This exquisite painting of the Madonna and Child was painted in the 1590s by an artist in the "Seminary of Painters," the Jesuit art academy located near Nagasaki, Japan. The Japanese artists amazed Europeans with their ability to copy the styles of the West, as this delicate painting on wood panel attests. Yet the jewel-like frame is done in an entirely Japanese technique of lacquer dusted with gold and silver and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

The pounding rain let up long enough for our battered jeep to find its way along the last few kilometers of mud road and into a clearing. There it stood, at long last, like a vision of an antediluvian world, the towering ruins of what had been the most spectacular Jesuit mission in South America. This was the end of a long journey, one that had taken me to the Reduction of São Miguel in the tropical countryside of Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul.

When Mogul artists from the court of the Emperors Akbar and Jahangir openly embraced Western styles and Christian subjects, they were not doing it out of a desire to convert. This delicate Madonna (ca. 1590s), on a page of a small book, was the work of a Muslim painter, and the verses inscribed in the volume in her hands are a Persian love poem. The exchange between the Moguls and Jesuits was purely intellectual and resulted from a Mogul desire to learn about Renaissance culture.

My journey had begun many years before in the dusty basement of Harvard's Widener Library; while working on a paper I became enthralled with what is still for me one of the most remarkable stories in the history of international relations: the Jesuits' attempt during the Renaissance to bring the best of European culture to the four corners of the earth, even when it was completely impractical and prohibitively costly. One of the most compelling examples of the indomitability of the human will, it was the Jesuits' stubborn, some say utopian, faith in the power of learning and the arts that put me on a trail that led over four continents and in that jeep in the Brazilian rainforest.

The Jesuits did not just bring the Renaissance to those four corners -- they adapted to the culture of their host communities as well. In the era after Columbus, when most Europeans were interested in conquering and exploiting the civilizations of the Americas and Asia, the Jesuits charted a different course. Although not entirely free of the superior attitude of most Europeans at the time, the Jesuits nevertheless made great efforts to adapt to non-European cultures. In a word, they went native. Seeking cultural partnerships with peoples as widely diverse as the Chinese and the Guaraní Indians of Paraguay, the Jesuits helped create mission societies that were at once European and non-European. The common currency they used was culture, whether rhetoric, music, or literature.

As an art historian, I was especially interested in their use of art and architecture. The Jesuits considered art to be an international language that could bind and reconcile. When language created formidable boundaries, art communicated across cultures and allowed people to find a common form of expression. For the Jesuits, art was a form of preaching that could express the tenets of Christianity. The host cultures, on the other hand, used art to express their ethnic identity by blending indigenous styles and iconographies with Christian subjects. Instead of merely being converted to Christianity, mission societies used art to convert Christianity. The impact of the mission art activities went beyond the missions as well, helping to create hybrid art forms even among societies that remained staunchly Buddhist, Daoist, or Muslim.

This sculpture of St. Paul (right) in the ruined church of the Reduction of Trinidad in Paraguay has a solidity and authority about it that typified Guaraní carving. Guaraní sculptors were known as santo apohava, which means quite literally "saint makers." These sculptures were seen as much more than simply representations of holy figures; they were believed to actually possess some of the saints' power. What is most remarkable is that the Guaraní had absolutely no tradition of carving prior to the arrival of the Jesuits.

The ruins of Trinidad Reduction in Paraguay (left) are all that is left of one of the largest Jesuit missions in South America. This reduction featured a massive stone church designed in the eighteenth century by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Battista Primoli, which emulates the architecture of Baroque Rome. The church originally was vaulted in stone, had a lofty dome, and was full to the brim with gilt altarpieces and statues -- all created by Guaraní Indian masons and artists.

In this curious painting of the late sixteenth century, a Chinese artist has transformed a scene of Noah from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Rome into an image of a Buddhist figure resting under a pine tree in a Chinese landscape. The once-ferocious lion, taken from a Western print of St. Jerome, has been reduced to a pussycat. This is an example of a non-Christian painter showing interest in European styles and trying to blend them with his own traditions.

Over the course of four years I traveled to archives from Buenos Aires to Manila and surveyed churches and half-forgotten artworks in museums, private collections, and dilapidated sheds. I found lost sculptures, overlooked paintings, and records of Jesuit art activities. My journey ended up as a book, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542 - 1773, the first survey of the art of the worldwide Jesuit missions (University of Toronto Press, 1999). In it I focused on the four missions that had the most flourishing artistic exchange and were the strongest statements of the Jesuits' commitment to high culture, both European and non-European.

Some paintings from the Japan mission are closer to traditional Japanese styles. This rare Madonna of the Snows (above) copies a European engraving but transforms it by making the facial features correspond to Japanese notions of beauty, such as the "bee-sting" lips and the wisps of hair outlining the head. The format, a hanging scroll of the kind commonly found in Buddhist temples, is another accommodation to Japanese style.

This delightful woodblock print (below) of the Annunciation of the Virgin by an anonymous Chinese artist is an illustration in a Jesuit catechism published in the Fujian province in 1608. Here the artist follows an engraving from an illustrated Jesuit Gospel from Antwerp, yet translates every line into its Chinese equivalent. The Virgin becomes a Ming Dynasty noblewoman, her house is a Chinese country pavilion, and the landscape in the background corresponds entirely to Chinese conventions.

Such is the Jesuit mission to the Great Mogul of India in the 1580s, where two half-starved Jesuits, Rodolfo Aquaviva and Antonio Montserrate, trudged across sea and desert to the wealthiest court on earth with trunkloads of books, oil paintings, and engravings that the emperor's Muslim and Hindu artists used to create a hybrid art style of great subtlety and sophistication (see Company, Winter 1995). Among the Guaraní Indians of South America, in places like São Miguel in Brazil, the Jesuits founded vast cities of stone featuring churches comparable to the splendors of Baroque Rome (see Company, Spring 1998). Yet the Guaraní artists who built and decorated them infused them with styles and allegories relating to their pre-Columbian traditions.

This Dead Christ at the Paraguayan Reduction of San Ignacio Guazœ was carved in the 1600s by a Guaraní artist I call the "San Ignacio Master." Anonymous like so many artists at the time, this sculptor brought to his work a spiritual intensity that is expressed through muted emotions and a simplicity of line. The Guaraní loved symmetry in their art, expressed here through Christ's tightly coiled braids and perfectly parted beard.

In China, European Jesuit artists promoted a hybrid art at the court of the Emperor of China, while the Chinese Jesuit painter Wu Li painted Daoist landscape scenes without a trace of European influence. The most active artistic mission in Asia was in Japan, where over 40 Japanese artists in the "Seminary of Painters" worked on oil paintings, sculptures, and engravings to create a Christian visual language that blended East with West and were some of the most exquisitely beautiful objects ever created at missions.