Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/94

, the splendour, variety, richness and gorgeous display is a particular characteristic of Mesopotamian, as well as Syrian and Egyptian artistic civilisation.

A historical synthesis was created in these countries, to which each of the nations representing eastern civilisation had contributed something purely its own. Byzantium, then newly-created (comparable with the transformation, in our own times, by Mustapha Kemal of the erstwhile historical village of Angora into the capital of an aspiring and vigorous nation) was not able to maintain competition with this accumulation of treasures, forming a perfect artistic unity: the art wichwhich [sic] followed in the train of Constantine was not sufficient to vanquish this overwhelming rivalry. As the new Roman Empire was and remained open to all forms of borrowed art, so it took this, the most costly of all, as it would have taken any other. And by this adoption it felt no humiliation, any more than there was humiliation to be found in the use of the Greek tongue for an unchanging church, in the use of the political form of government, of law, of literature. Everything was tribute to the Empire, everything formed a part of its rights and patrimony, once acquired by conquest. If the Latin competitors could have been vanquished by a series of victories, their French or Italian language, their mediaeval thought, and their art too would have been a portion of the war-prizes of Byzantium.

An oriental ornamentation, an exclusively oriental ornamentation, in a style which began 4.000 years before, as witness the palaces and cemeteries of Ur, a dome applied to solid Roman buildings of cheap brick, covered only by costly polychromatic marbles, and all expressed in the ancient Hellenic values of proportion, this is, compressed into a simple formula and without the mouthing of 90