Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/93

 borrowed models. Roman, Greek and Oriental art united to give that interesting blend: the Byzantine. And, because everything was subjected to the State, progress, under the aegis of the proud Eastern Empire, was possible.

This is surely so in the case of technique. From the Roman, Byzantium took, if only for a moment, the form of the basilica, with its three longitudinal divisions, with the apses of the judge, to which two others were adjoined, with lofty tribunes. Something, too, of the Greek sense of proportion was instinctively maintained, but for the most part these technical elements are of Oriental origin.

If an eminent researcher in matters of architectural technique is to be believed, this origin was mainly an Armenian one, It is true that Mr. Strzygowski, wholly reversing his doctrines, now sees in the wooden dwellings of the north, if not also in the tents of the nomad, the origin of all towns, and their builders to be the originators of the models which were later adopted by the nations building in marble, thus relegating these to the place of mere copyists. But Armenia, the ancient and the great, was never anything else but—after the tradition of Urartu—a refuge for the imperial Persian tradition, not so much a country aspiring to wider frontiers and a capital of its own, therefore unable to achieve either a period of definite crystallisation. From the moral point of view she was never able to virtualise the qualities of a strictly determined nation. The role which she played in the history of the Orient, in which she had so interesting a mission, was to collect the memories of the great eastern empires and to transmit them to the western, the Anatolian and the Byzantine.

The love of finely-worked detail, the necessity of invoking the aid of polychromy, the use of widely diverse materials to obtain strange and new effects by their 89