In art too a change was to be observed. Architecture began to favour the palace of the emperor, which ascended to the heights of the Magnaura. The lines of religious edifices were no more to be modified, but the ornamental was to change. Occidental influences were to be traced in painting. The icon-style was no longer the same in the celebrated monastery of St. Duke, and similar influences were found in remote parts of the Macedonian districts during the nth and 12th centuries. So too, in the 14th century, the mosaics of the Kahrie Djamissi in Constantinople, the pictures of Mistra, and the corresponding painting in the Wallachian Argeș, present expressive figures, overlaid with an all-pervading realism.
A discussion was commenced on the origins of this change which is also to be found in Italian art, Siena, in common with Byzantium, having the same methode of presenting the Madonna and the Saints. Which of either is the teacher and which the pupil? The solution is to be found in the fact that the majority of the Italian merchants resided for a time in Constantinople and various oriental cities, and that analogous political and social forms existed for more than three centuries in the east.
And now, at least, what is the ultimate limit of this Byzantine art?
We speak of Serbian or Bulgarian art, in the sense of national products. This is erroneous. All art produced within the theoretical boundaries of the Empire, as far West as the Adriatic and East to the Danube, is Byzantine. Nothwithstanding occidental elements to be traced in such Serbian monasteries as Studenitza, with its carved frescoes after Italo-Dalmatian models, the Byzantine is ubiquitous: the money and the patronage alone belongs to the new States.
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