Church;
moreover, in Russia, as I before frequently remarked, chronology
is untrustworthy, inasmuch as comparatively modern works assume
and parody the style of the most ancient. The heads of Christ in
Russia, one of which has been just described, are, as already said,
more or less servile reproductions of Byzantine types. Still the
typical form is found under varying phases; the general tendency
in these replicas of anterior originals would appear to be towards
the mitigation of the asperities in the confirmed Byzantine formulas.
Thus the more recent heads of the Saviour in the churches of St.
Petersburg, Moscow, Troitza and Kief, assume a certain modern manner,
and occasionally wear a smooth, pretty and ornamental aspect. In
these variations on the prescriptive Eastern type, the hair usually
flows down upon the shoulders, as with the Greek and Russian Priests
in the present day. As to the beard, it is thick and full, or short
and scant, but the cheeks are left uncovered, and show an elongated
face and chin.

These Russian heads of the Saviour in softening down the severe and
aged type common to Byzantium, assume a physiognomy not sufficiently
intellectual for the Greatest of Teachers. These "images" in fact
inspire little reverence except with blind worshippers; they are
mostly wrought up and renovated, so as to fulfil the preconceived
conditions of sanctity: undefined generality, weakness, smoothness,
and blackness, are the common characteristics of these supposititious
heads of the Saviour. It will thus again be easily understood how
opposite has been the practice of the Eastern and Western Churches;
it is a striking fact that at the time when, in Italy, under Leonardo
da Vinci, Raphael and others, the mystery of a God manifest in the
flesh had been as it were solved by a perfected art, this Russian
Church was still under bondage to the once accepted but now discarded
notion that the Redeemer ought to be represented as one who had no
form or comeliness. Art in the Western world gained access to the
beautiful, the perfect, and the divine, as soon as it was permitted
to the painter or the sculptor to develop to uttermost perfection
the idea of the Man-God. All such conceptions of the infinite,
whether it be that of Jupiter in pagan periods, or of Christ under
our divine dispensation, have always been the life and inspiration
of the arts. But in Russia ignoble heads of Christ convinced me that
such life and inspirati