Oriental Contributions to Franciscan Art in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

This dissertation analyses the Oriental influences in Franciscan art from the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries, arguing that what appears as an encounter with the East was, in fact, a complex process of self-definition within Western Christian culture. The research proceeds along a transregional trajectory from Italy to Armenia, Central Asia, and China, employing an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates art-historical analysis, textual exegesis, and material culture studies. Through frescoes, textiles, and manuscripts, the study reconstructs how images and objects circulated within the Eurasian networks opened by the Mongol Empire. Chapter One examines Italian martyrdom paintings such as St. Francis before the Sultan and The Martyrdom of the Franciscans, demonstrating how depictions of “infidel rulers” established a visual rhetoric of Franciscan martyrdom and sanctity. Chapter Two explores Armenia under Mongol rule as a pivotal node where Armenian craftsmen and Franciscan patrons negotiated religious and artistic meanings, revealing that so-called “cross-cultural fusion” was sustained by asymmetrical power relations rather than true reciprocity. Chapter Three turns to the Yuan dynasty’s “one million craftsmen” system and the global circulation of silk, showing how exotic textiles—rich with dragons, phoenixes, and parrots—were integrated into Franciscan liturgical spaces. Though seemingly at odds with the Franciscan ideal of poverty, these luxurious fabrics were re-sacralized as signs of divine splendor, their Oriental motifs reinterpreted through Western theology. Chapter Four examines illuminated manuscripts featuring hybrid and monstrous beasts, situating them within broader Eurasian imaginations of otherness. The study juxtaposes Franciscan depictions of monstrous Eastern creatures with Chinese representations of alien Western beings, revealing parallel strategies of “monstrification” that converted the unfamiliar into symbolic order. Across these chapters, the dissertation demonstrates that artistic exchange between East and West in the Franciscan world was less a story of mutual understanding than of selective appropriation and re-signification. Oriental images and materials were absorbed into Christian art, but their meanings were rewritten to serve Western spiritual narratives. The Orient, once feared as the realm of Antichrist, became a source of visual beauty and sanctity—its difference aestheticized and its alterity contained. This process illuminates a broader historical dynamic: the tension between universalist ideals and the persistent reinforcement of cultural boundaries. By tracing the Franciscan gaze upon the East—from martyrdom and mission to material desire and visual fascination—the study reconsiders the very notion of “religious tolerance” in medieval art. It concludes that what appeared as openness toward the foreign was often a subtle reassertion of hierarchy and selfhood, a process still resonant in modern discourses of civilization, faith, and power.