Six ages of the world

The Six Ages of the World is a Christian historical periodization outline first written about with authority by Saint Augustine around the year 400. It is based along Christian religious events, from the birth of Adam to the events of Revelation. The six ages of history were widely believed and in use throughout the Middle Ages, and until the Enlightenment, the writing of history was mostly the filling out of all or some part of this outline.

The outline accounts for seven ages, just as there are seven days of the week, with the seventh age being eternal rest after the final judgment and end times, just as the seventh day of the week is reserved for rest. It was normally called the Six Ages of the World because they were the ages of the world, of history, while the seventh age was not of this world and lasting eternal.

The Six Ages are best described in the words of Saint Augustine, found in On the catechizing of the uninstructed:

§ The First Age: "The first is from the beginning of the human race, that is, from Adam, who was the first man that was made, down to Noah, who constructed the ark at the time of the flood."

§ The Second Age: "..extends from that period on to Abraham, who was called the father indeed of all nations.."

§ The Third Age: "For the third age extends from Abraham on to David the king."

§ The Fourth Age: "The fourth from David on to that captivity whereby the people of God passed over into Babylonia."

§ The Fifth Age: "The fifth from that transmigration down to the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ."

§ The Sixth Age: "With His [Jesus Christ's] coming the sixth age has entered on its process."

Since 321, when Constantine legalized Christianity, former pagan worshipers needed a way to learn about Christianity and Augustine used his Catechetical document as a way to communicate and educate people about Christianity.

Augustine was not the first to conceive of the Six Ages, which had its roots in the Jewish tradition, but he was the first to write about it with authority.

Christian scholars believed it was possible to determine how long man had been alive, starting with Adam, by counting forward how long each generation had lived up to the time of Jesus, based on the ages recorded in the Bible. While the exact age of the earth was a matter of biblical interpretive debate, it was generally agreed man was somewhere in the last and final thousand years, the Sixth Age, and the final seventh age could happen at any time. The world was seen as an old place, and the future would be much shorter than the past; a common image was of the world growing old.

Augustine was the first to write of the Six Ages with authority. The Ages reflect the seven days of creation, of which the last day is the rest of the Sabbath, illustrating the human journey to find eternal rest with God, a common Christian narrative.

Robert Ardrey

“Aspects of Paleoanthropology”

"The Hunting Hypothesis"

Paleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.

The science arguably began in the late 1800s when important discoveries occurred which led to the study of human evolution. The discovery of the Neanderthal in Germany, Thomas Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, and Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man were all important to early paleoanthropological research.

The modern field of paleoanthropology began in the 19th century with the discovery of "Neanderthal man" (the eponymous skeleton was found in 1856, but there had been finds elsewhere since 1830), and with evidence of so-called cave men. The idea that humans are similar to certain great apes had been obvious to people for some time, but the idea of the biological evolution of species in general was not legitimized until after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.

Though Darwin's first book on evolution did not address the specific question of human evolution— "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history," Darwin wrote on the subject— the implications of evolutionary theory were clear to contemporary readers.

Debates between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen focused on the idea of human evolution. Huxley convincingly illustrated many of the similarities and differences between humans and apes in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. By the time Darwin published his own book on the subject, Descent of Man, it was already a well-known interpretation of his theory— and the interpretation which made the theory highly controversial. Even many of Darwin's original supporters (such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell) balked at the idea that human beings could have evolved their apparently boundless mental capacities and moral sensibilities through natural selection.

Since the time of Carolus Linnaeus, the great apes were considered the closest relatives of human beings, based on morphological similarity. In the 19th century, it was speculated that their closest living relatives were chimpanzees and gorillas, and based on the natural range of these creatures, it was surmised humans share a common ancestor with African apes and that fossils of these ancestors would ultimately be found in Africa.

Shmuel Eisenstadt

“The Axial Age of Karl Jaspers:

Way to Wisdom”

European Journal of Sociology, 1982

German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term the axial age to describe the period from 800 BC to 200 BC, during which, according to Jaspers, similarly revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India and the Occident. The period is also sometimes referred to as the axis age.

Jaspers, in his The Origin and Goal of History, identified a number of key axial age thinkers as having had a profound influence on future philosophy and religion, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged. Jaspers saw in these developments in religion and philosophy a striking parallel without any obvious direct transmission of ideas from one region to the other, having found no recorded proof of any extensive inter-communication between Ancient Greece, the Middle East, India and China. Jaspers held up this age as unique, and one to which the rest of the history of human thought might be compared. Jaspers' approach to the culture of the middle of the first millennium BC has been adopted by other scholars and academics, and has become a point of discussion.

Jaspers argued that during the axial age "the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently... And these are the foundations upon which humanity still subsists today". These foundations were laid by individual thinkers within a framework of a changing social environment.

Jaspers' axial shifts included the rise of Platonism, which would later become a major influence on the Western world through both Christian and secular thought throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Buddhism, another of the world's most influential philosophies, was founded by Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha, who lived during this period. In China, Confucianism arose during this era, where it remains a profound influence on social and religious life. Zoroastrianism, another of Jaspers' examples, is crucial to the development of monotheism. Jaspers also included the authors of the Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Isaiah, and Jeremiah as axial figures. Jaspers held Socrates, Confucius and Siddhartha Gautama in especially high regard, describing them as exemplary human beings, or as a "paradigmatic personality".

Jaspers described the axial age as "an interregnum between two ages of great empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness". Jaspers was particularly interested in the similarities in circumstance and thought of the Age's figures. These similarities included an engagement in the quest for human meaning and the rise of a new elite class of religious leaders and thinkers in China, India and the Occident. The three regions all gave birth to, and then institutionalized, a tradition of traveling scholars, who roamed from city to city to exchange ideas. These scholars were largely from extant religious traditions; in China, Confucianism and Taoism; in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism; in the Occident, the religion of Zoroaster; in Canaan, Judaism; and in Greece, sophism and other classical philosophy.

Jaspers argues that these characteristics appeared under the same sociological circumstances: China, India and the Occident each comprised multiple small states engaged in internal and external struggles.

German sociologist Max Weber played an important role in Jaspers' thinking. He provided a background for the importance of the period.

Religious historian Karen Armstrong explored the period and argued that the Enlightenment was a "Second Axial Age", including thinkers such as Isaac Newton, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and that religion today needs to return to the transformative Axial insights. In contrast, it has been suggested that the modern era is a new axial age, wherein traditional relationships between religion, secularity and traditional thought are changing.

Burke, P "The European Renaissance"

“Some Remarks on the Question of the Originality of the Renaissance”

Journal of the History of Ideas

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th through the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. It encompassed a revival of learning based on classical sources, the development of linear perspective in painting, and educational reform. The Renaissance saw developments in most intellectual pursuits, but is perhaps best known for its artistic aspect and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who have inspired the term "Renaissance men".

The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and there has always been debate among historians as to the usefulness of the Renaissance as a term and as a historical age. Some have called into question whether the Renaissance really was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for the classical age. While nineteenth-century historians were keen to emphasize that the Renaissance represented a clear "break" from medieval thought and practice, some modern historians have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras. Indeed, it is now usually considered incorrect to classify any historical period as "better" or "worse", leading some to call for an end to the use of the term, which they see as a product of presentism. The word Renaissance has also been used to describe other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Twelfth-century Renaissance.

Humanism was not a philosophy per se, but rather a method of learning. In contrast to the medieval scholastic mode, which focused on resolving contradictions between authors, humanists would study ancient texts in the original, and appraise them through a combination of reasoning and empirical evidence. Humanist education was based on the study of poetry, grammar, ethics and rhetoric. Above all, humanists asserted "the genius of man... the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind."

Humanist scholars shaped the intellectual landscape throughout the early modern period. Political philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More revived the ideas of Greek and Roman thinkers, and applied them in critiques of contemporary government. Theologians, notably Erasmus and Martin Luther, challenged the Aristotelian status quo, introducing radical new ideas of justification and faith.

One of the distinguishing features of Renaissance art was its development of highly realistic linear perspective. The development of perspective was part of a wider trend towards realism in the arts. To that end, painters also developed other techniques, studying light, shadow, and, famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, human anatomy. Underlying these changes in artistic method was a renewed desire to depict the beauty of nature, and to unravel the axioms of aesthetics, with the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael representing artistic pinnacles that were to be much imitated by other artists.

Concurrently, in the Netherlands, a particularly vibrant artistic culture developed, the work of Hugo van der Goes and Jan van Eyck having particular influence on the development of painting in Italy, both technically with the introduction of oil paint and canvas, and stylistically in terms of naturalism in representation.

The upheavals occurring in the arts and humanities were mirrored by a dynamic period of change in the sciences. Some have seen this flurry of activity as a "scientific revolution," heralding the beginning of the modern age. Others have seen it merely as an acceleration of a continuous process stretching from the ancient world to the present day. Regardless, there is general agreement that the Renaissance saw significant changes in the way the universe was viewed and the methods with which philosophers sought to explain natural phenomena.

Science and art were very much intermingled in the early Renaissance, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci making observational drawings of anatomy and nature. Yet the most significant development of the era was not a specific discovery, but rather a process for discovery, the scientific method. This revolutionary new way of learning about the world focused on empirical evidence, the importance of mathematics, and discarding the Aristotelian "final cause" in favor of a mechanical philosophy. Early and influential proponents of these ideas included Copernicus and Galileo.

The new scientific method led to great contributions in the fields of astronomy, physics, biology, and anatomy. A new confidence was placed in the role of dissection, observation, and a mechanistic view of anatomy.

Sitchin, Zecharia

“Age of Enlightenment”

"Journeys to the past", 2004

The Age of Enlightenment was an eighteenth century movement in philosophy. It is an age of optimism, tempered by the realistic recognition of the sad state of the human condition and the need for major reforms. Some classifications of this period also include 17th century philosophy, which is typically known as the Age of Reason.

The term can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated reason as the primary basis of authority. Developing in France, Britain and Germany, the Enlightenment influenced most of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia. The era is marked by such political changes as governmental consolidation, nation creation, greater rights for common people, and a decline in the influence of authoritarian institutions such as the nobility and Church.

After the revolution of knowledge commenced by Sir Isaac Newton and in a climate of increasing disaffection with repressive rule, Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, and carried into the governmental sphere, in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, Poland's Constitution of May 3, 1791, Russia's 1825 Decembrist Revolt, the Latin American independence movement, and the Greek national independence movement. In addition, Enlightenment ideals were influential in the Balkan independence movements against the Ottoman Empire, and many historians and philosophers credit the Enlightenment with the later rise of classical liberalism, socialism, democracy, and modern capitalism.

The Age of Enlightenment receives modern attention as a central model for many movements in the modern period. Prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State. The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

The continent of Europe had been ravaged by religious wars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. When political stability had been restored, notably after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom. Instead, the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge." The goal of a philosophy reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson. The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other natural philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment. There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions.

The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism, perhaps because of its conjunction with increased social acceptance of Jews in some western European states, especially those who were not orthodox or who converted to the officially sanctioned version of Christianity. Antisemitism, however, continued to remain a visible phenomenon throughout much of Europe during the Enlightenment, and a number of major Enlightenment figures were noted antisemites. The period is known as Haskalah in Jewish historiography, and the term carries the same connotations of "enlightenment" in Hebrew.

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism came to see itself as a period of rationality which overturned established traditions, analogously to the Encyclopaediasts and other Enlightenment philosophers. A variety of 20th century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and reductionism were seen as Enlightenment virtues. The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance.

This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point when Europe broke through what historian Peter Gay calls "the sacred circle," whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures - prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general. Philosophers are often understood as arguing that the Age of Reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction.

Ferguson, Wallace K.

“Romanticism”

(1962), Europe in Transition

Romanticismis a complex, self-contradictory artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.

The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity in untamed nature and its qualities that are "picturesque", both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom, as well as arguing for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.

Romanticism is closely tied to the idea of the "Romantic." Note the capital 'R' differs from "romantic" meaning "someone involved in romance," although the words have the same root. Our modern sense of a romantic character is sometimes based Byronic or Romantic ideals. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar and distant in modes more authentic than chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

The ideologies and events of the French Revolution, rooted in Romanticism, affected the direction it was to take, and the confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas.

In a general sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the twentieth century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. Some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment— a Counter-Enlightenment— and still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of neither subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."

Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.

Roux, Jean-Paul

“Europeans in Medieval China”

National Geographic Society, 1999

Numerous Europeans are known to have been in Medieval China during the second half of the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century (from 1246 to around 1350), at a time when the Mongol Empire ruled over a large part of Eurasia and connected Europe with their Chinese dominion of the Yuan Dynasty. Initially, Europeans in the east were captives made by the Mongols in Europe. They were essentially located in eastern Central Asia, as far as the Mongol capital of Karakorum. As contacts however, European missionaries and merchants started to travel far and wide in the Mongol realm. It is thought that thousands of them lived in medieval China under Mongol rule.

Before that time, instances of Europeans going to China or of Chinese going to Europe are virtually unknown. The closest cases are those of the Chinese general Ban Chao's exploration of the West in the 1st century CE and his dispatch of one of his officers Gan Ying to Rome, instances of Roman embassies to China in the 3-4th century, and the European invasions of the Huns under Attila in the 5th century.

In 1253, the Franciscan monk Guillaume de Rubrouck reported numerous Europeans in Central Asia. He described German prisoners who had been enslaved in iron mines. In Karakorum, the Mongol capital, he met with a Parisian, Guillaume de Buchier, who used to have shop near the Pont-Neuf, and a woman named Pâquette, from the French city of Metz, both of them having been captured in Hungary during the Mongol invasions there. Hungarians, Russians are also mentioned.

The Polo brothers first arrived in China in 1261, and are the first known merchants to have visited China. Marco Polo is the best known of the European merchants who lived and worked in Mongol China. The Florentine Balducci Pegolotti compiled a guide about trade in China, based on the accounts of several merchants who were already knowledgeable of the country. Another merchant, Petro de Lucalongo is known to have accompanied the monk John of Montecorvino to Khanbaliq in 1305. A Lombardian chirurgian is known to have reached the city in 1303, as well as a few others.

In Zaytun, the first harbor of China, there was a small Genoese colony, mentioned in 1326. The most famous Italian resident of the city was Andolo de Savignone, who was sent to the West by the Khan in 1336 in an embassy to request “100 horses and other treasures”. Following Savignone’s embassy, an ambassador was dispatched to China with one superb horse, which was later the object of Chinese poems and paintings.

Venetians also were present in China. John of Montecorvino had one of them brought a letter to the west in 1305. In 1339 a Venetian named Giovanni Loredano is recorded to have returned to Venice from China. A tombstone was discovered in Yangzhou in the name of Catherine de Villioni, daughter of Dominici, where she died in 1342.

Giovanni da Pian del Carpine was the first Christian monk to reach as far as Karakorum in 1246. Catholic missionaries soon established a considerable presence in China, due to the high religious tolerance of the Mongols. John of Montecorvino converted to Catholicism the ruler Korguz before his assassination. He translated the New Testament in the Mongol tongue, and converted 6,000 people (probably Turks and Mongols rather than Chinese). He was joined by three bishops and ordained archbishop of Peking by Pope Clement V in 1311.

In 1370, following the ousting of the Mongols from China, and the establishment of the Chinese Ming dynasty, a new mission was sent by the Pope to China formed by the Parisian theologian Guillaume du Pré as the new archbishop and 50 Franciscans. This mission however disappeared without news, apparently eliminated.

Cayley, John & Ming Wilson

“Europe Studies China”

The History of European Sinology, London, 1995

Sinologyis the study of China and things related to China, by non-Chinese or Chinese living outside China. Sino- is derived from Latin sinae – ‘the Chinese’, the origin of which is debatable. In the context of area studies, sinology is usually known as Chinese Studies.

In the Asian Sinosphere, the studies of China-related subjects began early. In Japan, sinology was known as shinagaku ("China Studies") or kangaku ("Han Studies"). In China, the studies of China-related subjects are known as guoxue ("National Studies"), and sinology is translated as hanxue.

In the West, some would date the origins of sinology as far back as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta in the 13th and 14th century, but the systematic study of China began in the 16th century, when missionaries, notably Matteo Ricci, introduced Christianity to China. The first Sinologist of Eastern Europe was Nicolae Milescu (1636-1708). Early sinological research often concentrated on the compatibility of Christianity with Chinese culture.

During the Age of Enlightenment, sinologists started to introduce Chinese philosophy, ethics, legal system, and aesthetics into the West. Though often unscientific and incomplete, their works inspired the development of Chinoiserie and a series of debates comparing Chinese and Western cultures. At that time, sinologists often described China as an enlightened kingdom, comparing it to Europe, which had just emerged from the Dark Ages. Among those European literati interested in China was Voltaire, who wrote the play L'orphelin de la Chine inspired by the Orphan of Zhao, and Leibniz who penned his famous News from China.

In 1732 a missionary priest from the kingdom of Naples, Matteo Ripa, created in Naples the first Sinology School of the European Continent: the "Chinese Institute", the first nucleus of what would become today's Naples Eastern University. The Jesuit Matteo Ripa had worked as a painter and copper-engraver at the Manchu court of the emperor Kangxi between 1711 and 1723. In 1732 he returned to Naples from China with four young Chinese Christians, all teachers of their native language and formed the Institute sanctioned by Pope Clement XII to teach Chinese to missionaries and thus advance the propagation of Christianity in China.

In 1814, a chair of Chinese and Manchu was founded at Collège de France. Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, who taught himself Chinese, filled the position, becoming the first Chinese professor in Europe. By that the first Russian Sinologist, Nikita Bichurin, had been living in Beijing for ten years. Abel-Rémusat's counterparts in England and Germany were Samuel Kidd (1797–1843) and Wilhelm Schott (1807-1889) respectively, though the first important secular sinologists in these two countries were James Legge and Hans von der Gabelentz. Secular scholars gradually came to outnumber missionaries, and in the 20th century sinology slowly gained a substantial presence in Western universities. In modern history, sinology has seen its influence in politics, due to its role in think tanks.

Colta F. Ives

“The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974

Japonism, the original French term, which is also used in English, is a term for the influence of the arts of Japan on those of the West. The word was first used by Jules Claretie in his book L'Art Francais en 1872 published in that year. Works arising from the direct transfer of principles of Japanese art on Western, especially by French artists, are called japonesque.

From the 1860s, Japanese wood-block prints became a source of inspiration for many European impressionist painters in France and the rest of the West, and eventually for Art Nouveau and Cubism. Artists were especially affected by the lack of perspective and shadow, the flat areas of strong colour, the compositional freedom in placing the subject off-centre, with mostly low diagonal axes to the background.

During the Kaei era (1848 – 1854), foreign merchant ships began to come to Japan. Following the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japan ended a long period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West, including photography and printing techniques; in turn, many Japanese ukiyo-e prints and ceramics, followed in time by Japanese textiles, bronzes and cloisonné enamels and other arts came to Europe and America and soon gained popularity.

Japonism started with the frenzy to collect Japanese art, particularly print art (ukiyo-e), of which the first samples were to be seen in Paris. In 1860 and 1861 reproductions (in black and white) of ukiyo-e were published in books on Japan. Baudelaire wrote in a letter in 1861: "Quite a while ago I received a packet of japonneries. I've split them up among my friends..", and the following year La Porte Chinoise, a shop selling various Japanese goods including prints, opened in the rue de Rivoli, the most fashionable shopping street in Paris.

At first most of the prints reaching the West were by contemporary Japanese artists of the 1860s and 1870s, and it took some time for Western taste to access and appreciate the greater masters of older generations.

At the same time, many American intellectuals maintained that Edo prints were a vulgar art form, unique to the period and distinct from the refined, religious, national heritage of Japan known as Yamato-e.

French collectors, writers, and art critics undertook many voyages to Japan in the 1870s and 1880s, leading to the publication of articles about Japanese aesthetics and the increased distribution of Edo era prints in Europe, especially in France. Among them, the liberal economist Henri Cernuschi the critic Theodore Duret (both in 1871 – 1872), and the British collector William Anderson, who lived for some years in Edo and taught medicine. (Anderson's collection has been acquired by the British Museum.) The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878 presented many pieces of Japanese art.

Curiously, while Japanese art was becoming popular in Europe, at the same time, the bunmeikaika ("Westernization") led to a loss in prestige for the prints in Japan. Artists who were influenced by Japanese art include Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Renoir, Monet, van Gogh, and Paul Gaugin. Some artists even moved to Japan because of their fascination with Japanese art.

In terms of music, one can say that Giacomo Puccini used Japonism in Madama Butterfly, and later in Turandot.

There were many characteristics of Japanese art that influenced these artists. In the Japonisme stage, they were more interested in the asymmetry and irregularity of Japanese art. Japanese art consisted of centered arrangements with no perspective, light with no shadows and vibrant colors on plane surfaces. These elements were in direct contrast to Roman-Greco art and were embraced by 19th century artists, who believed they freed the Western artistic mentality from academic conventions.

Ukiyo-e, with their curved lines, patterned surfaces and contrasting voids, and flatness of their picture-plane, also inspired Art Nouveau. Some line and curve patterns became graphic clichés that were later found in works of artists from all parts of the world. These forms and flat blocks of color were the precursors to abstract art in modernism.

Japonism also involved the adoption of Japanese elements or style across all the applied arts, from furniture, textiles, jewellery to graphic design.