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Romanesque Art

If Carolingian art does represent the dawn of western art it is none the less a pale and

fitful light. It is not until the beginning of the eleventh century that western European

art begins to develop a power and momentum of its own. Charlemagne’s Empire was

divided among his sons, and a century after his Coronation in 800 it had entirely

collapsed. The later ninth and tenth centuries see Europe once again exposed to attack:

Moslems from the south; Slavs and Magyars from the East, Vikings from the North.

Yet it was the Normans among the Vikings who reinvigorated Western Christendom

after Charlemagne’s death, settling in the north of France they adopted Christianity

and Feudalism and injected new vigour into both.

Meanwhile, during the tenth century the centre of political power in Europe had

moved to Germany where the Saxon kings had stabilized government; and Otto 1,

reviving Charlemagne’s dream of a Western Roman Empire in 962. In England,

somewhat earlier, King Alfred (who reigned from 871-99) also stabilized government.

Both Alfred and Otto and their immediate successors patronized the arts in England

and Saxony respectively, and this late ninth and tenth century Ottonian and Anglo-

Saxon cultivation of the arts may be regarded s late-Carolingian in inspiration, bit also

as proto-Romanesque, because it foreshadows particularly in Germany the

international Romanesque style which begins in the eleventh century.

Alfred the Great’s patronage of the arts culminated in the work of the Winchester

School of the late tenth century. Its finest expression, as with Carolingian art, is in its

illuminated manuscripts. The masterpiece of the school is usually considered to b the

Benedictional of St Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester from 963 to 984. A

Benedictional is a service book with appropriate benediction for the feast days of the

liturgical calendar. Here is a bishop,* possibly St Aethelwold himself blessing a

congregation. The script is in the Carolingian minuscule from which out own lower

case roman derives. It also bears close stylistic similarities to the Metz group of

Carolingian manuscript especially the Drogo Sacramentary.* The extensive use of

gold indicates Byzantine affinities and this half completed page show how the

illuminator drew his picture in red-brown ink first. Here* is the illustrated page the

Benediction of Dec 26th the proto-martyr Stephen: a youth Christ in a mandorla above,

supported by angels; Stephen being stoned below. The highly stylized columns with

their acanthus leaves is linked with the Carolingian school, but the flourishing

acanthus leaves in base, column and archivolt provide a most interesting example of

how the northern passion for all-over interlace persists even when the northern motif

is exchanged for the southern Graeco-Roman acanthus motif. Here is * an illustration

of the Three Marys at the tomb, illustrating a Benedictional for Easter Sunday, where

the acanthus foliage is even more luxuriant and the figures seem to grow out of the

plants.

Despite its delicate beauty this masterpiece of the Winchester School is late-

Carolingian, late-Byzantine, provincial and backward looking in its models.

A more daring synthesis of the Byzantine and Carolingian styles was achieved in

Saxony. The Gero Crucifix in Cologne Cathedral is roughly contemporary with the

Benedictional of St Aethewld. Both may be dated about 980. But this great wooden

crucifix brings a new realistic expressionism into western art. Certainly it has the

hieratic grandeur and severity of the Byzantine Christ Pantokrator from Daphni (?),

but the Saxon wood carver has humanized the figure to express the suffering flesh

even more than the timeless God. It is one of the earliest examples, as Jansen so

rightly points out, of that expressive realism, which is undoubtedly one of the ever-

recurring tendencies of Germanic art. This tendency is even more remarkably

expressed in the bronze doors made for St Michael’s Hildesheim in 1015,* executed

about forty years later. Here we see God the father pointing an accusing finger at

Adam, who of course blames Eve, who of course blames the snaky devil. The foliage

has still the interlace twistiness of Hiberno-Saxon art, bit the thin and very animated

figures, foreshadow a new vitality that is neither Irish, nor Byzantine, nor Roman.

This clearly indicates that a new art, the Romanesque, is being fashioned out of the

small melting pot of Carolingian art.

The Romanesque is also foreshadowed in the building for which the doors were made.

Professor Pevsner take St Michael’s Hildesheim* in his Outline of European

Architecture as the first typically Romanesque church. So lit us look at it careful. In

plan we have seen many of these features in Carolingian architecture, particularly in

St Riquier: the basilican aisled nave; and the double-ender effect in the church of the

St Gall monastery plan (819-839AD). But at St Michael’s there is a new emphasis

upon symmetry that hall mark of Graeco-Roman tradition. Now an eastern transept is

balanced by a western transept. A large western choir is balanced by three smaller

apses at the eastern end.* The church was unusually orientated toward the west.

Beneath the western coir was a half-subterranean crypt. Towers were placed at the

ends of the transepts. All these you see are Carolingian features, by Carolingian

features being reduced to an extremely firm symmetrical system. Nor did this

geometrisation of the building confine itself to opposing one mass to another large

mass. The unit or module, used at Hilesheim, is the distance between column and

column in the nave. The aisles are made p of units, one by to; the nave of units one by

three. Three units y three units, none squares, provides he unit for the nave bays and

the two crossings. The ambulatory groins are one by one ad so on. This modular,

metrical planning, thenceforwards, and St Michael’s is most conveniently dated to

1,000AD (1000-1033), is characteristic of Romanesque and Gothic planning. Who

was responsible for this modular planning? Certainly the masons built the cathedrals

and we can easily underestimate the significance of the msn’s solutions of structural

problems in discussing Romanesque and gothic. But the responsibility for such

planning, as commonsense would suggest, almost certainly lay with the bishops who

commissioned the buildings, in this case Bishop Bernwald. Bishops were often

described as architects at this time. Indeed Bishop Athenwold whose Benedictional

we have just seen was described as ‘theoreticus architectus’. No doubt both

Aethenwold and Bernwald knew their Vitruvius; and Vitruvius had insisted upon both

symmetry and perfect numbers. In his famous chapter on symmetry Vitruvius

discussed whether ten or six might not be the perfect number. Bernwald might well

have been influenced by Vitruvius’s discussion of six as the perfect number.

But we must remember that the architect bishops were also theologians; and their

geometry is a sacred and symbolic geometry.

Perhaps the first thing to grasp in seeking to penetrate the medieval way of thinking is

that it sought to reduce all things to number: the geography of heaven and earth,

history both sacred and secular, the spiritual and moral life were all functions of

number. You will find an excellent discussion of this in the introductory chapter of

Emile Male’s book on Religious art in France, published in the Fontana paperbacks

under the title The Gothic Image. The tradition of sacred mathematics goes back to

Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who discovered the scientific relation between the

vibrations of a length of stretched wire and the sound it made it was taken up by Plato

and later developed further by the Neo-Platonists, especially Plotinus in the 3rd

century AD who greatly influenced the Christian fathers, especially St Augustine who

wrote ‘The Divine Wisdom is reflected in the numbers impressed on all things’.

This discussion of the proto-Romanesque in England and Saxony brings us down to

the Romanesque itself. With the Romanesque Western Europe develops a style with a

character and momentum of its own, a style no longer provincial but growing out of

the new economic, political and religious energy of the West. Something happened to

Western Europe in the eleventh century comparable only to what happened to the

Greek cities during the sixth century BC. Everywhere there is new life, new energy. It

was not a product of the endeavours of great men, Charlemagnes, Alfreds and Ottos,

because everywhere it is the same. As with all momentous historical events there are

many reasons, not one. Professor Trevor Roper has recently suggested tat an invention,

a new plough, the heavy mouldboard plough which really dug the earth up instead of

scratching it may have had much to do with starting the process. Coming into general

use in the tenth century, it put more fields under crops, which produced more people,

and produced more land for the great agricultural monastic foundations; and more

land-hungry younger sons to go on crusade against the infidels after 1095 when Urban

11 dramatically proclaimed the first crusade. More masons, too, to build churches,

great and small, through the length and breadth of Western Christendom.

The thing happened so quickly that contemporaries were well aware of it; just as we

became aware of a building boom here as soon as industry was tooled up after the war.

It was remarked upon by Raul Glaber, a Cluniac monk writing in 1003 AD.

‘Therefore, after the above mentioned year of the millennium’ Glaber wrote ‘which is

now about here years past, there occurred throughout the world, especially in Italy and

Gaul, a rebuilding of church basilicas. Notwithstanding the great number already well

established and not in the least of need, nevertheless each Christian people strove

against the others to erect nobler ones. It was as if the whole earth, having cast off the

old by shaking itself, were clothing itself everywhere in the white robe of the church’.

Glaber was a Cluniac monk and the monks of Cluny were themselves at the centre of

the great rebuilding programme. Cluny was Benedictine; but it was a reformed

Benedictine monasticism suited to the new times. Whereas the original Benedictine

monasteries were each independent, suited to an economy of survival and poverty;

Cluny colonised; it was controlled from the top, it was a centralised and expanding

system, and Cluny did expand, until it had established a thousand monastic houses

throughout Europe. New in architecture, the Cluniac monks built for magnificence

and endurance; and this meant large vaulted churches.

Cluny itself was in Southern Burgundy; about 50 miles north of Lyons. Back in 931

the abbot Odo gained a papal privilege to bring other monasteries under the rule of the

abbot of Cluny. So the monastic empire spread. The great Cluniac building Abbot,

and one of the greatest builders of all time was Abbot Hugh, who built like an

Emperor from the time he was elected Abbot of Cluny at the age of twenty-five in

1050, for the next sixty years. Abbot Hugh was at the centre of the creation of the

mature Romanesque style.

We may see what it meant in this plan of the third Church, known as Cluny III built

by Hugh to provide for the rapid expansion of his monastery.

The building* was begun in 1086, a complex mathematical module was used of five

Roman feet, with sub-assemblies of this unit of three, five, seven, eight and third and

nine feet. Conant has a detailed account of this system of modules. The building’s

architect, Gunzo, turned the building into an epitome of sacred geometry, it

exemplified the monad, that is, the perfect one, and also the perfect numbers of

Isidore of Seville, the great Spanish encyclopaedic writer of the seventh century, the

apse was based on the symbolic number seven. Plato’s ‘succession by squares’ 1, 3, 9,

27 determined the lines of the western portal, the Pythagorean series of musical

numbers, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12 were prominent.

A long narthex, entered between towers, a great fcailsed nave, two transepts, an

apsidal choir surrounded by an ambulatory.* It was the largest and most splendid

church in Western Europe upon its completion in 1131 and remained so until the

completion of St Peters. It was destroyed except for a few remaining pars by the

revolution. Here is a reconstruction of the high altar, with it s ambulatory and

gallery,* here the distant view of the west front from an early nineteenth century

lithograph,* taken from an older engraving and here a remaining portions of throne of

the transepts.*

It was the Cluniac monks of France who organized the great pilgrimages to the Shrine

of St James the Great at Satiago da Compostela in Northern Spain. St James was

believed to have preached in Spain before his martyrdom in AD 4 and later his relics

were transferred to Santiago. Relics of the saints had been treasured since earliest

times and the second Council of Nicea of 787 which ended the iconoclastic

controversy in favour of images also anathematised those who despised relics and laid

down that no church should be consecrated without them. The Crusades brought back

great quantities of relics to Europe.

Here in our next slide is Conant’s map of the pilgrim roads to Santigo.* Again,

religious fervour assisted the expansion of Europe, many who came to worship at the

Shrine of St James did not return. The small Christian kings of northern Spain,

welcomed them and gave them land. Compostela became the centre for the national

and Christian movement against the Moors of Spain. Although Cluny was not on an

of the main roads, and other orders undoubtedly took part in providing hospices,

which were set along the roads at twenty miles distance—a comfortable days

journey*—Cluny nevertheless played a dominant role it the organization of the

pilgrimage. And along the roads themselves were some of the great monastic

Churches of the Romanesque foundations.

Note particularly the following which I shall have occasion to mention later: the road

from St Denis, through Tours, Poitiers and Bordaux. Note the position of St Benoiton

the Loire, of Vezelay and Autun, Conques, Moiss, Toulouse, and the most southerly

route from Arles through Toulouse. How closely the plan of the great church at Cluny,

Cluny III, influenced the plans of the churches of the pilgrim roads may be seen by

looking at the largest. Indeed the choir with ambulatory is sometimes called the

pilgrim choir, because it provided access to the holy relics. Note too the multiple

chapels. The Restoration of Santiago looks very much like a restoration of Cluny III.

But, if Cluny lies at the heart of the Romanesque culture, the limbs and members

spread far and wide, for it is a truly international culture of the west. Compare a map

of Carolingian architectural sites* with those of Romanesque sites, and we see how

much more universal it is. Indeed each region of France developed its own kind of

Romanesque architecture, and so did, of course England, German and Italy. I cannot

possibly discuss these inter-regional cross-currents; but we can, at least, look briefly

at some of the finest examples.

Here is the plan and south west view of St Benoit sur Loire.* After the Lombards

desolated Montecassino it is believed that the relics of St Benedict were brought here

to the abbey of Fleury. It has a fine westwork type of tower porch, a lantern tower and

was begun in early 1060. It is a sturdy, fortress-like type of early Burgudian

Romanesque. Here is the view from the east:* the well known pilgrim choir

arrangement. Not the blind arcaded corbels which are one of the most prominent

features of Romanesque decoration.

One of the most important of the pilgrim churches of Burgundy is that of Sainte

Madeleine of Vézélay.* Medieval legend had it that St Lazarus and his sisters Mary

Madalene and Martha came to Gaul where he became first bishop of Gaul. The cult of

both the Magdalene and St Lazarus was highly developed in Burgundy in

Romanesque times. Begun about 1096, it was the first large church in France where

nave and aisles are covered y groin vaults which are divided bay by bay with

transverse arches. The use of checker pattern by means of differently coloured stones

is a feature of much Romanesque work, especially Lombard Romanesque. Note too

that the lower arches of the choir ambulatory are pointed. This is the beginning not of

the Gothic style, but what has been described as the Burgandian half-Gothic. It seems

clear that returning Crusaders introduced the pointed arch from the Moslem

architecture of Spain or the near East.

We may see this development of the Burgundian half-Gothic at San Lazare* at Autun.

Here the transverse groins of the aisle vaults are pointed, a good example of

Burgundian half-Gothic. At the same time you will note an excellent reproduction of a

Roman Corinthian pilaster with correct mouldings. The Autun masons copied this

motif directly from the old Roman gate of Autun, the so-called Port d’Arrou* which

still stands. St Lazare was a Cluniac establishment built by the last great abbot of

Cluny, the grand nephew of Abbot Hugh of Semur, Abbot Peter the Venerable.

The greatest of all the French Romanesque churches, the greatest church of the

pilgrim roads, is the Church of St Serin at Toulouse. Begun about 1077, built in the

fine pinkish-red sandstone of the Midi. The nave is very dark and very lofty with

transverse arches maintaining a barrel vault; the piers holding the arches bring a

verticality to the composition which the Gothic will later develop.

On the North in Normandy. The Normans produced a fine loft austere Romanesque,

such as St Etienne (The Abbey aux Hommes) founded by William shortly after his

conquest of England.

Here the four tall buttresses give a verticality to the west façade. The Abbaye aux

Dames* founded by Matilda, William’s wife, has similar vertical buttresses, two

handsome towers and a central tower over the crossing. The churches at Caen were

built by William and Matilda in expiation of their uncanonical marriage, within the

forbidden degrees. The masterpiece of Anglo-Norman Romanesque, however, is of

course, Durham, begun in 1093. The vault over the East end, completed by 1107 is of

great interest because here we have the earliest known use of the ribbed groin vault.

As we have seen churches like S. Serin had already groined their transverse arches,

that was a well established practice. And churches like St Madeleine in Vezelay used

the groined vault between bays. But the crucial discovery which was to change

Romanesque into Gothic was either the pointed arch nor the pointed vault or the

groined vault, but the ribbed groined vault. The use of the rib made it possible to

transform the dead weight of a barrel or groined vault into a strong skeleton of ribs

and fill the spaces between the ribs with lighter stones.

The glory of Romanesque sculpture is not less than the glory of the architecture. It is

sometimes claimed that the French masons had to rediscover the monumental

tradition in sculpture. Indeed Emile Male begins his book Religious Art of the 12th

and 13th

centuries with the bald statement ‘Sculpture was reborn in France in the

eleventh century’ and gives the credit for it to the two great Cluniac patrons I have

already mentioned, Hugh of Semur and Peter the Venerable. But it is almost beyond

doubt that a continuous tradition of monumental sculpture in France and in Eastern

Europe could be traced back to Roman times if so much had not been destroyed by

idol smashers and revolutionaries over the centuries.

In England for example a tradition of monumental sculpture can be traced back at

least as far s the Northumbrian School of the seventh century, notably in the Great

Ruthwell Cross fifteen feet high with monumental sculpture over life size in deep

relief. Mary Magdalene was the feet of Christ, and the Bewcastle Cross* with Christ

being worshipped by the beasts.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the art of sculpture had to be virtually learned over again

by the French mason. Consider, for example, these capital head from Tournus.* They

are probably fragments from and old building destroyed by fire shortly after the year

one thousand. Primitive and crude but certainly animated.

Under the Cluniac Abbots the tympana of western doorway, porches and capitals

within Romanesque churches were richly decorated with sculpture. Here is the great

tympanum over the west doorway at Moissac.* Emile Male has shown how this and

many similar tympana were inspired by manuscript illuminations in the first instance;

itself an indication that the French Romanesque sculptors had virtually to begin again.

The Moissac tympanum shows the Christ of the Apocalypse with the four beasts of

the Evangelists about him, accompanied by 24 elders of the Apocalypse bearing cups

and violas (?). Although this iconographic scheme goes back to Roman basilicas, the

tremendous popularity of the Apocalypse theme in Carolingian and Romanesque

times is undoubtedly due to a Spanish monk of the eighth century, Beatus the Abbot

of Liebana in the Asturias mountains, just where the Arab invasion had been halted.

Beatus wrote a commentary on St John’s Revelation and implied at the same time that

the end of the world was at hand. With Islam on the doorstep one can appreciate his

feelings. His writings were taken up extensively and copied throughout western

Christendom. The sculptor of the Moissac tympanum appears to have seen an

illustrated copy of Beatus’s Apocalypse. Here is the relevant illustration*. Not only I

Christ surrounded by the beasts, but the elders flourish their cups and guitars.

At Autun, there is a similar Christ in Judgment scene.* Signed beneath the feet:

‘Giselbertus Hoc Fecit’. Such inscriptions are not unprecedented, but rather rare. He

was an artist of unusual ability.

The hierarchical order of the Tympana.

The sculpture on the capitals within the San Lazare at Autun contain some of the

finest work in the whole field of Romanesque sculpture.

a. The temptation of Christ.

b. Two virtues and two vices.

c. Noli me Tagere. Christ in the Garden.

d. The Adoration of the Magi.

e. The Dream of the Magi.

f. The Flight into Egypt.

g. Eve. There is nothing comparable to this in Christian art—probably derived

from a Roman copy.

h. Luxuria or lust. Te young lad has allowed himself to look at the young lady

whilst bathing, so he is being carried of by the devil.

The high Romanesque sculpture of the 12th century at its best achieves a remarkable

intensity of line and movement which expresses the spiritual vitality and aspiration of

the times remarkably.

a. The figure of Isaiah, on the right jamb at Souillac.

b. Detail of the Christ of the Tympanum at Vezelay.

c. The remarkably elongated and majestic figure of St Peter at Moissac.

We noted earlier that the Vikings who ravaged the Christian world selling Europeans

as slaves to Islam in the eighth century were to a large extent Christianised and

civilized during the ninth and tenth centuries. The Norman section of them indeed

became leaders of the Western world in many fields. Without wishing to attribute

everything to the Normans, it is at least arguable that the new vitality which arises in

Romanesque sculpture during the twelfth century was a genuine synthesis of Roman

art and Roman Christianity on the one hand, and the older art of the North, the art of

the Oseberg Ship, with its springing vitality of line surely has something to do with

the springing vitality of St Peter at Moissac. Even the animals are not far away.

Whereas Carolingian art was a mixture, in which the component parts are still visible,

high Romanesque art is a genuine compound; a new synthesis has been established

into which the older elements have been completely absorbed.

Library Digitised Collections

Author/s:Smith, Bernard

Title:Romanesque art

Date:1956-1966

Persistent Link:http://hdl.handle.net/11343/56270