Knowt
Chapter 11: Romanesque
Key Notes
Time Period: 1050–1150, some objects date as early as 1000 and late as 1200
Culture, beliefs, and physical settings
Romanesque art is a part of the medieval artistic tradition.
In the Romanesque period, royal courts emphasized the study of theology, music, and writing.
Romanesque art avoids naturalism and emphasizes stylistic variety. Text is often incorporated into artwork from this period.
Cultural interactions
There is an active exchange of artistic ideas throughout the Middle Ages.
There is a great influence of Roman, Early Medieval, and Islamic art on Romanesque art.
Audience, functions and patron
Works of art were often displayed in religious or court settings.
Existing architecture is mostly religious.
Theories and Interpretations
The study of art history is shaped by changing analyses based on scholarship, theories, context, and written record.
Contextual information comes from written records that are religious or civic.
Historical Background
By 1000, Europe had settled down following the enormous migration of the Early Medieval era.
Viking ancestors conquered Normandy, France, southern Italy, and Sicily after being Christianized.
Spanish and North African attacks were neutralized, and Europeans started the Crusades to invade Muslim areas.
The pope led Europe's Christian empire, which resembled the Roman secular empire.
Even though Europeans battled equally, commerce and the arts flourished, and cities thrived for the first time in generations.
People traveled throughout Europe on religious pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem.
The Santiago de Compostela shrine to Saint James was the most popular.
As the conclusion of western European pilgrimages, a beautiful Romanesque cathedral was erected.
To provide travelers with more sacred sites, shrines were built at strategic spots along the path.
One of history's greatest revitalizations was this pilgrimage movement and associated construction boom.
Patronage and Artistic Life
Feudalism: a symbiotic connection between lords and peasants—dominated medieval life.
Farmworkers fed everyone.
Landowners protected peasants.
Between these locations, artists become middle class.
Painting was valued more than sculpture or building since artists worked less with their hands.
Women were limited to "feminine handicrafts" including pottery, weaving, and manuscript decorating.
Queens, abbesses, and other powerful women funded nunneries and illuminated manuscripts.
Nun Hrotswitha of Gandersheim created plays like Roman poets and playwrights.
Hildegard von Bingen, a musician, author, and patroness, was a genius of the time.
Although Christian works dominate Romanesque art, many wonderfully made secular works exist.
Medieval secular and religious works frequently shared symbolism.
Medieval architecture emphasizes castles, manors, monasteries, and cathedrals.
Master builders, not architects, designed them and hired the workers.
Skilled artists oversaw the building's design with these master builders.
Romanesque Architecture
Civic pride, creative expression, and spiritual devotion were found in cathedrals.
They took hundreds of years to build
They were quite costly
They were carefully built and maintained.
Church leaders replaced wood roofs with stone to prevent fires.
Wood-built ones were occasionally retrofitted.
Cathedral: the principal church of a diocese, where a bishop sits
The period's moniker, "Romanesque," comes from this resurgence of stone constructions.
However, stone was problematic.
It's heavy, thus the walls must be thicker to support the roof.
To minimize wall holes, windows are modest.
It's dark inside.
To let more light into the structure, the outside of the windows is thin and the inside is bigger.
However, stained glass dimmed rooms.
The rib vault was invented by expert builders to sustain these large structures' roofs.
Rib vault: a vault in which diagonal arches form riblike patterns. These arches partially support a roof, in some cases forming a web-like design
These ribs were originally ornamental moldings on groin vaults, but they later formed a new roof support system.
While they do not hold their whole weight, they assist transmit their burden down to the walls and onto the gigantic piers below, which act as buttresses.
Rib vaults open up ceiling spaces, allowing for bigger clerestory windows.
Clerestory: the window story of a church
Rib vaults were created first, followed by stones in the intervals between.
Stone is fireproof and has additional benefits.
It's robust and waterproof.
It also conducts sound effectively, allowing medieval music with Gregorian chant to be sung so that even people in the back of these massive structures could hear the service.
The medieval bay is the building block.
This space has an arch on the first level, a triforium with smaller arches on the second, and windows in a clerestory on the third.
Triforium: A narrow passageway with arches opening onto a nave, usually directly below a clerestory
The bay's shape was duplicated throughout the cathedral to create an aesthetic unity.
Bay: a vertical section of a church that is embraced by a set of columns and is usually composed of arches and aligned windows
An ambulatory, also seen in Early Christian churches, was added to the east end of Romanesque structures to accommodate huge crowds on feast days and pilgrimages.
This pathway directed spectators around the cathedral without interrupting the apse festivities.
Pilgrims may see relics and other religious things in chapels spaced throughout the ambulatory.
They perform well in this environment at Saint Sernin's ambulatory.
Abbey: a monastery for monks, or a convent for nuns, and the church that is connected to it
Ambulatory: a passageway around the apse of a church
Apse: the end point of a church where the altar is
Italian buildings have separate bell towers called campaniles to summon people to prayer.
Campanile: a bell tower of an Italian building
Northern European buildings incorporate this ower into the fabric of the building often over the crossing.
Arcade: a series of arches supported by columns. When the arches face a wall and are not self-supporting, they are called a blind arcade
Baptistery: in medieval architecture, a separate chapel or building generally in front of a church used for baptisms
Compound pier: a gathering of engaged shafts around a pier
Gallery: a passageway inside or outside a church that generally is characterized by having a colonnade or arcade
Jamb: the side posts of a medieval portal
Narthex: the vestibule, or lobby, of a church
Portal: a doorway. In medieval art they can be significantly decorated
Trumeau (plural: trumeaux): the central pillar of a portal that stabilizes the structure. It is often elaborately decorated
➼ Church of Sainte-Foy
Details
Romanesque Europe
c. 1050–1130, stone
Conques, France
Form
Church built to handle the large number of pilgrims: wide transepts, large ambulatory with radiating chapels.
Radiating chapel: a chapel that extends out in a radial pattern from an apse or an ambulatory
Transept: an aisle in a church perpendicular to the nave
Massive heavy interior walls, unadorned.
No clerestory; light provided by windows over the side aisles and galleries.
Barrel vaults in nave, reinforced by transverse arches.
Transverse arch: an arch that spans an interior space connecting opposite walls by crossing from side to side
Cross-like ground plan, called a Latin cross.
Function
Christian church built along the pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, a popular pilgrimage center for the worship of the relics of Saint James.
Radiating chapels housed relics of the saints.
Images
Romanesque Sculpture and Painting
Large-scale stone sculpture was rare in the Early Medieval period, but the Romanesque revived it.
Sculptors were inspired by goldsmiths and other metal artisans, but they created life-size sculptures.
Sculpture was often put around medieval church doorways to help worshipers grasp the building's subject.
As before, ivories, wooden things, and metallurgy flourished.
Illuminated manuscripts and the odd ceiling or wall mural tell us most about Romanesque art.
Figures are often black-outlined and brightly colored.
Since gestures and emotions are magnified, heads and hands are proportionately the biggest characteristics.
Figures seem to float because they fill a blank surface.
As in the Bayeux Tapestry, they sometimes tiptoe or glide.
People dominate structures that seem like props or stage sets in most Romanesque artwork.
Romanesque churches are known for painted stone sculpture.
Capitals are carved with Bible scenes.
The gateway is Romanesque sculpture's crowning achievement.
These masterpieces are in such a prominent place that sculptors competed to carve them.
Famous painters were sought by municipalities.
Their autographs express their greatness.
Despite geographical differences, Romanesque sculpture has certain common traits.
Flattened figures with zigzagging draperies obscure body shape rather than define it.
A hierarchy of figures is thoroughly developed.
Borders are used to frame situations for figures.
Preferring to be defined by these boundaries, they seldom challenge them.
This epoch also saw smaller, autonomous sculptures.
Reliquaries with treasured relics like saints' bones are cherished and lavishly decorated.
Reliquary: a vessel for holding a sacred relic. Often reliquaries took the shape of the objects they held. Precious metals and stones were the common material
➼ Last Judgment
Details
1050–1130
Made of stone and paint
Found in Sainte-Foy, Conques
Last Judgment: in Christianity, the judgment before God at the end of the world
Form
Largest Romanesque tympanum.
Tympanum (plural: tympana): a rounded sculpture placed over the portal of a medieval church
124 figures densely packed together; originally richly painted.
Function
Last Judgment cautions pilgrims that life is transitory and one should prepare for the next life.
Subject of the tympanum reminds pilgrims of the point of their pilgrimage.
Content
Christ, as a strict judge, divides the world into those going to heaven and those going to hell.
Christ is depicted with a welcoming right hand, a cast down left hand.
Christ sits in a mandorla.
Mandorla: (Italian for “almond”) an almond-shaped circle of light around the figure of Christ or Buddha
A dividing line runs vertically through the cross in the middle of the composition.
The Archangel Michael and the devil are at Christ’s feet, weighing souls.
Hell, with the damned, is on the right.
People enter the church on the right as sinners and exit on the left as saved; the right door has sculptures of the damned and the left door has images of the saved.
The figures of the saved move toward Christ, Mary, and Saint Peter; local abbots and monks follow Charlemagne, the legendary benefactor of the monastery, who is led by the hand.
Paradise, at the lower level, is portrayed as the heavenly Jerusalem.
Sainte Foy interceded for those enslaved by the Muslims in Spain—she herself appears kneeling before a giant hand of God.
On the right lower level, the devil presides over a chaotic tangle of tortured condemned sinners.
Inscription on lintel: “O Sinners, change your morals before you might face a cruel judgment.”
Hieratic scale may parallel one’s status in a feudal society.
Image
➼ Reliquary of Sainte-Foy
Details
Made of gold, silver, gemstones, and enamel over wood.
9th century, with later additions
Found in Sainte-Foy, Conques
Form
Child saint’s skull is housed in the rather mannish-looking enlarged head.
Jewels, gems, and crown added over the years by the faithful, as acts of devotion.
Facial expression is haughty and severe.
Function: Reliquary of a young girl martyred in the early fourth century.
Context
Sainte Foy (or Faith) probably died as a martyr to the Christian faith during the persecutions in 303 under Emperor Diocletian; she was tortured over a brazier; she refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods in a pagan ritual.
Saint Foy, triumphant over death, looking up and over the viewer’s head.
Relics of her body were stolen from a nearby town and enthroned in Conques in 866.
One of the earliest large-scale sculptures in the Middle Ages.
Image
➼ The Bayeux Tapestry
Details
Romanesque Europe (English or Norman)
1066–1080
Made of embroidery on linen
Found in Bayeux Tapestry Museum, Bayeux, France
Embroidery: a woven product in which the design is stitched into a premade fabric
Tapestry: a woven product in which the design and the backing are produced at the same time on a device called a loom
Form
Color used in a decorative, although unnatural, manner—different parts of a horse are colored variously.
Neutral background of unpainted fabric.
Flat figures; no shadows.
Content
Tells the story (in Latin) of William the Conqueror’s conquest of England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
The story, told from the Norman point-of-view, emphasizes the treachery of Harold of England, who breaks his vow of loyalty and betrays William by having himself crowned.
More than 600 people, 75 scenes.
Fanciful beasts in upper and lower registers.
Borders sometimes comment on the main scenes or show scenes of everyday life.
Function
Uncertainty over how this work was meant to be displayed, perhaps in a cathedral hung from the pillars in the nave or hung in a hall along a wall.
Technique
Tapestry is a misnomer; actually, it’s an embroidery.
Probably designed by a man and executed by women.
Patronage: Commissioned by Bishop Odo, half-brother to William the Conqueror.
Context
Continues the narrative tradition of medieval art; 230 feet long.
Narrative tradition goes back to the Column of Trajan
Image
