Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/155

 Rh had become necessary to redecorate the rooms of the Grand Duke's ruined palace. In every country and at every period, mural paintings have been a faithful expression of the feeling of the century producing them. In Russia, during the sixteenth century, no difference existed, in this respect, between secular and religious edifices. In every building, the style and subjects of the decoration were almost identical, and chiefly drawn from Scripture or from ecclesiastical tradition. Sylvester seems to have been appointed to overlook the work of the artists at the Kremlin. The paintings then executed were till the end of the seventeenth century, and Monsieur Zabiéline ('Private Life of the Tsars,' p. 149) has been able to give us an exact account of them. The only conclusion at all flattering to the pope to be drawn therefrom is his possession of certain courtly aptitudes already brought into relief in the Domostroï. Whether as a repentant sinner or—and this more especially—as a triumphant conqueror, as Joshua entering a vanquished city or Solomon pouring forth a flood of beneficent wisdom, Ivan's is the figure perpetually limned in the huge apotheosis that typified and idealized all the great facts and glories of his reign. And though the young Sovereign may have found some means to edification in these pictures, he must have discovered still more, and more persuasive, temptations to pride, while the scenes of carnage connected with the triumphs of the Biblical conqueror, the 'cutting off of every living soul' represented on the broken walls of these ravaged Jerichoes, were not calculated to soften the inherent ferocity of his instincts.

Sylvester's apologists have further credited him with a somewhat novel piece of daring, to which the work of the unknown artists he is said to have inspired bears witness. The figure of a woman 'with her sleeves dropped as if she was dancing' close beside the hieratic presentment of the Christ, gave rise to scandal and to an ecclesiastical prosecution. But Macarius himself appeared as the champion of art, and defended the artist's right thus to symbolize debauchery amidst the other vices confounded and put to shame by the word of the Divine Master. The introduction of a certain flow of innovation into the plastic art of Russia unquestionably dates from this epoch, and this was due to a current of foreign influences with which Sylvester certainly had nothing to do. In two ikons simultaneously painted by Pskovian artists for the Church of the Annunciation, Rovinski has recognised an undoubted imitation of Cimabue and Perugino.

But the reforming period of Ivan's reign only began with the convocation of an assembly of which the date and precise nature cannot, so far, be clearly settled, but which certainly did