ABSTRACT
In the early 1340s, the painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti accepted a commission to paint a series of frescoes illustrating Franciscan narrative scenes for the chapter house of San Francesco in Siena, Italy. Despite the extraordinary innovations of the Mongol period, scholarship into the twenty-first century has often adhered to the view that Mongol artistic patronage and taste were “influenced” by other, better-established cultures. Yuan art is Chinese art, but it is also part of a larger, pan-Asian phenomenon of Mongol culture that could only exist due to the geographic reach of the Mongol empire. The Mongol period saw unparalleled exchange – commercial, cultural, and diplomatic – across the entirety of the known world. The transmission of materials and the imitation of motifs and techniques is most famously seen in the example of blue and white porcelain, which flourished during the Yuan dynasty, and, it has been argued, was the first “global” brand.
