Design and denial: Leonardo Olschki, Italian art, and Mongol Eurasia

Abstract

In 1944, the historian Leonardo Olschki (1883-1961) published an article called “Asian Exoticism in Italian Art of the Early Renaissance.” It appeared in the Art Bulletin ,the journal of the College Art Association of America. Olschki’s aim was to examine the influence of Asian art on Italian production between about 1300 and the end of the fifteenth century, a period of intense change in Italian visual traditions. He began with the need for specificity and rigour, and an explanation of why the term “oriental” used by previous scholars was so general as to be meaningless as a category of analysis. He then focused on links to the regions of Persia and East Asia, which in the fourteenth centur..