This essay has been conceived from the desire to challenge the paradigm of core and periphery in the historiography of Western art: a long-embedded model that perpetuates the notion of early modern western European art as the sole locus of artistic innovation, at the expense of east-central European and American peripheries. In order to provide this article with a workable scope, the role of a benchmark by which to test the validity of the author’s claims has been assigned to the analysis of early modern Polish-Lithuanian artistic production and consumption as part of the greater network of trade and cultural exchange operating in the new globalizing world of early modernity. Through such discussion, this essay attempts to confront prevailing orthodoxies about artistic peripheries, and spark a debate about reasons for the exclusion of artistic peripheries from the hegemonic historiographies of art.