A Note on Russians & Byzantium.
However, future Russian peoples were not descended from the Scythians: the core of Russian nationality is Slavic, the name given to people who resided in the forests areas to the north. There were also a number of invading races like the Warings who assailed the Slavs from the north and the Turks who attacked them from the Middle East. The Slavs eventually threw in their lot with the Warings, or as they were become known the Varangians who may have had some lineage with the Angles, hence English. The Varangians mainly invaded from Scandinavia and the Baltic; and they even penetrated as far south as Constaninople where they laid siege to the city in 860. Judging from eyewitness accounts this invasion force of muscular, long-haired, belligerent Norsemen put the fear of God into the Byzantine people with one chronicler of the Siege, Photius, using the word Rus (Rhos), its first use in a Greek text. Eventually this mishmash of various races was to go under the name “Rus”, “the oldest designation for territory dubbed Russian.”[1] Turning to Byzantine art (above), this presents something of a problem in the context of Russian art history because there are usually three prevailing views about its significance to Russia. Firstly: there are those who ignore early Russian art altogether; then there are those who choose to view Russian art as a subset of Byzantine art; then there are those who say Byzantium’s influence upon Russian art was minimal on the grounds that the former had ceased to exist before the latter artistically reached its majority.[2] What doesn’t help is that no handbooks on Byzantine art, or treatises on art theory survive from the period which isn’t really surprising as the function of Byzantine art was largely religious. Secular portraits and decoration were completely different genres altogether. Though the early Church Fathers were opposed to art, it gradually gained approval after it had been incorporated into the Nicene canon after the Council of Constantinople in 843 A.D. Though art historians have found it difficult to pinpoint an “aesthetics” of Byzantine art, they have discerned that rather than follow a path of development from abstract to naturalistic rules, Byzantine art moved in spirals, e.g., from Hellenistic to medieval art and vice versa. As to the characteristics of Byzantine art, it is best described in the following way. Severity of line; lacking roundness and volume; floating free in spiritual space where prayer and adoration have completely abolished the distance the object and subject of contemplation. Turning to Russia, what Carcraft calls “Byzanto-Russian” art was the result of the diffusion of the Mediterrean style to the churches of Eastern Slavs, and especially the panel icons imported by East Slavs from Constantinople and other Byzantine centres. It would be left to the Russians to make up their mind how they should deal with Byzantine art, how they should use it to forge their own national style in painting. And this distinctive national style would become conspicuous after the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire, completed in 1435 resulting in the weakening of Byzantine art in its homeland. From the fifteenth- century onwards, Russia would enter a “Golden Age of Art” which meant Russia had a long time to wait until it entered this phase. This begs the question of why there was such a time-lag between Russia’s origins and the appearance of a truly, distinctive national style in the country.
[1] Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad, endnotes to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916, Penguin ed, 1978), 295. The novel and the extensive annotations are a good introduction to things Russian.
[2] James Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution, 39.
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