The Russian School of Painting
ditions as far as the outward demands of iconography were concerned, such as: the choice of subject matter, the postures, the grouping and, to some extent, the vestures. Yet the Church was indifferent to the fact that the very type of the saints, under the influence of German engravings, began to assume a sluggish character, and that the style of the icons became broken, flabby, as remote as possible from the stern grandeur of the Byzantine manner. About the age of Peter, and for some time after, this current became even stronger; and in the middle of the eighteenth century it degenerated into a bizarre mixture of the Byzantine pattern with the wild eccentricities of the German rococo. Academicism wiped out the last traces of Byzantinism from Russian iconography, and in the first half of the nineteenth century we find no traces of it. Only in the popular peasant arts and crafts has the ancient ecclesisatic art survived to this very day.
It is customary to begin the history of the Russian School of Painting of the Western type with two artists sent abroad by Peter for the purpose of study. This is not quite accurate, for neither of these artists had a decisive influence on the subsequent development of Russian art. Of far greater importance for the Russian School were the numerous foreign masters summoned to the country from foreign parts. In the choice of these,
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