Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/95

 rhetoric, Byzantine art. Successive new discoveries in Western Asia will merely tend to point the moral.

The second problem consists in the phases of the art. Such phases in the transmission of an art can equally be determined by archaeological or scientific discovery, or by the initiative of superior intelligence, no less than by practical usage and revolutions of thought.

But no great technical discovery took place in the millenium of Byzantine existence. It seems that the crowning of a basilica with a cupola had already been realised in Asia before the opening of the new Constantinopolitan era. The celebrated architects of Justinian failed in building the cupola of Hagia Sofia not because it was the first attempt—in which case it would not have been made with the costly materials necessary for an imperial basilica—but because the dimensions were so great as to bewilder them. No such catastrophe attended the efforts of an artist in the west, an unknown artist in the Île-de-France, to transmit the weight of the dome not to the outer walls, which could thus be carved in the most refine dand apparently dangerous manner, but to independent buttresses.

I have affirmed that genius was not to be found in those countries where everything was a mere matter of teaching, a traditional transmission, where no revolution could occur except in the struggle for power, the riots of the amphitheatre or the brawls of the street.

A new current of ideas, however, was introduced by iconoclasm, tending to purify the orthodoxy of all suspicion of idolatry in an epoch when the abstract creed of Islam was impressive to many minds. A complete change was enforced by the two epochs of triumph in this direction. The icons disappeared from the public life of the people, notwithstanding that in private life they were maintained, 91