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

  

  

  Chapter 12: Gothic Art