Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/107

 Rh taste, to be recognised in the long, deeply-serrated leaf—that of a sort of wild fig-tree—which spreads or curls in its cold black tints in the midst of the warm Oriental colouring.

All this is thoroughly and incontestably Russian, but is it an artistic expression adequate to the genius of the nation? Is it, in other words, capable of stirring the admiration and the imitative faculties of other nations, as did the Greek and even the French and Italian art of certain periods? Did it even constitute a private fund susceptible of any independent development? If the Russian borrowers, when they turned to foreign models, had added anything to them beyond failures in executive skill—more or less successful alterations, and combinations the results of which were unsuccessful as a rule; if they had introduced anything of their own—the fauna and flora of their own country, any reflection of their own sky; if, amidst their perpetual assimilation of exotic types, they had known how to enter into direct communion with Nature, that first condition and starting-point of any original art, we might have answered, Yes! But all they did was to copy, to fit in, to disfigure. Look at the carved balcony of an isba. There you will see, so coarsely reproduced as to be almost, though not wholly, unrecognisable, faces of lions and panthers, and representations of fig-trees and palm-trees, invariably. We have to come down to the most recent exemplifications of an art that is still feeling its way, the timid effort of some ultra-modern draughtsman, before we discover, under the pencil or brush, the outline of a fir-tree, the white fur of any Northern creature.

Under what conditions, after what plan, by whose hands, these thirteenth and fourteenth century churches, the style of which is now thought worthy of praise, were built, we cannot tell. As to the buildings, secular and religious, of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which attract the eye for the same reason—the Church of the Assumption at Moscow, the doorway of St. Nicholas at Mojaïsk, the famous 'palace of the facets' (Granovitaïa palata)—we have an historical certainty: Italian artists have left their mark upon them. Until quite lately the disconcerting and bewildering Church of the Blessed St. Basil (Vassili Blajennoï), built between 1553 and 1559 which Karamzine calls 'a masterpiece of Gothic architecture,' Father Martynov 'an evocation of the Erectheion of the Athenian Acropolis,' Theophile Gauthier 'a huge crouching dragon,' Kugler 'an enormous heap of mushrooms,' and Custine 'a jam-pot,' has also been taken to be of Italian workmanship. This mistake has now been recognised. The architects' accounts have been unearthed, and have revealed two Russian names, Barma and Postnikov. We must render