The relationship between East and West remains a topic of burning
timeliness, particularly in its political dimension. Yet, we can gain a
complete understanding of the current tensions only if we consider them
within a broader historical framework, spanning from art to diplomacy,
from religion to ethnography. The present volume tackles precisely this
complex task, offering its reader a rich mosaic of case studies and
scholarly research, relating to the mutual approaches between the
Euro-American 'West', and the Sino-Japanese 'East'. In the first part of
the book, art historian Marco Musillo uses the depictions of Tartars in
fourteenth-century Italian frescoes as the starting point of a
trajectory leading to eighteenth-century European literature on China.
In the second part, the reader is introduced to two cases of diplomatic
encounter, one in sixteenth-century Italy between Japanese subjects and
local courts, and the other one between Qing China and twentieth-century
United States, in the space of the universal exhibition in St. Louis.
Finally, the last section proposes three interconnected art historical
explorations: the screen design of Chinese origin in colonial Mexico,
Medieval Christian tombstones in China, and early-modern Filipino sacred
sculpture.