Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/109

 Rh and Kondakov, two learned historians of art, felt, while they were travelling through the province of Vladimir, as though they were in one of the Lombard provinces of Italy! This is a pious illusion. In Russia nature and history alike have set their faces against any rapid progress in this path. They have denied the artist his rough materials, and assigned him, as the chief well-spring of his inspiration, Byzantium, with her dried-up or stagnant waters. The Russian genius is rooted in patience, and this the apologists of the national art seem to forget. At the period now under consideration Russian art is beginning to drink at other springs; the living stream will soon flow fast, no doubt, but the rise of the river is not yet, and we are at the very beginning of things.

In the bosom of the Orthodox Church, too, within which, until a recent epoch, every form of intellectual activity has been circumscribed, the national art has felt the action of the twofold current, ascetic and sensualist. A dark medley of monkish cells, blossoming out into a profligate luxuriance of form—that is the Church of the Blessed Basil, and the true image of the Russian spirit of the sixteenth century.

Yet it was in this ecclesiastical and specially monastic sphere that feelings and ideas destined to cast a leaven of revival into the stagnation of a people on which age was laying a cold hand, even in the heyday of its youth, first sprang to life.

The Russia of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a reform of its own. Isolated though the country was, and closed against any action from foreign sources, it could not remain absolutely unaffected; and, besides, it was itself, though in a different way and in a much more limited degree, passing through certain revolutionary phases, and consequently undergoing a certain process of upheaval. A renovating movement, either spontaneously developed in the national mind or induced by some foreign influence, began to show itself as early as in the fourteenth century, chiefly in the province of Novgorod, the cradle and the last refuge of the traditions of freedom. The original date of this movement may be assigned to the year 1376. At that period three heretics, founders of the sect of the strigolniki, or cloth-shearers (one of the leaders thus put to death belonged to this trade), were cast from the summit of the bridge in that republican city. This sect repudiated all idea of an ecclesiastical hierarchy, as being based on simony. The Church, whose supremacy extended at Novgorod to the sphere of economic interests, soon put down the revolt; but even in the second half of the fifteenth century the strigolniki