Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/147

 time to the two-fold influence of Turkish art from the east and the Western Renaissance.

Turkish influence was first perceptible in the opening years of the 17th century and exclusively in Moldavia. Only an architect who had lived for many years in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire could have introduced those innovations which are to be found in all churches of the northern principality up to the latter part of the century. This new influence was chiefly noticeable in ornamentation: large flowers and stars, quadrates of geometrical shape were added to the groins of the vaults. Tomb-stones appeared enriched by similar ornaments. In Wallachia, the Orient, a more extended Orient has given to the architecture of the province the floreated and foliated door and window frames (where they do not assume the old Gothic lines of Moldavia), the carved profusion of the burial stones and, towards 1700, figures of stucco on the outer walls of churches or in the interior decoration of palaces, representing grapes, flowers, Persian lamps and Asiatic birds.

But the stronger influence is of local peasant inspiration. It corresponds to the designs of the carpets and rugs, of the skirts and other garments, of many objects used in the villages. The church is literally covered with a cloak of vividly hued figures. Prophets of Israel, the tree of Jesse and the genealogy of the Virgin, the Sybils and Sapients of ancient Greece, the joys of Paradise and the torments of Hell, figures representing the hereditary enemies of the peasant, sinners of all grades down to the man who comes too late to church, not omitting the usurer and the grasping merchant, all these form the interesting gallery of folklore in South-Eastern Europe, and were duly made to play their part in the church-decoration.

In this manner Byzantine art, which had a stronger appeal to the more cultivated classes, descends to the sentiments and the tastes of the humble peasant. It also affords striking proof of the truly democratic soul of the