Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/106

 82 very rightly, the existence of certain types quite absent from the Byzantine iconography, such as pictures of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin (Pokrov), of St. Nicholas, called the Warrior, of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, St. Boris and St. Gleb; also a special interpretation of certain mysteries or religious subjects, and the softened expression of some other types. And this, most assuredly, is something. In form, too, these pictures differ from their Eastern models, but in the sense in which a bad copy differs from the original. Some Russian critics have endeavoured to discover, in their much simpler drawing, a tendency to a closer approach to Nature. But it strikes me as being only a lack of knowledge. There is no reason why nature should be interpreted clumsily, after the manner of schoolboys who scribble on their copybooks. The same process of simplification, even to the giving up of the gold backgrounds, probably necessitated by the poverty of the monasteries, rules manuscript decoration down to the end of the thirteenth century. But in the fourteenth a much more visible change takes place, and carries the Russian school, in this particular, far from the Byzantine tradition and its hieratic forms. We see a sudden introduction of the infinite forms of human and animal life, together with a profusion of designs recalling the scrolls and interlacing patterns carved on the wood of ancient Scandinavian churches, or, yet farther back, on the belt-plates and chiselled clasps of the Merovingian epoch, and sometimes traceable to Iranian types, by no means foreign to the Romanesque and Byzantine styles of early ages. This is like a return to the original sources, for such fantastic representations of men, animals, birds, and insects were known in Herodotus' time, among the peoples then dwelling on Russian soil. But even as regards the Iranian inspiration, it would seem as though this renaissance had come through the West, for the manuscript literature of Novgorod, in which it was more specially exemplified, and which almost entirely escaped the Tartar influence, underwent a very strong current of European influences, which travelled by way of Riga and the Hanseatic towns.

In the fifteenth century these abnormal forms of fancy made way for combinations of single lines, the symmetrical interlacements of which terminated in long cusped foliage. Then another current, to which no Oriental or Asiatic origin can be assigned, swept over the national art; and finally, in the fifteenth century, there was a backward eddy. Under the pressure, probably, of religious feeling, of the spirit of orthodoxy, alarmed by the struggle between the Papacy and the Reformation, the Byzantine tradition got the upper hand again, linked this time with a certain infusion of German and