Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/105

 Rh worked, and often painted or gilt, which recall the Temple of Ellora. Within, the great curves of the Byzantine vaults are broken up into sharp angles. Presently corbelled pyramids are added to the cupolas. These, quite foreign to Byzantine taste, are exceedingly frequent in Hindu architecture. The military buildings of the period follow the same lines. The towers of the Kremlin, built in a square, their ramparts crowned with narrow merlons, are a deviation from the more ancient models.

But was it Asia that triumphed in all these changes? Is it to Asiatic influences that, as Viollet-le-Duc believes, the door of the fourteenth-century church at Rostov, owes its niches, with their centres formed by the arcs of a circle, and a sharp rectilinear top, and its wall-space so rich in decoration that the groundwork cannot be seen? Does not the Romanesque style delight in the multiplication of such ecclesiological details, as Father Martynax has proved? Was not Byzantium the connecting-link between Russia and Asia, just as the Slav countries of the south-west were the connecting-link between Europe and the Russian provinces that Jay nearest her? Hard by some instance of Russian foliage decoration, connected by Viollet-le-Duc with a Hindu design, Darcel has succeeded in detecting a Byzantine ornament that holds a place between the two types. But the transmission of ideas and forms may have followed other paths and other byways. A curious example of this is to be noticed in the case of a literary work. 'Bova, the King's Son' (Korolevitch Bova), a very popular Russian tale, is certainly of Hindu origin. It belongs to the cycle of Somadeva, the Kathá-sarit-sàgara, or 'Ocean of Tales.' And yet Bova is not one of Somadeva's heroes; he is the knight Beuves d'Antone, a hero of the Carlovingian period. India has thus travelled across Western Europe to reach Russia, and the Western inspiration has accidentally found its way into this other department of the national existence, isolated though it has been, and jealously guarded against external influences.

Some mention must also be made of other forms of art, though they were but slightly apparent in Russia at this time. At Souzdal, and more especially at Novgorod, iconography, influenced by one of the many Greco-Oriental schools existing in the twelfth century at Byzantium, in Italy, and in the Slav countries of the south-west, Servia and Bulgaria, reached a considerable development between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The specimens of the work of the latter town—that done at Souzdal has entirely disappeared—probably give us the exact measure of the originality attainable by the artists of the period. Observers have noticed, and