ABSTRACT
The object types and visual programs invoked in the chapters that follow, variously crafted in ceramic, wood, lacquer, shell, metal, and pigment, were in high demand, inspiring a desire for ownership and consumption that not only propelled their movement and transmission across regions but also toward more distant spheres. The blue and white porcelain produced at the kilns of Jingdezhen inspired a far-flung and multi-sited global industry of ceramics that strived to replicate the visual appeal and technological uniqueness of Chinese wares. The impact of Jingdezhen extended in all directions, including New Spain in the seventeenth century, as exemplified by Puebla glazed earthenware, which drew on a blue-and-white decorative language and classic Asian forms, along with precolonial clay-working techniques and indigenous motifs. In the sixteenth century, Japanese artisans produced attractive objects sheathed in lacquer, such as cabinets, altars, and lecterns, which deployed Christian iconography and foreign shapes, aimed at both local and distant audiences. The allure of inlaid Asian lacquerware also had an impact on colonial Mexico, where it inspired the genre of enconchado paintings, which were undergirded by support materials that echoed lacquer's gleaming surface effects, through mother-of-pearl, shell, and gold. In fifteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia, aesthetic motifs and designs were culled from multiple sources and then channeled, indeed systemized, across the empire, where they were applied upon varied surfaces, including metalware, textiles, woodwork, and tiles. In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, churches stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia sought to acquire complex, multi-paneled, carved, and gilded altarpieces produced in the Low Countries. The one that was commissioned for a village church in Botkyrka, Sweden, was so favored that two separate attempts were made to acquire it for other sites, after it was installed in the sixteenth century.
