BYZANTINE ART 19 r
Genesis mosaics which decorate the narthex of St. Mark's
at Venice we find landscape, architectural features, and an
equally novel taste for the picturesque. These characteristic
tendencies mark the beginning of a transformation in
Byzantine art. Moreover the well-known intellectual move-
ment in Constantinople of the fourteenth century brought
about a revival of the classical tradition and a return to the
ideas and models of Greek antiquity. These facts might lead
us to expect, and do indeed explain, the new aspect which
Byzantine art was to assume in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries and that last brilliant renaissance in which it found
its expression.
When fifty years ago mosaics dating from the beginning
of the fourteenth century were discovered in the mosque of
Kahrieh Djami at Constantinople, they revealed an art so
different from that of the Byzantine monuments which were
then known that they gave rise to much perplexity. They
were at first taken for Italian work; it was proposed to credit
them to some pupil of Giotto, who about this time was
designing the frescoes of the chapel of the Arena at Padua in
much the same style. Discoveries made in the East during
the last thirty years have, however, demonstrated the falsity
of this hypothesis and proved that the Kahrieh mosaics were
by no means a solitary creation but one of a great series of
works scattered over the whole of the Christian East. This
powerful artistic movement can be traced in the frescoes
which decorate the churches of Mistra in the Morea, as well
as in the churches of Macedonia and Serbia: it appears in
the churches of Roumania as at Curtea de Arges and in the
Russian churches at Novgorod; it is even visible in the
mosaics of the baptistery of St. Mark's at Venice. Of the Mt.
Athos paintings, while the earliest date from the fourteenth
century, those of the sixteenth show the last flowering of this
great artistic revival. In all these closely allied works the
art is the same; everywhere we find the same love of life, of
movement, and the picturesque, together with a passion for
the dramatic, the tender, and the pathetic. It was a realistic
art, in which a masterly power of composition was combined
with a wonderful sense of colour, and thus in the history of
Byzantine art it appears as both original and creative.