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Part I covers not only the earliest chronological period in the book but also the most extensive timespan of any part of the anthology: the first text dates from c.1204, the last from c.1690. With the exception, however, of the first four texts, which form a chronologically separate cluster, all the rest date from the mid‐fifteenth century to the late seventeenth century, a period of approximately 250 years. In the arts, this includes the Renaissance as well as the later founding of the French Academie Royale, and with it, the inception of the academic system which not only dominated French art for the next two hundred years but also provided the model that fundamentally shaped art practice throughout Europe. In a broader perspective the timespan also covers the late fifteenth‐ and sixteenth‐century Age of Exploration and the seventeenth‐century ‘scientific revolution’. By any standards, that amounts to a world‐historical epoch, and although the existing volumes of Art in Theory do not encompass Renaissance art theory (precisely because it was felt to constitute a subject distinct from our concern with the modern period and its academic predecessor), the present anthology of necessity does seek to address this period of Europe’s earliest encounters – since antiquity – with the wider world.

It is now widely accepted both that capitalism is a worldwide phenomenon (in the sense that no geographical zone can be said to lie outside the capitalist world‐system) and that the origins of the modern capitalist world‐system can be traced to the period covered by this first part of the anthology. Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, among others, locate its beginnings in the city states of the Italian Renaissance, notably Genoa, Venice, Florence and Milan. Both in turn take their cue from the magisterial work of Fernand Braudel. In his three‐volume Civilisation and Capitalism, Braudel argues that it is the conjunction of internationally based centres of capital accumulation with emergent state formations that gives rise to the modern world‐system. Braudel further argues that capitalism as such should be considered as analytically distinct both from the realm of daily material life and the realm of low‐level market transactions, both of which have a much longer history than the modern capitalist system. A key role in the emergence of both regional systems and the eventual fully fledged world‐system thus accrues to the development of cities, long‐distance trade and related developments in ‘high’ finance.

It is to be noted that such ‘world‐system’ accounts of the origins of modern capitalism conflict both with ‘liberal’ accounts and with a more conventional Marxist explanation. The former tend to identify capitalism with the operation of the market economy under a rubric of ‘free enterprise’ and as more or less congruent with a key aspect of human nature extending back through history. The latter normally date the ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’ to seventeenth‐century England, and the emergence there for the first time of a proletarianized working class, the extraction of surplus‐value from whom is held to provide the impetus for subsequent capital accumulation.

These debates between a production‐oriented explanation of capitalism, originating in a single nation‐state and spreading outwards from there, and an explanation based in systemic relations rooted in trade and finance, lie beyond the scope of the present volume; salient references can be followed in the bibliography at the end of the book. That said, what we can pertinently observe here is that the latter speaks more readily than the former to our central concern with art, material culture and the sphere of representation in general, and it is they which have formed the underlying framework of the present book.

For Braudel, Wallerstein and Arrighi, the crucial developments were concentrated in the Mediterranean area and encompass its developing trade both with northern Europe and with civilizations further east: the Islamic lands of what we now call the Middle East, and beyond those, India and China. These perspectives are further developed by the argument of Janet Abu‐Lughod that the Western‐dominated capitalist world‐system had been preceded by an earlier ‘world‐system’ which reached its height in the early fourteenth century. That system was distinguished from what came later by the fact that its three main economic and cultural zones (the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and China) were all approximately equal in power, and that Europe was marginal to all of them. It is a corollary of Abu‐Lughod’s argument that the customary periodization of ‘Western civilization’ (which is conventionally constructed in terms of pagan antiquity, followed by a long period of collapse and gradual rebuilding characterized by a mix of feudalism and Christianity, culminating in the Christian–humanist synthesis of the Renaissance), simply does not apply there. There is no intervening gulf of ‘the Dark Ages’ – precipitated by the collapse of the western Roman Empire – between an interconnected classical antiquity and the flourishing early modern civilizations of Islam, India and China.

The existence of this sphere of advanced civilization in the eastern part of the globe, based on high levels of wealth and trade, with its consequent effect on levels of material and intellectual culture, is crucial for what followed over succeeding centuries in terms of the changing status of the West in the world. Growing participation, albeit at first marginal, in networks of cross‐cultural interaction during this period, is of no small significance to the narrative of the present volume. A further range of factors bearing upon our central concerns also interact with these developing financial and economic relations: geo‐political developments impacted upon the cultural crossings which we are trying to bring into focus. The most important of these were, on the one hand, the Crusades: the successive military campaigns in which western Europeans came to occupy significant areas of the Middle East for a prolonged period of just under two centuries, ending in 1291. On the other hand, there are the consequences arising from the unanticipated incursion into Europe at approximately the same time of armies of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan.

Remote as all of this may seem at first sight from the sphere of ‘Art’, it is these complex but fundamental developments that underwrite Part I, especially the first section, conceived under the title ‘Figures of Wealth and Power’. The first four texts, dating from a time between the early thirteenth and mid‐fourteenth centuries, are separated by over 150 years from our subsequent selections. They form a kind of ‘prologue’ to the rest of the book. The Fourth Crusade, led by a coalition of the Roman Catholic Church and assorted feudal aristocrats, achieved notoriety by diverting its planned attack on the Muslim‐held ‘Holy Land’ in favour of an assault on the capital of its notional Christian ally, the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople. Robert of Clari’s account here signifies the moment when western Europe first encounters in a palpable way the fabled ‘riches of the East’.

It was only a few decades after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 (and the transfer of many of its treasures to Venice: plunder which contributed decisively to the distinctive fabric of that city) that Europe was shaken by the military victories of the Mongols. These were nomad armies from central Asia who had already wrought significant destruction on the advanced Islamic civilizations of the Middle East, including, not least, the destruction of Baghdad in 1258. The paradoxical effect of the Mongols’ success, and the ensuing ‘Pax Mongolica’ across great expanses of the Eurasian landmass, was to stimulate attempts by Europeans to initiate contact with civilizations further east. First, there were religious initiatives, as the pope in Rome sought to enlist ‘Tartar’ help against what was assumed to be the common enemy of Islam: a strange kind of attempt to, as it were, advance the Crusades by other means. Second, and more effective, were overtly commercial initiatives, as merchants sought to take advantage of the unanticipated stability arising in the wake of the Mongol conquests to open up land routes giving access to the luxury goods of the Far East. Representatives of the Church’s ambition included the Franciscan friars Giovanni di Pian de Carpini and William of Rubruck. The most famous of the commercial endeavours are those of the Venetian Polo brothers and their nephew Marco. We have included extracts from both Carpini’s account of Tartary and China and Marco Polo’s descriptions of what he saw en route to the court of the great Khan in ‘Cathay’. Finally, we have also included a short account taken not from an actual traveller but from the fictional (but for all that, influential) Travels of ‘Sir John Mandeville’. Our extract purports to describe the mythical realm of Prester John, a Christian monarch in the heart of Asia who would come to the aid of Christians in their conflict with sundry heathens and representatives of anti‐Christ. Together, these four accounts offer a glimpse of what it was about the material culture of the East that drew Europeans into the wider world: a world that, as Abu‐Lughod points out, had to have been richer and better organized than Europe or there would have been nothing for Europeans to covet and to invest all their efforts in securing.

Following on from those early descriptions, ‘Figures of Wealth and Power’ goes on to offer a selection of Renaissance writings describing various encounters with the East. These include a cluster of texts underlining the far from insignificant role of art in transactions between Italian city‐states and the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These are then followed by a range of accounts by travellers to the East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all offering vivid testimony to the wealth and high levels of material culture they encountered.

The first cluster of texts centres on a series of exchanges which the Venetians and other Italian cities had with the Ottoman Turks, who had captured Constantinople in 1453. The Ottomans were by then the principal competitors of the Italians for trade in the eastern Mediterranean, as well as forming, along with the Egyptian Mamluks, the conduit for the products of the East, including silks, metalwork and, above all, spices into Europe. The remaining texts in this section reflect the epochal shift in the East–West axis which began at the end of the fifteenth century. The combined effects of the Black Death, the end of the Pax Mongolica and the rise of the Ottomans, all fuelled attempts to find an alternative route to the riches of the East, with the result that this period sees the displacement of the Mediterranean from its status as unchallenged centre of European civilization, and the transition to pre‐eminence of the western European nations bordering the Atlantic. The crucial moments came when Portuguese navigators, who had been pressing down the coast of Africa for several decades following the capture of Ceuta in Morocco in 1415, succeeded first in rounding Cape Palmas, in West Africa, around 1460, and then, in the late 1480s, passed the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. Finally, in 1497–8, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape again and, with the assistance of an Arab pilot, sailed from East Africa to the west coast of India. The major literary testament to Portuguese expansionism is the epic poem The Lusiads, published by Luís Vaz de Camões in 1572. Modelled on Virgil’s Aeniad, the poem gives a retrospective account of da Gama’s voyage, a mixture of historical record, ennobling classical myth, and Camões’s personal experience of India and east Asia, where he was between 1553 and 1567. Camões has been described as the first major European artist to cross the equator, but for the purpose of the present anthology we have selected instead a range of prose accounts by Europeans of south and east Asian art and material culture. For his part Camões echoes the prevailing tropes of the European encounter with Eastern culture: admiration for its craft skills and the value of its materials, disapproval or even disgust with its figurative art, and an overarching hostility to its religions, especially Islam. Thus, regarding da Gama’s first landfall in Calicut, Camões writes of ‘noble palaces’ among ‘groves of delightful trees’, and a ruler ‘reclining on a couch unsurpassed in its rich and delicate workmanship’, wearing a robe of ‘a cloth of gold, his diadem studded with every precious kind of gem.’ However, he also has occasion to describe a temple, itself ‘richly furbished’ but containing ‘images of their gods fashioned in wood and cold stone, the faces and colours as discordant as if the Devil had devised them’ (Camões 1997, canto VII, stanzas 46 and 47, 50, 57). In these verses, Camões encapsulates the dualism of the European response to the East, a frequently unstable mix of materially induced covetousness and spiritually fuelled superiority. It was, moreover, underpinned from the outset by violence and overwhelming firepower.

The second section of Part I, ‘Across the Ocean Sea’, marks a change of focus. Five years before da Gama’s voyage to India, the Genoese ‘Admiral of the Ocean Sea’, Christopher Columbus, financed by the Spanish monarchy, had stumbled across America in 1492, seeking a westward route to Marco Polo’s ‘Cathay’. At that historical moment, da Gama’s India mattered more than Columbus’s America, in terms of enriching Europe, but with time, it was Columbus’s discovery that was to prove the most resonant in world history. The majority of the selections in Section IB concern the culture clash consequent upon the Spanish invasion of America. As Europeans began to fan out into areas hitherto unknown or unfamiliar to them, travellers’ tales became popular, both in respect of their usefulness to commercial enterprise and their attractiveness to a growing reading public at home. Included here, in addition to the American collision, are two early accounts of sub‐Saharan West Africa, notably the city of Benin, as well as the first recorded encounter with the indigenous people of Australia by the English adventurer William Dampier.

The final section, IC ‘Scholarly Responses’, looks to a different register of reflection on the wider worlds being encountered by Europeans. Throughout the book we have tried to distinguish between two types of account, reflected in the thematic divisions of the parts. On the one hand, we have the accounts of those who actually went to new worlds and wrote about what they saw: typically, travellers’ tales, and later the narratives of missionaries, and colonists. On the other, we have consistently tried to represent attempts to make sense of the new information about the world that was flooding in (and indeed also the flood of actual artefacts), by those who stayed at home. Section IC opens with a selection from an inventory of the goods contained in the Villa Medici in Florence at the moment of the death of the patriarch Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492. As Arrighi has observed, for the city‐states of the Italian Renaissance, ‘the conspicuous consumption of cultural products was integral to a state‐making process’ (Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 2010, p. 96). Nor is this merely a conclusion drawn retrospectively by historians about the relationship between capital and culture. Arrighi cites no less a figure than Lorenzo himself, writing in the 1470s about the Medicis’ enormous expenditure on art and architecture: ‘I think it casts a brilliant light on our estate, and it seems to me that the monies were well‐spent and I am very pleased with this’ (ibid., p. 106). The section continues with a diary entry by Albrecht Dürer concerning his sight of various artefacts from the New World of Mexico, which he saw while on a journey to the Netherlands in 1520. Brief though it is, this note is an exceptional account by a major European artist of his first‐hand experience of artworks from a different culture. We have also included short extracts from much longer texts in the founding literature of the French Royal Academy, no more than glancing asides concerning Islamic and Chinese art, but with all the resonance of a Freudian slip – observations with a telling longevity in the European tradition. We also present evidence of the burgeoning desire to collect novelties, and inventories of the resulting collections and ‘cabinets of curiosities’, the earliest manifestations of what later became museums. In addition, the section includes a range of literary and philosophical attempts to speculate about the meaning of it all, both in terms of apprehensions of cultural difference, and in terms of a reflex to profit, that is to say, of proto‐colonialism.

The interconnectedness of this early modern world can be told in microcosm in the story of a single book. That small book, which is not the kind of text which can be successfully extracted for the purpose of the present anthology, now resides in the collection of the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. It is the Tarikh‐i Hind‐i garbi, a history of the ‘West Indies’. It is described in the Beatty collection information as the earliest text on the New World to have been written in the non‐Western world. Of its two parts, the first describes North America and the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan, while the second discusses South America, especially Peru, with a section on the silver mine of Potosi in Bolivia. But it is the story of the small book itself which is really revealing. The Turkish text described by the Beatty Library was a compilation made by a scribe in Istanbul in about 1580. This Turkish text is said to be derived from information contained in an Italian translation of several texts on America written by five earlier Spanish authors. The Turkish text was then in turn translated into Persian, and it was at this stage that the illustrations were painted. Its images, likely made from verbal descriptions by an artist who had never seen the things he was painting, include exotic plants, one a sort of flowering cactus, an animal which seems to be a tapir, various robed intellectuals and a strange abstract shape which turns out to be a mountain of silver. The little book, currently resting in a glass case in Dublin, was printed in seventeenth‐century India. Thus a sort of circuit of information, perhaps of misinformation – or better, of creative interpretation – is what seems to have occurred. The verbal and visual information travels from South America to Spain, to Italy, to Turkey, to Persia, to India, and in the course of its journey it is transformed. The book raises all sorts of questions about truth and fiction, art and artifice, facts, power, imagination and translation. All of these questions are open‐ended, but what is indisputable is that their answers will also have to travel round the world, challenging normative histories as they go.

And ‘Art’? Where is all of this in European art? The simple answer is that it is there in images: images long overlooked and little discussed but now brought forward by many writers in the new wave of Renaissance art history.Venetian art is the nonpareil. The East is there in portraits of sultans; it is there in turbaned figures talking in groups in piazzas off to the side or behind the central commercial or Christian events being represented; it is there in the dark‐skinned figure of Balthasar in pictures of the Magi – likely Persian Zoroastrian priests – paying homage at the nativity; it is there in Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini’s chronicle paintings of the encounter of Christians and pagans; it is there, in the shape of Chinese porcelain bowls, in Titian’s picture of the gods carousing. It is in the fabric of the city’s architecture, all the way from the gold and marble of San Marco to the sculpted reliefs of a turbaned porter and a camel set into buildings beside the canals. It is also there in the vivid blues of the Virgin’s robe, in the form of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. The wider world is present too in northern European art: in Holbein’s Turkish carpet draping his Ambassadors’ table, and in the red line of the Treaty of Tordesillas dividing the world between Portugal and Spain, running down the globe in the same painting. Africans and Turks and Jews nestle in Dürer’s martyrdoms, even sometimes, a portrait of an African. In Spain, South American ‘Indians’ both tackle conquistadors and stand in for Balthasar as the Magi do homage. Outside the world of the fine arts as such, the world appears in Europe in a multiplicity of costume books as well as the metalwork traditionally labelled Veneto‐Saracenic; it is there in leather bindings to books. Above all, perhaps, it is there on maps, in the shape of exotic animals and differently dressed people wandering the continents. And on and on.

From the Renaissance onwards, the world is in the art of the West. And yet, perhaps that is the main point. For in all of this art, the traces of the world live within the European frame. Lifelikeness, mimesis, imitation, the apparently seamless representation of the world as it is, succeeded in encapsulating the image of the wider world within its Western frame. Perspective, which allows the representation of everything, however exotic, simultaneously underwrites the subordination of everything too. It absorbed the flat, the bright, the abstract, the stylized, but it also implicitly relegated them within the hierarchy of representation it established in the fifteenth century and continued to underwrite until well into the nineteenth.

Yet, looked at from a slightly different angle, perhaps the keystone image, as it were, is not itself held within a perspective frame. That image can be found in a map, and not in a depicted animal or ‘savage’ roaming around its edges, but in the very form of the map itself. In the different sort of perspective grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude, it is the map‐as‐image itself which does the work. Mercator’s canonical projection of the world, with its definitive centering of Europe, first appeared in 1569. In the scientific mapping of the world by Europeans, no less than in the perspectival spaces of European art, the world is always there, but by the same token, always held in its place, literally.