While the different forms of chinoiserie in the eighteenth century and of Japanism in the nineteenth century have been the subjects of innumerable publications, the contribution of the Orient to the preceding periods has generally been obscured by historians of Western art. Is this real blind spot the fruit of ignorance, or is it the sign of an anachronistic and Eurocentric chauvinism?

This paper first recalls the importance and frequency of secular contacts along the Silk Route travelled by missionaries and merchants. The two subsequent case history studies illustrate the phenomena both of hybridisation and of crossbreeding which result in formal borrowings. In the first, the presence of clouds or Chinese mountains in landscape paintings in Europe from the fifteenth century onward testifies to the migrations from East to West. The second concerns the architectural motif of the door in the shape of a monster’s mouth in the garden of Bomarzo and in the Palazzo Zuccari in Rome, and argues that this too seems to come from an exotic iconographic source, in this case, that ofthe Indonesian kala.