559 onward on the mins of the temple known
as Kiswarkancha, or in Diego de Landa’s great friary-church at Izamal,
where the glyphs on recycled stones can still be seen in the cloister.
In Mexico and Peru, the masons and sculptors were mainly indigenous.
They probably had their own traditions, their own habitus
(although we cannot be sure that they had worked as masons and
sculptors before they were trained by the colonizers). As a result, the
sculpture on church facades of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
in the New World, especially Peru, may have been classical in its
syntax but it was partly indigenous in its lexicon—in other words, the
converse of the media lengua of Ecuador. In the sixteenth century the
combination of local and imported motifs is already visible. However,
it was in the seventeenth century that a distinctive Peruvian style or
ecotype emerged, which some art historians have named the estilo
mestizo, and others “hybrid baroque.”75This hybrid style includes local
items such as pumas on church facades as well as a tendency to decorate
surfaces more fully and in a flatter manner than in the European
architecture of the time, as if the artisans had translated designs from
indigenous textiles into stone. A famous example of the style is the
Jesuit church in Arequipa, known as La Companfa.
The emergence of this estilo mestizo may have been encouraged by
the Jesuits, whose missionary strategy in different parts of the world,
from China to Peru, was that of “accommodating” Christianity to local
tradition. Hybridity is often the result of accommodation, a term that
has recently come into use in linguistics, or more exactly come back into
use, since ancient Roman rhetoricians already used the term.
The hybrid style of Peru may also have been encouraged by the
interpenetration of Christian and Muslim cultures in medieval Spain,
divided as it was into Christian and Muslim kingdoms. During the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in Toledo, for instance, Alcala, and
elsewhere in Spain, some Christian churches were decorated by Arab
74 Serge Gruzinski, Lapensee metisse (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 112-16.
75 Bailey, Andean Hybrid Baroque, favours the idea of hybridization; Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), is suspicious
of the concept.
Burke, Clossey, and Femandez-Armesto: Global Renaissance 29
artisans in the so-called mudejar style, with geometrical and calligraphic
motifs of the kind to be found in mosques. It might therefore be suggested
that Spanish colonial patrons of architecture were prepared by
their experience in the peninsula to favor or at least to accept a mixture
of European with indigenous artistic traditions.
It remains an open question whether decorations such as these, like
the fafades of churches from Arequipa to Goa, represent conscious
artistic syncretism or whether they are the unintended consequence of
asking local craftsmen to follow European models that were unfamiliar
to them. However, similar points may be made about European artefacts,
from statues to texts, many of which combined elements from
medieval and classical or from Christian and pagan traditions.
C o nclusion
Several important general themes emerge from this survey. One is the
role of missionaries in introducing the Renaissance as well as Christianity
to the world beyond Europe. They brought religious images
because of their content, but these images provoked interest on
account of their style. The medium was part of the message. Missionaries
are “cultural interpreters,” though they vary in their methods.
For example, the Jesuit policy of “accommodation” to local cultures
was criticized by rival orders such as the Dominicans who feared the
dangerous degradation of elements of the faith necessary to the convert’s
salvation.
Another recurrent theme is the important role of prints, which
were easy to export in large numbers, in spreading the knowledge of
Renaissance art. Vital, of course, were the contexts that made possible
the long-range reception of culture of European origin: exploration,
unprecedentedly far-flung empires, widening circles of trade, the
increasing mobility of travelers, migrants, sojourners and armies, and
the technologies that made non-Europeans respect Western wisdom. It is
hard, for example, to imagine China or Japan or some Southeast Asian
states evincing enthusiasm for ignorant, poor, smelly barbarians without
the attractions of Jesuit cartography and astronomy. But whether
carried by war or wares, imperialism or example, and however modified
by hybridity, the Renaissance was an unprecedentedly far-reaching
movement. The impact of the Renaissance on much of the rest of the
world was abundant— thin, of course, in most of the places it touched,
but, in some areas, transforming. Similarly, the impact of the rest of the
world on the Renaissance was real and, in some areas, decisive.
30 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, MARCH 2 0 17
If the Renaissance was global in its effects, the question of how far
afield to trace its origins is harder to answer. It was anomalous by the
standards of comparable earlier and later movements because it occurred
at a time of attenuated trans-Eurasian contacts, with little or no input
from east and south Asia. It is not possible to discern in the making of
the Renaissance, on a similar scale, the obvious input from far afield
that helped to stimulate innovations in the first millennium b.c.e., for
example, or the high Middle Ages, or the Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, the Renaissance was a hybrid of European initiatives
with transplantations of extra-European culture that originated in or
passed through the Islamic world. Further impact—albeit slow and
modest in effect—from the Americas and Africa helped shape the
development of the movement in the sixteenth century. In the period
of the making of the Renaissance, Europe was not conquered by a host
of influences from outside. Rather, a threadbare series of stragglers
penetrated the heartland, mostly from not very far afield, and made
important but hardly decisive contributions.
In the case of the visual arts, at least, a provisional conclusion might
be that Western culture had actually been more open to exotic influences
in the Middle Ages than it was in the Renaissance, both during
the period of Europe’s relative isolation from the 1360s to the 1490s,
and even during the “high” Renaissance of the early sixteenth century,
when the ideal of classicism (the “grammar” of architecture, for
instance) increased the obstacles to hybridization, which smacked of
impurity. To note one example, an analysis of possible cases of Mexican
influence on the decoration of the loggia at the Vatican by Raphael
and his workshop concluded that Aztec art was too alien to assimilate.76
All the same, not the least advantage of viewing the Renaissance from
a global perspective is to make more visible instances of hybridization
that were important at both ends of the process, but have come to be
recognized only quite recently.
76 Nicole Dacos, “Presents americains a la Renaissance: L’Assimilation de 1’exotisme,”
Gazette des beaux-arts 73 (1969): 57-62.
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