In Russian art, it is possible to find a few Scandinavian traces, or, to be more exact, in the arts of Scandinavia we find some elements borrowed from the same sources whence the Russians took theirs.
Russia has been one of the laboratories in which the arts, brought from all parts of Asia, have been united to adopt an intermediate form between the Eastern and the Western world.
Geographically, she was favourably placed to gather together these influences; and, ethnologically, she was entirely prepared to assimilate these arts and develop them. If she has stopped short in this work, it was only at a very recent period, and when repudiating her origin and traditions, she tried to become Western, in spite of her own genius.
In the first place, the oldest religious edifices of Russia affect slender forms, in elevation, which distinguishes them from the purely Byzantine buildings.
Evidently, the Russians, from the Twelfth Century on, employed in their religious edifices a geometrical plan that was different from that employed by the Byzantine architects, but one very close to that admitted by the architects of Greece during the early years of the Middle Ages.
In Georgia and Armenia, a number of ancient churches, the majority of which are very small, are also of this character. But, while submitting to these dispositions, as soon as they adopted masonry instead of wood for building, the Russians gave quite individual proportions to their religious edifices.
By the Fifteenth Century, Russia had combined all the various elements by the aid of which a national art should be constituted. To recapitulate these origins: We find already among the Scythians some elements of art fairly well developed, foreign to Greek art and derived from Oriental tradition. Byzantium, in constant contact with the people of Southern Russia, made its arts felt there; but in the North, some slight Finnish influences and then some Scandinavian ones, make themselves felt. From Persia likewise, Russia received impulses in art, on account of her commercial relations with that country through Georgia and Armenia. In the Thirteenth Century, the Tartar-Mongol domination was imposed upon Russia, employed her artists and craftsmen, and thus placed her in direct contact with that Mediæval Orient that was so mighty and so brilliant in all its art productions.
At length left to herself, in the Fifteenth Century, Russia constituted her own art from these various sources. But this variety of sources is more apparent than real. It is enough to examine Scythian ornamentation to recognize that it is of a pronounced Indo-Oriental character. Byzantine taste has exerted a preponderating influence upon Russia. But it has been recognized that this Byzantine style is itself composed of very varied elements among which figure most largely the art of Eastern Asia, and that from this Byzantine art Russia likes to appropriate the Asiatic side in particular.
So that we may regard Russian art as composed of elements borrowed from the Orient to the almost complete exclusion of all others.
Moreover, if we follow the streams of art to their sources, we soon come to recognize that the tributaries are not at all numerous.