Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/96

 so that in remote corners of the provinces the technical skill of fashioning them was never lost. No reproduction of the human figure was permitted, and it was perhaps in this moment that sculpture itself, hitherto allowed, was expressly prohibited. The classical models, never forgotten or omitted from the ornamental, as is shown by the miniature still extant, were still more cherished: a new form of ornamentation, of fruit and suchs of heroic episodes, as on the pagan sepulchres, of historical processions, and surely also of such abstract lines as in the Mohammedan temples, was introduced and maintained. The old usages returned at the moment when the worshippers of holy images gained the power, and very little of the official art, cultivated for some decades, remained. And this is all which was brought forth by such changes of mind. The great revolution represented by the school of Bardas, by the research of Photius and by the literary works of Psellos was not greatly felt in the development of an art which seems to have found in ornaments novelties merely of a secondary importance.

The great influence for the new type of architecture came only from the ever-increasing importance of monastic bodies. The spiritual needs of the members of a monastery were esentially different from those in a city where all ritual was to be celebrated within the walls of a great basilica. The body of the church itself, frequented at most by a few neighbouring peasants, had no reason for preserving exaggerated proportions: the choir became the most important part of the structure, where the brothers could assemble to sing; on this part the light had to be concentrated, and not on the pews above, or on the «ship» beneath. Later, an open porch, an exonarthex, was necessary for receiving the public, who were not commonly admitted to the interior. A mystic sentiment 92