"Romanesque" and "Middle Byzantine"

Athens, NAM Roman, Antonine, Osteotheke.  Yes, this marble osteotheke is a millennium, more or less, earlier than this Post, but see the remarks below on the ivory Veroli casket.

MIDDLE BYZANTINE AND ROMANESQUE

Middle Byzantine art is the art of the Macedonian and Commenian dynasties at Constantinople.  It began with the end of iconoclasm in the Macedonian dynasty and is part of a great revival of scholarship and literature called the Macedonian Renascence, in art often called the Second Golden Age of Byzantine Art, Justinian's century being the First.  It is punctuated by the rise of Venice and the First Crusade (1095-1099) and terminated in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade's sacking Constantinople (illustrating the difficulty of controlling an army at a distance with anything less than present-day communications).  That the Macedonian Renascence tried to recapture the values of Greek civilization as well as its prose style and grammar and, in art, some of its imagery, is apparent in their attitude to the classics of Greek literature, such as Athenian drama, as well as in the profound humanism that pervades Christian Middle Byzantine imagery, preeminently in the great mosaics in the monastic church at Daphnê, just outside Athens.  Despite the difficulties of travel, and even before the first crusade, western Europe was hardly unaware of Byzantine culture; after that crusade a trickle became a flood.  But the great new architecture of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries shows closer acquaintance with Islamic architecture than with Byzantine, except in Venice where San Marco is practically a Byzantine church and in parts of southern France (at Périgueux); it is not that they travelled to Damascus or Baghdad or even to north Africa, but that southern Spain had remained Moslem until c. 1085 A.D., and they did know the great mosque at Cordoba.

The term "Romanesque" that we use to designate European art beginning in the second half of the eleventh century really refers to what happened in architecture and sculpture all over Europe; there is no comparable revolution in book illustration or other kinds of painting, although the styles certainly are different from earlier ones.  The revolution in architecture is in reviving vaulted ashlar stone building on a scale to rival ancient Rome.  Since southern France and the German Rhineland had been part of the ancient Roman empire, those regions had very impressive examples of Roman building, especially in towns like Trier and Arles, just to name two.  Now, in Rome itself, where they had access to volcanically formed hydraulic cement, the vaulting of buildings had been done in concrete (see the Basilica of Constantine and the Pantheon and the Great Hall of Trajan's Markets in your Prints).  But Europe north of the Alps, while possessing fine stone, had no such cement for making concrete (neither had the Greek East, which is why Byzantine domes are of stone or brick).  In France and the Rhineland, the ancient Roman buildings had stone vaults, and as much of the mason's traditional craft as survived was in building with stone.  Of course, a number of persons did go to Rome; they knew about the ancient structures there, but when they turned to emulating and competing with Roman glory in architecture, architects north of the Alps created a Roman-ish revival using their own materials.

Each region (not necessarily coinciding with the boundaries of modern nations) had its own building traditions.  Each vied in the effort of "revival" (actually producing original architectural forms), but all that the various styles of the different regions share is their Romanishness, so that Romanesque is a perfect label.  Much the same is true of the different regional styles of architectural sculpture (to be discussed with slides).

It is inappropriate and futile to try to find any other embracing formula for "what is Romanesque?".  For example, it is not the "round arched" period, because in Burgundy pointed arches are used in Romanesque.  It is not even true that all the churches are vaulted; in Tuscany otherwise advanced church design has wooden roofs.  They are not less Roman-ish for that reason; the Italians knew best of all that Roman basilicas were wooden-roofed.  It is not meaningful to ask which region is more progressive than another.  Cluniac, Pilgrimage, Norman, Anglo-Norman, Rhineland, Lombard, and Tuscan are only some of the richly varied architectural types within Romanesque.

The first three works that we consider here are contemporary with Ottonian art in the West, but while the latter is usually included under "Early Medieval Art", in the Greek-speaking world the art of the 10th and early 11th centuries goes under our "Middle Byzantine" heading, although, as we have noted, this period is punctuated by the events of the First Crusade at about the chronological point where we regard "Romanesque Art" in the West as beginning.

[K 148] [1606]  The book called the Paris Psalter (because it is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris), like certain Byzantine literary works of the same period, is more egregiously "Classical" (i.e., Greco-Roman, since by the 10th century all of pagan antiquity seemed "Classical" to them) than anything we have seen for some time.  The framed, full-color illustrations are full of carefully labelled personifications (Melodia, the Red Sea, with an oar over her shoulder, Bethlehem).  The rocks and trees look almost like something from Pompeii.  The modelling in light and dark is more purposeful than in the Carolingian Coronation Gospels; the 3/4 views (and even the foreshortened shoulders) are rather convincing, while the adorable animals listening to David's harp (as is he were Orpheus!  Both David and Orpheus have come to be regarded as antetypes of Christ) and the lunging horses in the Crossing of the Red Sea put us back in a world wholly different from that of symbolic, stylized animals.  In the latter scene, we have again the flying cape with its end lifted by some invisible wind that we saw in the Vienna Genesis (in fact, the 6th-century Genesis has a scene of Noah's Flood as full of naturalism as this Crossing of the Red Sea).  Even more remarkable is the presence of Mood and Sentiment: I mean, the whole of the David picture is imbued with idyllic feeling, and the whole of the Red Sea picture is dramatic--not just the features of individual figures.  Equally important and impressive is the indication of atmospheric distance (with the distant trees and buildings becoming paler and brighter as well as smaller) in the David picture.  All these characteristics indicate that the learned segment of the Byzantine world still possessed ancient illustrated books, early enough to have served as models for the Paris Psalter, a prime document of the Macedonian Renascence (we save the French spelling, Renaissance, for the 15th and 16th centuries).  On the other hand, the frames of these pictures are wholly anti-classical in character: they are painted imitations of enamel work and jewels in gold settings, unlike the acanthus frames we saw in the Carolingian manuscripts.  The Middle Ages loved to set ancient treasures, such as Roman cameos, in rich, bejewelled settings, and books of the Gospels had heavily jewel-encrusted covers.  These pictures look like ancient images set in "barbarian" frames: recall the Germanic pins that we studied.  Most Byzantine jewelry is just as "medieval" as that of the west.

[K 19] [K 20]  The Harbaville Triptych, ca. A.D. 1000 (to correct the dates on the Prints) is one of the finest Middle Byzantine ivories.  A triptych, of course, differs from a diptych in being threefold, but also it is not writing tablets, rather a portable divine image whose outer leaves close.  When closed, you see the cross with trees (recall Sigvald's Balustrade at Cividale) on the back (the inscription is IC XC NI-KA: Jesus Christ Conquers) and on the leaves 8 full-length saints and 4 saints' busts in circles.  When open, you see it as in [K 19].  The four soldier saints are George, Eustathios, and the two Theodores.  St. John the Theologian (i.e., the Evangelist, not the Baptist) and St. Andrew accompany SS. Peter and Paul below the figure of Christ enthroned; the entreating figures left and right of Christ are Mary, his mother, and John the Forerunner (i.e., the Baptist).  This composition of Mary and John interceding with Christ for believers is called a Deësis, which is Greek for "intercessory prayer".  Here, then, the subject matter is as Christian as can be, and the attenuation of bodily substance to suggest spirituality that we have noted before is especially obvious here.  But, to the contrary, the style of the figures, and especially of their drapery in relation to their bodies, shows once again how Byzantine artists have not lost the Greek sense of structural logic: the drapery wraps around and continues, it falls in accord with gravity, it folds reasonably, and, even if the bodies seem to be made of stuff more rarified than flesh, the drapery obeys the stance of the body.  In sum, the artist is not thinking of drapery as a pattern but in terms of the cloth (being one thing) in relation to a figure (which is another).

[K 300]  The Veroli Casket offers another contrast.  This is the kind of Middle Byzantine secular luxury art probably destined for wealthy young women of marriageable age.  So it bears famous stories about girls: Iphigeneia and Europa.  The workmanship is excellent.  The style is utterly different from that of the Harbaville Triptych, doubtless because it both has different prototypes and also may have been made in a workshop with a different ancestry of successive apprenticeships.  The dichotomy is astonishing: the subject matter and even the compositions are from ancient classical sources, with no hint of Christian content since this is a secular piece, but the short-bodied, knobby, almost funny (but very skillful) style seems to us hilariously un-Classical.  We wonder, how did it seem to them?  Did they really look at this style as, somehow, the way ancient literature was supposed to look?  That is why Byzantine art is so richly fascinating: this is the civilization that inherits and preserves alive, both together, Christianity in the language of the Gospels, in the world where the evangelists mostly moved, and Greek language, history, and art and literature, from their own unbroken past.  Many considerations have been brought to bear on the style of the Veroli casket (and other ivories resembling it): the use of drills, reinterpreting in ivory a style in book illustration, reinterpreting in ivory the style of certain late Roman-Empire marble sarcophagi.
The Antonine osteotheke (for the collected bones of a corpse) is just as atypical of Antonine styles of the 2nd c. AD as the Veroli Casket is of a date c. 1,000 AD.  The casket is much more painstaking work.  In any case, the Antonine work could not itself be a model for the Byzantine piece.  Not only is their manner, however unmistakably related but they share several stories and compositions, favorites from Greek literature, such as Iphigeneia and Jason and Europa and an Aphrodite in the Capua/deMilo pose (and with Eros at her feet).  We are forcibly reminded of how many illustrated books existed that have been lost, as also, in a different way, we are with the Paris Psalter.

[G 199]  Venice did not need to go on Crusade to learn about the Byzantine world; having control of the Dalmatian coast (most of Croatia), Venice ruled the Adriatic at this period and not only traded with but was under Byzantine political influence.  Yet the Church of San Marco, begun in 1063, although so Byzantine-like that some call it "Byzantine", is rather broader-proportioned than contemporary Eastern churches.  Its plan is different from Hagia Sophia's, though it is nearly equally grand: it is a cross inscribed in a square, each arm of the cross also being square, and a dome is raised over each of the arm squares as well as over the center, none of the domes singly being as vast as Hagia Sophia's.  Like the Roman Pantheon's, its domes are not concealed by roofs but covered with gilded copper over wood (in the Pantheon, it was originally bronze over the concrete dome).  The general effect of the figured mosaics, on a gold ground, recalls Byzantine mosaic, but their styles (from several centuries) are rather different.

[G 117] [MG 239] [MG 42] [K 230]  The Monastery Church at Daphni, about 6 miles from the Acropolis, is now in the suburbs of modern Athens and, no longer in use as a monastery, is deconsecrated and preserved (like the ancient temples) as a national monument.  Dated now ca. 1080, its plan is one of two types greatly favored in Middle Byzantine Greece.  It is a cross-in-square plan with only one, central dome (and a "saucer" dome over the choir/bema), and a glance at the plan reveals that this is not a dome on pendentives, which has the four great piers at the corners of the central square; you can't use pendentives here.  On the exterior, you see the four corners of the square; on the interior [MG 42] you see that the structures which produce the circle for the dome (rather, for the cylindrical drum on which the dome rests) begin angular and just sort of "cheat" into curvature to join the arches thrown across the corners of the square.  This alternative to a pendentive is called a squinch.  An octagon is formed, from which the builder eases into a circle.  This solution places a larger dome over a given square, but, although Daphni is a good-sized church, it would not work at the scale of Hagia Sophia, since it distributes the thrust less evenly and efficiently than the pendentives.  The masonry of the church also is typical of central and southern Greece in this period: ashlar blocks of poros limestone (the same as was used in antiquity) are outlined in red brick.  Structurally, the addition of brick weakens the wall, but it is very pretty; rows of bricks with their corners facing out frame the windows like rickrack.  Notice the angular exterior (semi-hexagonal) of the apses.  The surviving mosaics are certainly the finest of the Middle Byzantine period and are typical in their theological program.  Here we can only consider the Pantokrator in the center of the dome, the squinch mosaics (Annunciation, Nativity, Baptism, Transfiguration of Christ, corresponding to major feasts of the church), and, on the east wall of the north arm of the cross, the Crucifixion.  The Pantokrator is distinctly different in style, execution, and feeling from the rest of the mosaics; Pantokrator means "ruler of the Universe", and this ikon (<eikon = image) is an image of God beyond any anecdote of his incarnation as man (in Jesus).  Here the artist had no license to interpret.  All the other mosaics, in delicately contrasted, rather pale colors, celebrate the humanity of the stories in the Gospels and in a style that, like that of the Harbaville Triptych, miraculously preserves a sense of the proportions of human bodies, the relationship of drapery to the body and obedience to gravity, and meaningful use of light and shade to create a sense of solid form.  Of course, mosaic is not so conducive as paint to these effects, so the result is all the more remarkable.  In the Crucifixion, the figure of Mary is noble as well as desolate, John, the beloved disciple, is young and gentle (notice again that uplifted bit of drapery, which may very subtly express agitation), and the figure of Christ expresses suffering that is at once human and divine, as we already have noted in comparing it with the Gero Crucifix.  Only, the Byzantine artist has an easier time with the drapery around the loins.

[G 108]  Right in the center of Athens, the Church of the Kapnikarea is one of about a dozen small Middle Byzantine Athenian parish churches of the 11th or (as here) the 12th century (the porch, at left, is a century later).  They have the type of cross-in-square plan typical of small churches all over Greece, with a single dome in the center (on a tall drum with windows for illumination).  This little dome is built over a square with tiny pendentives making the transition, and at the four corners of the square (on the floor) are columns rather than piers.  At this scale, the curvature of the pendentives can be done by rule of thumb, and columns are sufficient; truth to tell, once the mortar is well set, the dome will usually stand even if a column or two is missing!  The wall construction, as at Daphni, in these small churches is poros outlined with red brick; red tiles on the little dome and roofs cap it off.

[MG 39] [K 231]  Not much later, at the end of the 12th century, the famous Russian church of St. Dmitri (<Demetrios) at Vladimir shows the influence--and then some--of the Middle Byzantine taste for tall central domes.  But no one could see this as a mere provincial variant; it is an original reinterpretation of Byzantine church architecture.  Whereas the Greeks liked to differentiate the low corners of the square from the higher roofs of the cross, the Russians raise the corners to the same height, creating a church that as a whole is almost always taller than the side of the square that defines its plan, and an even taller drum supports the dome in the center.  The decoration also is uniquely Russian.  Later the Russians will create Schools of icon painting (distinguished by certain kinds of figure elongation and the use of a creamy white instead of a gold background) that vie in importance with Greek icons, but the Madonna of Vladimir was imported from Constantinople itself and, in spite of damage and restorations, remains one of the finest surviving Middle Byzantine icons.  Notice that icons, for contemplation in worship, are less naturalistic than many of the mosaics and book illustrations.

Now we turn to the Romanesque art of Western Europe  

CLUNIAC CHURCH DESIGN

[MG 268] [MG 29] [K 31]  The Abbey Church and Monastery of Cluny was the most powerful Benedictine Abbey throughout the Middle Ages; the Benedictine Order, too, was international, and sometimes the Abbot of Cluny told the Pope what to do.  The architecture and sculpture of Cluny and of the churches of her daughter houses (priories) are among the most important and influential of the Romanesque styles.
You cannot fail to notice the general resemblance of the plan of the monastery to St. Gall and Centula, since all three are Benedictine (if you have read Umberto Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose, you will know that a 14th-century abbey in Italy also was laid out similarly).  By the late 11th century, Cluny had already outgrown two abbey churches.  Cluny III, which you see in the Plan and in Kenneth J. Conant's fine drawing, stood until the French Revolution; today one end of one transept survives.  Let us read the plan: it is 5-aisled with two transepts; apsidal chapels emerge to the east from the arms of the transepts, and five apsidal chapels radiate from the apse; beyond the choir, a ring of columns separates the apse, proper, from the ambulatory (Latin for "walk-around") that wraps around it.  Now let us read the drawing which is a view from the east: low down we see the nine low chapels, on the eastern transept and around the apse; next highest we see the wall and windows of the ambulatory; next highest, then, is the clerestory of the apse and the roofs, to left and right, of the arms of the eastern transept; higher, we see the end wall of the choir above the half-dome of the apse, which is level with the roofs of the nave and the taller western transept, and we see that the promise of multiple towers seen in the Carolingian and Ottonian churches is fulfilled in Romanesque: three matching octagonal towers over the crossing of the western transept and nave and over the ends of the western transept.  An architectural drawing, even one that looks like a picture, to be studied must be read, even as we have just done.  What is not visible in these drawings is that inside Cluny III's nave was vaulted, with a slightly pointed barrel vault, reinforced at every support (pier) in the nave by a stout, slightly pointed transverse arch.  A pointed arch is double-centered: its lines are arcs drawn from two centers, intersecting at the point.  We think the idea was borrowed from Islamic building practice.  On the wall of the nave, below the clerestory and above the arcade (the nave-wall arcade also had slightly pointed arches), was a "blind" arcade called a triforium; it is called blind because it has no light behind it.  All of this is in ashlar stone; stone is the native building material of the Rhône basin and was so even during the Roman Empire, but medieval builders heretofore had seldom ventured to emulate their ancestors' Roman vaulting.  Note that this is not dry-stone ashlar, like Greek and Egyptian, but mortared ashlar.
The capitals of the columns separating the apse from the ambulatory, completed ca. 1095, are figured.  Sometimes, for example in the Baths of Caracalla, the Romans put figures in Composite capitals; those are the ancestors of these, which still might be called "Composite", but the figural decoration now is much more important.  Now several centers in Europe are having their own Renascence of learning (not just the Macedonian Dynasty in Constantinople), to which the Cluny capitals are eloquent testimony.  The figures represent not only human labors, like Agriculture, but the fields of basic and more advanced learning, the Trivium and the Quadrivium, and the musical Modes (the transposable scales that we call Keys had not yet been devised).  We are forcibly reminded that the abbeys were great centers of learning and music; learning and plainsong are the opus dei (work of God), at least as much as agriculture, since the latter can be done for profit.  Especially characteristic of the heads of these Cluny sculptures are the close-set drilled eyes, the neatly combed, center-parted hair, the rather pursed lips of the mouths, and the carefully designed drapery folds, flattened and neatly arranged one on top of the other.  Now we have the revival of architectural sculpture on a large scale.  The artists must have had recourse to book illustrations and small sculptures, such as ivories, to re-create major sculpture "overnight".
In summary, a Cluny type church has an ambulatory with radiating chapels around its main apse; it has slightly pointed arches (let no one tell you that pointed = Gothic); it has a clerestory and a triforium.

[G 255] [K 51]  The Cathedral of St. Lazare at Autun, a little north of Cluny, proves that the type of the Cluny nave was not confined to monastic churches, since a Cathedral is by definition the principal church of a major town and the seat (cathedra) of a bishop, whereas a monastic church, by definition, is primarily for the Order whose monastery it is attached to, and the abbey (if the monastery is Benedictine) is headed by its abbot, or its prior if it is only a priory.  St. Lazare at Autun is a long generation later than the design of Cluny III; its nave-wall arcade is distinctly pointed, not slightly, and so is its nave vault.  Here we see clearly the difference between windows (in the clerestory, with sunlight streaming in) and the triforium just below it, which is blind.  The important thing is to understand what a quantum leap has taken place in the grammar and syntax of the nave wall.  Now it has the same level of design logic as the Greek Doric had in the age of the Parthenon.  At the floor level, we have the compound pier; in the nave arcade, each pilaster in this compound pier terminates in a figured capital from which the arch springs.  The pilasters that go up the wall to frame the clerestory windows are punctuated by capital-like mouldings where they cross the string courses above and below the triforium.  The reinforcing transverse arches in the main vault visually spring from the center pilaster of the compound pier, which runs all the way up the nave wall to meet it and give it a visual raison d'être.  The word "articulation" gets overused, but here it is precisely correct for the logical connectedness of the whole design, in which each part in its function and relationship is clearly related to those to which it is subordinate and to the whole.
The Last Judgment tympanum by Giselbertus is Autun Cathedral's other claim to fame.  It was finished by about A.D. 1130.  The portal of an early-12th-century Burgundian church is now recessed in the doorway with colonnettes on the jambs.  The tympanum (the Latin spelling of the Greek word for "drum") is stone slabs filling the arch over the door, made to be carved and painted--for these tympana were brightly colored, and some even retain part of the color.  Vivid subjects were popular, not least the Last Judgment.  Before we assume that the church aimed to terrify simple sinners by the images of souls being weighed in the balance and found wanting, then fed to a people-eating device at right (which looks borrowed from an ancient lion's head water spout!), then tormented, in the lower register, we should think how much we "sophisticates" like horror films (not to say more) and how few vicarious thrills were available, by comparison, for medieval entertainment.  It is hard to doubt, considering what gets best ratings on television, that the people of Autun dwelt with delicious shivers on the demons, and on the punishments meted out to other people; like the editors of modern art-history textbooks, they probably found the blessed souls on Christ's right hand far less absorbing.  In fact, the blessed souls have faces as blissful as kittens being licked by their mother, quite delightful.  And in the center of it all is Christ enthroned in an almond-shaped glory (a mandorla), centered and stable and manifestly just, however strict.  Giselbertus signed his work, in Latin; he is the first French medieval sculptor to do so, and well he might, for it is a masterpiece.  This is the kind of art that is not to be judged by its naturalism but by its overwhelming and unforgettable imaginative power and by the powerful organization of images that holds it all together without reducing it to tiresome rows of dolls.

The energy that drove this new Romanesque is sometimes connected to the fact that the world had NOT come to an end in A.D. 1000, the Millennium, but we should consider also that population and prosperity had been increasing steadily, since no new barbarians had come for more than a century; thus travel, even sailing, became safer, and trade could develop.  It was in this period that the great pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela became important, and, no matter how devout pilgrimages are, from the point of view of merchants along the Route, they are Business.

PILGRIMAGE-TYPE CHURCH DESIGN

[MG 196] [G 461]  Santiago de Compostela in NW Spain (see MAP 18), as comparison of the plan with MG 186 will show, is the same kind of Romanesque church as St. Sernin at Toulouse; there are others of the same type along the Pilgrimage Routes.  All have an aisle continuously up one side, around the transept, around the choir and apse (coinciding with the ambulatory there), and back on the other side: you can walk all the way around without ever entering the tall, principal spaces, i.e., the nave and the central nave-like spaces of the transept.  The plan is designed for pilgrim traffic.  Also defining for the Pilgrimage type are chapels radiating from the ambulatory of the apse (shared with Cluny: it is not one feature alone that defines a type) and a full gallery (second storey above the aisles, opening onto the nave, which we first saw at St. Demetrius in Thessaloniki and in San Vitale, though there in a central-plan church) above the aisles.  As the X's on the plans indicate, the aisles are groin-vaulted, and the double lines separating the bays of the tall space (nave and transept) indicate transverse arches strengthening a barrel vault, a round arched barrel vault in these.  Pilgrimage churches are rather dark, and a glance at the photo or the elevations tells you why: no direct illumination of the central space; they didn't dare using clerestory openings, as the continuous barrel was very heavy and these large churches have quite high vaults.  What is beautiful is the integrity of the fine, solid masonry and the design of the nave wall with its stacked arcades; notice how each arch, large or small, springs from its own capital on its own applied colonnette, just as in the Cluny-type churches of Burgundy, and those that must reach the transverse arches of the main barrel vault are very long, but every arch has its own "footprint" on the floor (so you can read them off the plan!).  That compound "footprint" of colonnettes attached to a core pier indicates what we call a compound pier.  Now, this logic of columns, capitals, and arches is just a new and wonderful development of the ancient basic idea of superimposed orders.

[MG 186] [G 322] [G 323] [G 324]  The Church of St. Sernin at Toulouse in SW France (see MAP 18), although its façade was never finished, still less its intended towers, with its five-aisled nave (when counting, the nave is counted, too), is perhaps the finest Pilgrimage church, and over the centuries it has been less altered (although much restored in the 19th century) than the others.  The tall, tall crossing tower is 13th century.  Everything that we can't quite deduce from the plan can be read in the elevation and cross section.  The outer aisles are roofed lower, and light reaching the nave laterally comes through the gallery from its windows; we see them, too, in the exterior photo [G 322].  The most exciting exterior view, as at Cluny, is from the east [G 323], with the cluster of low apses belonging to the radial chapels and the transept chapels around the tall principal apse, anchored by the long horizontal of the huge transept, but as at Compostela most beautiful of all is the majestic, solid but not ponderous, perspective of the nave.  The hanging chandeliers and the distant altar give you an idea of the scale (yet Cluny III was larger, and at 99' from the floor its main vault was the highest in pre-Gothic France).

[K 50]  The Church of La Madeleine at Vézelay has perhaps the most well known tympanum sculpture; with Christ in the center as at Autun, its subject matter is rarer than a Last Judgment; it is the Mission of the Apostles at Pentecost (Acts 2).  Because the apostles are to go out and spread the gospel to all lands, in the compartments around the main picture are very odd representations of foreigners, such as were mentioned in third- or fourth-hand accounts in manuscript books describing far-off places that no one had visited in person: two men with pigs' snouts for noses derive from some traveler's having said that in Ethiopia men are pig-nosed!  When transportation and communications are terribly limited it is understandable that people might be fascinated by almost any "precious" tidbit of information; consider how today many will believe almost anything about extraterrestrials, which, similarly, they can know nothing about.  In the voussoirs around the tympanum are the signs of the zodiac, again to signify the universality of the Mission.  It is easy to become distracted by the iconography and forget to look at the art, at the style of the sculpture.  It is extraordinary and wonderful, elongated expressively, gesticulatory and animated.  It is utterly different from earlier, sometimes awkward departures from naturalism.  No one could mistake this for inability to imitate nature; it is a style of art that has nothing to do with imitation or the empirical study of organic articulation or any sort of illusionism.  What has happened is that many generations of workshop tradition and familiarity with late Roman provincial monuments (which also accounts for the use of fluted pilasters that we saw in Autun Cathedral), after a whole generation of Romanesque architectural sculpture since the time of the Cluny capitals with the Tones of Music, etc., in the hands of a very gifted and confident sculptor with a powerful vision of what he wants to accomplish, has coalesced in an unforgettable, unified style.  Notice the hems of the drapery, where we see the very apotheosis of that ancient uplifted bit of drapery that we have been noticing since the end of the 5th century B.C.  It is hard to imagine developing this style much further in the same direction.  Indeed, in about 15 years, up around Paris, we shall have the genesis of a whole new approach, a new beginning.

[K 324]  The trumeau is the center post supporting the main lintel of a church's portal.  Those at Moissac and Souillac both are decorated with crisscrossed, exotically stylized animals.  The crisscross decorative arrangement comes from contemporary manuscripts: an initial I, for example, might be ornamented in this way.  But the stylization of the animals also derives from Middle Eastern metalwork vessels, a certain number of which had been imported into Europe, and survived, which Europeans metalsmiths had been inspired by (this inspiration is obvious in some 12th century animal-vessels made for pouring water on the priest's hands preparatory to the Mass).  Romanesque architectural sculpture uses this style much as Late Roman used vine scrolls, with or without animals and figures.  The Moissac trumeau on the adjacent side has a cross-legged prophet in an elongated gesticulatory style of great power, refinement, and expression, comparable to that of the Christ in the Vézelay tympanum.

HALL CHURCHES

[MG 33] The façade of Notre Dame la Grande de Poitiers is broad and low, approximately square.  This is because it fronts a church with aisles nearly as high (given the slope of the roof) as its nave (see the next).  Such Romanesque churches are found in southwest France (hall churches, later, are popular in Germany).  Its portals are recessed with setbacks and with colonnettes on the jambs.  Sculpture is confined to blind arcades on the façade--very Romanish, indeed.  It is as different as can be from Cluny III or Autun or a Pilgrimage Church.

[G 313] [K 200]  For the character of the interior space of one of these Hall Churches, we turn to the Abbey Church at St. Savin sur Gartempe.  Free-standing pure columns alone directly support an arcade on which the continuous barrel vault (without heavier transverse arches) rests.  The aisles are similarly vaulted.  The style has its own simple majesty.  The plastered continuous barrel vault invites painted decoration, which here is preserved.  The flattened drapery folds and the gesticulatory expressiveness are comparable with Romanesque sculpture and manuscript illustrations.  The painter's Tower of Babel not only is small (the same principal as with the buildings on the Column of Trajan and in earlier medieval art) but is approximately Romanesque in style--they know no more about ancient Mesopotamian architecture than they do about the physiognomy of Ethiopians.  We have lost most of the wall paintings of this period.

[1617]  One of the most remarkable and wonderful surviving Romanesque historical and artistic documents is an embroidery.  We call it The Bayeux Tapestry, but it is not what we mean by that word.  It is yards and yards of hand-loomed linen, embroidered in wool, almost entirely in chain stitch, with which you can fill in areas of solid color as well as make strong outlines.  Its date is certain; it was made almost immediately (but so much embroidery wasn't done in a day) after the invasion of England, culminating in the Battle of Hastings in 1066, by William of Normandy, William the Conqueror.  Traditionally it was made "by" (at the behest of) Queen Matilda.  Even without making allowance for the embroidery medium, or the fact that it was made in Normandy rather than central France, its approach to composition and its figure style are quite compatible with the style of the vault of St. Savin sur Gartempe.  Like the Parthenon frieze or the windings of the Column of Trajan, the Bayeux Tapestry is endlessly interesting from end to end.  It records in short texts labelling vivid embroidered pictures the whole history of the campaign: diplomatic missions, the army crossing the English Channel in boats, and all, not only the Battle of Hastings itself, but it is a detail from the Battle that you have in your Print, vividly illustrating the text, HIC CECIDERUNT SIMUL ANGLI ET FRANCI IN PRELIO = Here fell at one and the same time English and French in battle.  You don't need illusionism to convey the shouts and groans or the cry of a horse breaking its neck, and we hardly notice that red, green, yellow, black and white are the only colors.

[K 204]  Coming from these (deliberately--to maximize the contrast between the styles) the Bronze Baptismal Font of St. Barthelémy at Liège by Renier de Huy is even more remarkable.  It is a little later, but that is not the reason for its classical-looking naturalism, its suave refinement, its superb mastery of bronze casting and finishing.  This work comes from the valley of the Meuse River (Verdun, of World War I fame, is on the Meuse; the river runs northward, from France, through Belgium, into Holland), so it is called the Mosan style.  Back to Carolingian times, this region had a strong classical tradition.  The artist and/or the prelate who commissioned the font had in mind one of the Wonders in Solomon's temple, made by Hiram of Tyre, a Phoenician (I Kings 7: 23-26), hence the 12 oxen, but in Christianity they refer to the 12 Disciples.  The way that the waters of the Jordan rise conically and ensure Jesus' modesty may come from a Byzantine prototype (cf. [MG 42]).  The soft and natural drapery, responsive to the bodies inside it, the gentle faces with softly waving hair framing them, and, most of all, the diagonally draped figure in process of pivoting and turning his head are an astonishing anticipation of High Gothic figure style a century later, to the formation of which this Mosan work may have contributed.

NORMAN AND ANGLO-NORMAN CHURCHES

[MG 45] [G 263] [G 329]  At Caen (to Americans, the city nearest the D-Day beaches) William the Conqueror founded two monastic churches: the Abbaye aux Hommes, St. Etienne, and the Abbaye aux Dames, Ste. Trinité, similar and equal but not quite alike, the examples we use to define Norman Romanesque style.  Everything about them is important.  The two-tower façade is both a development from the early medieval Westwerk (as at St. Pantaleon, Köln) and the starting point for the Gothic façade (as at Chartres, for example, [G 269]).  The upper parts of the towers (as you might intuit just by looking at them) were finished later than the lower parts.  The masonry is of the highest quality, which, as we shall see, permitted innovations in vaulting.  The nave of St. Etienne has the logical design, with colonnettes provided for each arch, as we have seen elsewhere; like the Pilgrimage churches, it has a gallery over the aisles, but, like Cluny, it also has a clerestory.  The architect dared combine them because his new high vaults don't weigh as much, and they don't deliver their burden and thrust evenly like a barrel vault, because they are groin vaults with ribs.  Let's review a bit to get our ducks in a row: groin vaults go back at least to Rome; ribs were used, e.g., in the domes of both the Pantheon and Hagia Sophia, but all of those were in concrete and/or brick.  Even as St. Etienne is rising, so is Speyer Cathedral (see below) with mortared cut stone (masonry) groin vaults, but without ribs, and St. Ambrogio in Lombard Milan with brick-ribbed groin vaults but not in mortared cut stone (masonry) but a brick and mortar mix.  The two Caen Abbayes have cut-stone groin vaults with cut-stone ribs, and the construction method is new: the ribs are built first, and when they are set wooden movable forms are hung from the ribs, and on these properly curved forms the masonry vaults, one section, from rib to rib, at a time.  Before, one had to construct, from the floor up, in wood, stout forms on which to lay the vaults, one whole bay at a time; it took more wood, more time, more labor.  Now only the forms (centering) for the slender ribs have to be erected all the way from the floor.  What is more, since the curvatures to the lines of the ribs channels the weight/thrust almost entirely into the piers, and the rest of the vault can be thinner, so lighter, the wall has less work.  So we come back to the clerestory; this is why the architect dared a clerestory above a gallery and why the nave is better lit.  This is a major breakthrough, very elegant engineering, and all done by practice, tectonic vision, and rule of thumb.  This kind of vaulting will be one of the ingredients that go into the birth of Gothic engineering.  St. Etienne has square bays; the intermediate lighter piers correspond to a transverse rib (not heavier than the other ribs), on which the diagonal ribs intersect, making in the vault a square bay divided into six sections: a sexpartite rib vault.  The diagonal ribs are depressed (less than a semicircle) so as not to rise too much higher than the transverse rib.  Now let's look at the nunnery church, Ste. Trinité.  It also has ribbed vaults, but its cross-section is different from St. Etienne's; it has tallish aisles without a gallery, but a blind triforium such as we saw in Cluny III.  The cross-section is very useful; it shows how a triforium corresponds on the interior to the sloping aisle roof outside; one more thing: hidden under that aisle roof is a half-arch buttress.  This is the kind of arch buttress that, moved outside and grounded in a tower buttress, will become a flying buttress in Gothic architecture.

[MG 190]  The most splendid Anglo-Norman church is Durham Cathedral, in the far north of England [MAP 18].  A few traits, such as the |XX| seven-part vaulting bays, are unique to Durham, and the masonry throughout is much heavier (also, it is a very large church), but in all its basic principals it is similar to St. Etienne: both gallery and clerestory, alternating more and less massive piers, the major, compound piers being those that divide one bay from the next (the minor piers at Durham are an English specialty, cylindrical with geometric patterns deeply carved into them).  Under the aisle roofs are half-arch buttresses similar to those of Ste. Trinité.  The original apse was replaced by an English Gothic rectangular east end (see Salisbury Cathedral in the next section).  In the long view of the nave, look how the vaults change beyond the break at the crossing; beyond the crossing the vaults are Gothic quadripartite rib vaults, whose pattern is more connected and with less distinguishable separate bays.  Durham Cathedral, sited on the cliff overlooking the river, adorns many travel posters; it dominates the city magnificently.  In [G 360] you can see the tall crossing tower which we saw breaking the continuous rhythm of the vaults in the interior.

RHINELAND CHURCHES

[G 492] [G 500]  Even the beginner in reading architectural style can see that these two churches belong to the same building tradition and that tradition rooted in Ottonian building as in St. Pantaleon, Köln, and St. Michael's Hildesheim.  Maria Laach is an abbey church, good sized, but Worms Cathedral is a great city cathedral.  But both have two transepts with round towers attached, and both have crossing towers over the intersections of both transepts and the nave.  Both have the exterior walls articulated with the rows of arches and lesenas (the vertical flat strips), which come from the brick work of Lombardy (cf. the taller tower of St. Ambrogio, Milan, in [G 165]) and which we already noted on the Westwerk of St. Pantaleon.  Speyer Cathedral, mentioned above, the Imperial church of the Holy Roman Empire, is of the same type and even grander than Worms.  Although these Rhineland churches in the nave still have solid walls, with neither triforium nor gallery, they have colonnettes running from the floor to each arch, including one all the way to the transverse arch dividing bay from bay, making compound piers and articulating the nave wall, and they are vaulted, with fine, solid stone vaults, plain groin vaults without ribs here.  The basic design is very traditional, but the vaulting is excellent, and at Speyer the vaults are 107' from the floor, higher than the pointed barrel vault of Cluny III; only the great Gothic cathedral vaults will be higher.

ITALY: LOMBARDY

[G 165] [G 166] [MG 174]  St. Ambrogio in Milan (there has been a church here almost since the time of St. Ambrose himself; he died in A.D. 397) also is true to its old regional tradition.  It is built in brick.  It has an atrium, and its façade has a tribune from which a crowd in the atrium could be addressed, just as Old St. Peter's had.  Its bell towers stand close to it but are built separate from it, as at Sant' Apollinare in Classe (not to mention Giotto's tower at Florence Cathedral and the leaning tower at Pisa Cathedral).  The small, plain tower is older than the Romanesque church.  The octagon for the unique tower over the last bay before the choir, which was an excellent afterthought, is formed with squinches from arch to arch of the crossing square.  True to Italian tradition, the interior is broad and low, compared with Romanesque churches north of the Alps.  But, it has compound piers, and a gallery over the aisles, and it is groin vaulted . . . with ribs, but ribs built like Roman ribs, and the vaults are very heavy, so in the nave there is no clerestory (the brilliant idea of the octagon tower with windows compensates).  The diagonal ribs are complete semi-circles; since a2 + b2 = c2, it follows that the groin vaults are domed, and, as you see in the photo and in [MG 174], the feeling is almost as if you actually had domes over each bay, separated by the lower transverse arches.  As you plainly see, just because two churches both "have groin vaults" does not mean that they are alike

ITALY: TUSCANY

[B 428]  Also, just because churches are in the same modern nation does not imply that they are alike.  Tuscan Romanesque is very special.  The Baptistery of Florence is much older than the Cathedral it stands in front of.  In fact, dating from the middle of the 11th century, it is a little older than most French Romanesque churches.  Central-planned, of course; baptisteries are.  It is a perfect octagon with an octagonal pointed dome (there are beautiful mosaics on the interior of the dome, which date from the end of the 13th century and are Tuscan Byzantine in style) and a lantern at the top.  The sculptures over the three portals, the pedimented window frames, and, of course, their famous bronze doors (in ART 1441) are later.  We look at this building a little puzzled.  Somehow it looks "Roman", but there is nothing like it in Roman architecture.  Roman architecture never had marble veneer on the outside of the building, nor is the marble veneer on the inside of the Pantheon, for example, flat and linear, as this is.  What is truly Roman about it is the veritably classical feeling for superimposed and stacked orders, in two clearly defined storeys, and the proportions of the blind arcades, and the true entablature between the arcades and the genuine attic, almost as if the architect had gotten an idea from something in Rome, such as the Arch of Titus.  So, since "Romanesque" means "Romanish", this in its own way, is more so than the northern buildings.

[G 156] [G 157]  Almost exactly the same commentary applies to San Miniato al Monte, on the other side of the Arno River on the hill looking down on the center of Florence.  On the one hand, the flat, linear geometry of the patterns in white marble and dark gray pietra serena, on the other, the classically proportioned arches with a real entablature (almost) and, on the second storey of the façade, screening the west end of the taller nave (which, yes, has clerestory windows) we have what can only be described as a linear design of a four-column temple façade (remember the Ionic temple of Fortuna Virilis in Rome).  Un-Roman to the nth degree is the emphasis on flatness.  San Miniato has the plan (and the open timber roof) of an Early Christian basilica; even its columns look classical.  But it is divided into bays by the diaphragm arches (also in the aisles), and, corresponding to these are compound piers, real Romanesque compound piers with colonnettes, making the abbabba rhythm that we saw first in St. Demetrius, Thessaloniki, and, again, in St. Michael's, Hildesheim (which is only a little older than San Miniato).

[G 184] [G 185]  The greatest Tuscan church that is really Romanesque, although its façade and some other exterior finishing, as well as its wedding cake Baptistery and, of course, the Leaning Tower, are Tuscan Gothic of a special kind, is Pisa Cathedral.  Basically basilica-shaped, with a flat coffered ceiling, but with aisles and galleries in its transept as well as its nave (which you can read from the windows and roof levels on the exterior), with uninterrupted Roman columns (real ones, taken from an ancient building)--it still doesn't feel "Roman" exactly.  It's the zebra striping (from Islamic architecture, you will recall) and the pointed arch at the crossing, and the crossing tower set on an octagon formed with squinches that give this Tuscan Romanesque interior its exotic flavor.  Also, it has rather tall proportions.  All these traits taken together give it its unique character.