Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/104

 80 insoluble. Russia has been, in a most special sense, one of those laboratories in which currents of art, flowing from the most opposite points, have met and mingled, to produce an intermediate form between those of the Western and the Eastern worlds.

Every civilization, indeed, has been the fruit of some such fusion, and circumstance has served the artistic development of this particular country better than its intellectual progress. The isolation, in this matter, has been less complete. The first church-builders, and those most generally employed from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, were Greeks. But at a later period, heartily as the Westerners were hated or scorned, their skill was often used, and even in 1150 Andrew, grandson of Monomachus, sent for Lombard architects to build the Church of the Assumption at Vladimir, while his son George, who had married a Georgian Princess, employed Armenian workmen at Souzdal. The intervention of Persian workers elsewhere, at the same epoch, seems proved by the style of certain decorations, and from the fifteenth century onwards the appearance of Italian art, with Pietro Solario, the Milanese, Aristote Fioraventi, the Florentine, Mario, Alevisio, and many more, has become a matter of history.

How these elements combined, and in what proportions, is a question which cannot now, and probably never will be, precisely answered. In architecture Byzantium, though maintaining her supremacy, was forced to yield somewhat to the advancing wave, Mongol or Scandinavian, Romanesque or Turanian. And Byzantine art, itself composite, owing tribute to the Farthest East, to Persia, Asia Minor, and even Rome, rather led its Russian imitators back to the sources of its own inspiration. The most ancient of the religious edifices in Southern Russia possess a slimness of outline and elegance of proportion which differentiates them from the purely Byzantine form, or even the architectural type adopted at the same epoch in France and Italy and Germany. They seem to have been inspired by some other model, or partly, perhaps, by some original idea. Who can tell? When St. Louis sent an envoy to the Court of the Khan, he found a Russian architect there, as well as a French goldsmith!

During the thirteenth century the influence of Indo-Tartar art makes itself clearly felt. Curves which seem to have been borrowed from Thibetan monuments, rounded columns crowned with bulging capitals, appear upon the scene. The primitive plan of the churches, as regards its chief outlines, is not changed, but to the central dome, which has existed from the earliest times, others are added, raised up like towers, and crowned with bulbous roofs covered with metal, curiously