French art historian Émile Mâle (1862-1954) published his trilogy on medieval art between 1898 and 1922, before extending his reflections a decade later to religious art after the Council of Trent. This essay explores how Mâle creates a logical narrative linking the periods of the medieval trilogy L’Art religieux en France (translated into English as Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century, Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century and Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages: A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources) by means of a common thread: the relations between the East and the West as they appear in the artworks and, more precisely, the role of the East (i.e., the Near East in the broad sense) in ‘inseminating’ the West during each period of artistic change. The establishment of such a connection goes beyond questions of the influence and transfer of forms and motifs; it expresses the inner workings of Mâle’s thought, which acts like a narrative process in his writing. Such a dialectics is to be resituated within a learned historicist imaginary proper to Mâle’s own times and which thus led him to perceive, over the long period of ancient history, the movements of the civilisations that gave rise to France as a nation.