Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/141



THE BYZANTINE IN ROUMANIAN AND THE ROUMANIAN IN BYZANTINE ART

That an art exclusive to a single country or representing the qualities of a single people exists is decidedly to be denied. An unbiassed examination of the so-called Byzantine art tends to prove this.

As art, as culture, Byzantium is an abstract conception which can be transferred by circumstance to other countries, to serve other races. The classical sense of it contains a synthesis of the Oriental with Greek and Roman elements which came to be blended into an altogether novel, harmonious and characteristic type. But this synthesis, once, achieved, was capable of modification and it suffices to show that other nations than the Greeks and Slavs adopted the Byzantine formula to transform it into yet richer compositions, to prove this. The factors responsible for producing this change, at once logical and comprehensible, were: the nature of the new soil to which the alien form was transplanted and the nationality, the state of civilisation and the lives of the new workers and artists. In the awakening and development of Roumanian art this is clearly visible.

The earliest extant structure of brick and stone is to be found at Argeș: the celebrated church of the princes, with its beautiful 13th century frescoes in the manner of the mosaics of the Kahrieh Djamissi or the pictures of the Mistra, which represented a revolutionary period in the art typical to the Byzantine countries. The style is