Romanesque Art – �The Art and Architecture of the Romanesque Period
Presentation by
Dr. Shubham Shiva
Romanesque art refers to the art of Europe from the late 10th century to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century or later, depending on the region.
The first major movement of Medieval art, the style known as "Romanesque" can be used to cover all derivations of Roman architecture in the West, from the fall of Rome (c.450 CE) until the advent of the Gothic style around 1150.
Traditionally, however, the term refers to the specific style of architecture, along with sculpture and other minor arts that appeared across France, Germany, Italy, and Spain during the 11th century.
Richer and more grandiose than anything witnessed during the era of Early Christian Art, the Romanesque style is characterized by a massiveness of scale, reflecting the greater social stability of the new Millennium, and the growing confidence of the Christian Church in Rome, a Church whose expansionism set in motion the Crusades to free the Holy Land from the grip of Islam.
Later, the success of the Crusaders and their acquisition of Holy Relics stimulated further construction of new churches across Europe in the fully-fledged Romanesque style of architecture (Norman architecture in Britain and Ireland). In turn, this building program produced a huge demand for decorative religious art, including sculpture, stained glass, and ecclesiastical metalwork of all types. By the 12th century, certain architects and sculptors had become highly sought-after by ecclesiastical and also secular patrons.
Background (c.450-1000)
Between Romanesque and antique art there is an interval of many centuries, during which the Northern tribes made their entry into history. This period of folk migration is one of prehistoric arts and crafts, which are well known.
Various discoveries of golden ornaments and coins show the long route followed by the Germanic tribes in their journey from the East into France and Spain.
The careless and simple beauty of the jewelry of the Merovingian King, Childeric, who died in 481, betrays the influence of classical traditions, which were not, however, just feebly accepted, but adapted in a masterful way, often without full understanding.
The Merovingian period was not a bridge between antiquity and the Middle Ages; it produced no late flowering of ancient culture and literature, such as Gothic Roman culture did in the writings of Cassiodorus or Boetius.
After Theodoric the Great had secured a leading position by alliances with all the Germanic states, it seemed at first as though Rome, under the Gothic rule, would peacefully combine the old and the new; but the Merovingians, under Clovis, made this impossible.
In the East, Byzantium was able to hold out for some centuries only because she could draw upon the hardy highland peoples of the Balkans and Asia Minor. In western Europe, the center of evolution moved northwards, for there were its new sources of energy.
The old Viking Decorative art is often discussed and described but is usually misunderstood: the emphasis is always laid on the interlacing straps or ribbons, the knots, and loops, and unconvincing attempts are made to relate these to the technique of weaving. But more important than their ultimate origin is their autocratic disdain of symmetry, their avoidance of geometrical forms, and their restless, undisciplined energy. If one wanted to invent a new art to express an age of restless transition, one could imagine nothing more appropriate than this, which never derives its motives from geometry, but always creates a living and organic pattern.
In the illuminated manuscripts of the early Christian period, in particular those of the Irish and the Anglo-Saxons - peoples who as early as the fifth century had their Christian churches and monasteries - the spiritual character of this new art is clear.
Due to the far-reaching missionary activities of the Irish monks, priceless illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells, and also manuscripts with richly illuminated initials from such Continental centers as St Gall, Paris, Toulouse, and Laon were created. This art of Northern and Eastern Europe includes lively trellis-work and animal motifs, visible in the miniatures of its manuscripts, or the ornamental metal-work of tools and weapons, or its brooches - the so-called fibulae.
Only the West is still faithful to the style of the Byzantine and Armenian miniatures, but without succumbing to hieratic stylization, indulging rather in the unruly, vital fantasies of the Age of Migration.
In their architecture, on the other hand, they were more influenced by the forms of Roman Art indeed, this architecture was at first a synthesis of antique prototypes, rather than a new creation.
The tomb of Theodoric the Great in Ravenna; Charlemagne's chapel in Aix, built on the model of the church of San Vitale, and consecrated in the year 805; and the Carolingian gatehouse at Lorsch, are various stages in the acceptance of these traditional forms, which the new rulers adopted with delight. Thus the whole of the Carolingian period, from 700 to 900, must be regarded as pre-Romanesque, and in a certain sense as a survival of antiquity.
Feudalism and Warfare
Much of Europe was affected by feudalism, in which peasants held tenure from local rulers over the land they farmed in exchange for military service.
As a result, they could be called on for local spats as well as to follow their lord across Europe to the Crusades.
The Crusades (1095–1270) brought about substantial migration and the resultant spread of ideas and trade skills, particularly the building of fortifications and the metalworking for the provision of arms, which was also applied to the fitting and decoration of buildings.
The continual movement of people, rulers, nobles, bishops, abbots, craftsmen, and peasants was an important factor in creating homogeneous building methods and a recognizable Romanesque style, despite regional differences.
Life became less secure after the Carolingian period, resulting in castles built at strategic points. Many were constructed as strongholds of the Normans, descendants of the Vikings who invaded northern France in 911.
Political struggles also resulted in the fortification of towns by rebuilding and strengthening walls that remained from the Roman period.
One of the most notable surviving fortifications is that of the city of Carcassonne. The enclosure of towns resulted in a style of tall, narrow townhouses with limited living space. These often surrounded communal courtyards, as at San Gimignano in Tuscany.
Growing Prosperity
As Europe grew steadily more prosperous during this period, the art of the highest quality was no longer confined to the royal court and a small circle of monasteries as in the Carolingian and Ottonian periods.
Monasteries remained important, especially those of the new Cistercian, Cluniac, and Carthusian orders that spread across Europe.
City churches, including those on pilgrimage routes and many in small towns and villages, were elaborately decorated. Indeed, these have often survived when cathedrals and city churches have been rebuilt, while Romanesque royal palaces have not.
The lay artist, Nicholas of Verdun, became a valued figure known across the continent.
Most masons and goldsmiths were now lay professionals rather than monastic clergy, and lay painters like Master Hugo were the majority by the end of the period.
The iconography of their church work was likely determined in consultation with clerical advisers.
Romanesque Art: Spiritual Foundations
About 1000 CE the influence of Christianity had spread to all parts of Europe. Although the course of history, during this process, was not untroubled, and although the Middle Ages were disturbed by violent conflicts between Emperor and Pope, and by the Crusades, one cannot fail to realize the power and the unity of the feelings quietly at work behind the turmoil.
Followers of a faith which taught them to worship the Sun as the life-giving Power and personified the forces of Nature as gods, yet fearing life in spite of all their magic, the heathens encountered the Christian philosophy. It seemed to them that there was great magic in the Christian scriptures, and they painted the letters as living creatures. Knowledge of Latin taught them the values of a high and ancient civilization, to which they dedicated their unspoiled energies. For these peoples, Christianity was not a refuge for the weary, but a new assurance of life, an ordering of the universe such as they had not found in the old doctrine. Since there was a Judge in heaven, who looked into the hearts of mankind, and since the new faith told them, even to the least particulars, what was right and wrong, the young Christian could really look up to God as a loving father in heaven. Only general piety can explain the fact that the influence of authority was often incredibly disproportionate to its power.
While one cannot find a common denominator for the infinitely rich and varied life of many centuries, the Romanesque world does seem to be one vast community, united by Christianity. The Middle Ages have been called a night lasting almost a thousand years, but the night was bright with stars. In spite of the universal religious control, Romanesque, and much later, Gothic man, was able to realize his individual personality. Art needed powerful stimuli; at first, there were churches and monasteries, then universities and religious orders, and finally states, cities, and individual patrons.
The result of all these various forms was that little remained of the antique forms, apart from the ornamental motifs. The unifying sense of Romanesque art appears in the intimate union of poetry and music; metrical accentuations, and, above all, the rhymes, indicate the revival and independence of the sense of rhythm, to which the Latin quantitative meter had become unintelligible.
The founders of the monastery of Cluny, at the beginning of the tenth century, reformed the rules of the Benedictine Order in accordance with the spirit of the times, threw off the last traces of Byzantine stiffness, and established a spiritual order, above political confusion and threatening social dissolution, which made war upon ignorance and immorality and provided a refuge for scholars. This combination of religious idealism with organizing ability gave life a purpose; what remained after the disintegration of the Carolingian empire, which had been too closely wedded to antiquity, had now to find its place in the new religious community, which laid down the future conditions of European civilization. For everyone, a spiritual attitude was prescribed, to which the individual was subordinated, and which was maintained in the peasant's hut as well as the king's court, in the monastic cell no less than in the bishop's palace. Only thus could such a personality as Bernard of Clairvaux, a simple abbot, not only govern the Cistercian Order for a whole generation but rule the destinies of the entire Western world.
The finest expression of this monastic piety was the Romanesque style.
Romanesque Church Architecture
In Romanesque religious architecture practical considerations were gradually superseded by aesthetics; from the outwardly simple meeting house of the Christian basilica, the church, even in its external aspect, became a majestic monument.
The individual parts of the early Christian basilica survived the longest, but the whole aspect of the structure very quickly changed. The ratio of height to width, which in early Christian art were approximately equal, increased until the nave was sometimes twice as high as the building was wide. The bell tower, the campanile, which had hitherto stood by itself, now moved up against the body of the church, which often had two such towers. At first, the twin towers were built on either side of the façade, while the ground plan assumed the form of the Latin cross, with a transept coming between the chancel and the nave. The crossing of the nave and transept was crowned by a dome or a tower. In the apse, where the choir stood, there was too little room for the clergy, always very numerous in the great monastery churches; so the nave was continued beyond the crossing, providing a chancel for the choir. As a rule, this was shut off from the nave and the transepts by stone barriers or screens, and the screen facing the nave often contained a sort of platform, the bacterium or lectern, from which the Gospels were read.
Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel in Aachen, modeled on San Vitale,
Ravenna is an early example of
Romanesque architecture.
When wooden roofs, still very usual in the Romanesque churches, were abandoned - often for practical reasons, and on account of the danger of fire - in favor of vaulted roofs, the crossing of nave and transepts determined the whole ground plan of the Romanesque basilica.
On account of the strong lateral thrust the semi-cylindrical barrel vaulting was seldom adopted, but preferably the cross vaulting which had already been used by the Romans for covering wide spans. This cross-vaulting is produced when two barrel vaults intersect each other at right angles above a square ground plan. The load is then carried by the four corner posts or piers. But since the nave is twice as high as the aisles, the so-called engaged Romanesque system becomes a necessity. In this, the square intersection or crossing determines the span of the rest of the nave, which is intersected at intervals by two bays from the aisles.
The columns of the nave which carried the heaviest load were gradually replaced by piers until Romanesque architects came to use only the latter. As vertical components of the walls they belonged to the body of the building, while the columns were parts of the articulated structure; it was only in the late antique that they were inharmoniously burdened with masses of rising masonry. This substitution of the pier for the column in Romanesque architecture is a simplification compared to the inclusion of the forecourt of the basilica between the towers, whereby the ancient atrium became the so-called parvis, and the ancient font shrank to the proportions of a holy-water stoup.
On the other hand, the old Roman colonnade or peristyle was revived in the form of the cloister connecting the church and the monastery. The Romanesque church was almost always connected with a monastic foundation, in which all sorts of rooms were required for the community life of the monks - such as the chapter hall for assemblies, the refectory for meals, and the dormitory for sleeping. The whole abbey was often surrounded by fortified walls and towers and constituted a little self-contained city. As a rule, the only departure from the plan of the basilica was the baptistery, which was usually a transeptal building, such as is represented in miniature by the domed reliquary from the Guelph treasury.
In the North, however, larger churches, tending toward the cruciform or transeptal plan, were sometimes built over Roman foundations. Such was the church of St Gereon in Cologne. In the case of castle or fortress chapels, the form of the double church was adopted in order to save space; here two chapels were built with the same plan, one above the other, the lower of the two often being used as a sepulchral chapel. Examples of this kind are to be seen, above all, in Nuremberg, Eger, and Goslar. The ordinary Romanesque church, where the whole of the chancel, the presbyterium, was raised several steps above the nave, while under it was the krypta, a vaulted crypt, the burial place of the founders of the church and other notable people, is a variation of this arrangement.
From these basic forms, the Romanesque architecture of Europe evolved ever richer, more beautiful, and refined methods of construction. The various ways of applying and carrying out these methods in the individual portions of the fabric gave the Romanesque building its special character.
Romanesque Architectural Monuments
The influence of antiquity radiating from the South of France was felt as far northwards as Cluny in Burgundy, the province on the frontier of the Celtic-French and Germanic populations.
In the great Benedictine church at Cluny, begun in 1089, the Southern French barrel vault was adapted to a cruciform basilica, of the type which had evolved in the North.
Only from reconstruction is it possible to realize the magnificence of this Romanesque building, which rose from the ground plan of a two-armed cross, with its various towers, crossings, and apses, and which, with its five naves and its two transepts, was regarded at the time as the most important church in Christendom.
What cannot be seen from the few existing remains may be inferred from the details of the monastic church at Vezelay, the Cathedral of Autun, and other French buildings.
Compactness and a tendency toward systematic sub-division were characteristic of Burgundian Romanesque; this may be seen also in the neighboring churches of western Switzerland, in the porch of Romainmotier, or the great collegiate church of Payerne.
Benedictine church at Cluny
Cathedral of Autun
Tympanum depicting the “Last Judgment” from the Saint-Lazare Cathedral, Autun, France.
c. 1120-1130 or c. 1130-1145.
The base of tympanum is approximately 21′ in length
Contemporary Norman buildings are far more primitive-looking. Where southern influences had not penetrated, even after the introduction of stone, the old system of timber construction dictated the form of the structure, and it was not until after the conquest of England in 1066, that the Normans ruled over wide areas of Europe, that their increased self-consciousness found expression in architecture.
The conventual churches of Sainte- Trinite, and Saint-Etienne at Caen, founded by William the Conqueror and his wife, and erected about this time, concentrate all their strength in the piers and buttresses, the walls being little more than connecting screens. A new chivalric order of architecture had made its appearance, from which the Gothic would presently develop in all parts of Europe.
It was in Germany, however, that Romanesque architecture lingered longer than elsewhere, and produced some of its finest masterpieces. If we regard it as a style of a period of suspicion, then the buildings of the end of the close of the 'Staufisch' era must be included in it: the magnificent churches of Limburg, Bamberg, and Naumburg, which, with other buildings of the period, are often attributed to a so-called transitional style, or to a separate 'German Gothic art' style. These terms have little justification when we reflect that those buildings represent the completion and perfection of the Romanesque rather than a step towards a new style.
Describing the developments in chronological order:
In the German-speaking East, as in Normandy, the ceilings of the basilicas - apart from the crypts and the apses - were for a long time always flat.
The collegiate church at Gernrode, founded in 961, like the churches built on the model of the conventional church of St Michael, in Hildesheim, and the great basilica at Hersfeld, are of this type.
So are the churches of St Emmeram and St Jacob in Regensburg, the church of St Peter in Salzburg, which was restored after a fire in 1127; and the cathedral of Gurk in Carinthia.
In the Rhineland, in the course of the 11th century, a series of cathedrals were built with vaulted ceilings. In 1016, the old cathedral of Trier was rebuilt; and from the same century date, the three magnificent cathedrals of Speyer, Mainz, and Worms were.
As well as the Romanesque ground-plan, imposed by the vault, they had the double chancel characteristic of German churches.
This plan was introduced in the famous church of St Gall at the beginning of the ninth century but is rarely seen south of the Alps, though one example is to be seen at Valpolicella, near Verona.
One of the principles of the Romanesque style was to lay the individual stones of ecclesiastical buildings in closely-set courses, but in Worms, we see a tendency - which came to fruition in Bamburg and Naumburg - to soften and enrich the rigid construction by ornamental forms of masonry.
The abbey church of Laach, in the Middle Rhine, discarded the conventional system, and to make more space the span of the vaulting was as great in the aisle as in the nave, with the result that the transverse arches of the bays were of different heights.
The monks, who were trained in the Benedictine traditions of Cluny, always built uniform, flat-ceilinged, triple-naved basilicas, with arches supported by columns, and without crypts, like the Minster at Schaffhausen.
A typical building of the end of the Romanesque period is the Minster at Basle, with a polygonal chancel, a gallery, and a triforium above the arcades of the nave. In the Gothic period, it was made wider, with five naves or aisles.
Of secular buildings, the most important, apart from the first urban dwelling houses, are castles and palaces. A fortified tower, the donjon, rectangular or circular in form, constituted the citadel, the place of refuge.
As long as its defensive function dictated its form, aesthetics had to give way to utilitarian considerations. Only after the eleventh century were separate dwelling houses built inside the larger fortresses and then they were often decorated outside.
Especially where the dwelling-house, as a prince's palace, was detached from the fortress and built in the open, as at Gelnhausen, the way was open for artistic developments.
In the existing remains at Gelnhausen, we see a trefoil arch above the entrance, besides groups of late Romanesque windows, and there is also a Romanesque gatehouse, in the upper floor of which Romanesque rose windows were probably inserted.
The ornamental forms applied to secular buildings were those of ecclesiastical architecture. The walls were divided by pilasters, and by the round corbels characteristic of Romanesque art.
Dwarf-arched galleries, like those built inside the churches, in the triforium, are often seen on the outside of Romanesque buildings.
In these, as in the pillars of the naves, or cloisters, we constantly find the Romanesque cushion or cuboid capital.
The transition from the round shaft of the column to the square spring of the arch is affected fairly neatly by the interpenetration of the cube and sphere.
After the middle of the twelfth century, but not before, it was always ornamented. Other artistic features of Romanesque buildings are to be considered under the headings of sculpture, painting, carving, etc.
Romanesque Sculpture, Painting and Decorative Arts
Long after the ornamental animal motifs of the period of migrations had been forgotten, sculptured animal forms of all kinds played an important part in the details of Romanesque buildings.
In spite of their fantastic character, one can trace a definite development, an approach to greater realism. Nordic fantasies are mingled with the dragons, lions, basilisks, and vipers mentioned in the Bible and in ancient fables, as we see them represented in medieval bestiaries.
The carvings so often found on windows, capitals, pedestals, friezes, corbels, tables of arches, and elsewhere, are the prelude, and accompaniment, of the sculpture of the human figure with which Romanesque art enriched the Christian world.
The invasion of the cultural area of the Mediterranean by the spiritual power of Islam in the eighth century finally separated Europe from the Oriental world.
While the influence of Islam aroused the first opposition to the veneration of images in Byzantium, Italy refused to take part in the great iconoclastic revolt.
Many Byzantine artists, workers in mosaic and carpet-weavers above all, made their way into Italy, bringing wIth them such images of the saints as they could rescue.
At this time Italy severed the political bond with Byzantium and elected the Frankish King Charlemagne as the protector of the Italian church.
The Romanesque Painting uses the narrative of the religious passages as a way to portray them in a simple sequence easy to understand by the spectator.
The Romanesque Paint has a clear symbolic intention as well as divulges and narrative of the religious theme and utilizes for this purpose an anti-naturalistic representation of reality.
With decorative and divulge purposes the Romanesque painting serve well for ecclesiastic propaganda. All the figures in this painting have the same height and alike facial expressions and features.
Forced perspective subordinated to the narrative purpose of the religious Romanesque Paint.
Sculpture
Since the wall paintings and sculptures of the Carolingian period have almost completely disappeared we know only from written records that the churches of the North were decorated with paintings like those of the South.
There were two Northern additions to the iconography of the Italian church: the crucifixion of Christ and the Last Judgment, the latter being a theme that later Romanesque art never tired of representing. Still in rather low relief at first, the figures in the tympana of arches in the early cathedrals are crowded together in confusion.
Byzantine taste enclosed the figure of Christ in a mandorla (an elliptical aureole surrounding the whole figure; the word means, in Italian, an almond); the representation is more conventional but at the same time more plastic than was possible within the ancient nimbus. A century later the figures had become less conventional and national differences had modified the details.
The figures on the west front of the cathedral of Chartres, which were the work of one of the greatest of the medieval masters, still seem to be fastened to the pillars, but in the altar-front of the time of Henry II the figures begin to step out of the flat surface.
Their movement is still spasmodic and uncertain in the chancel screen of the Bamberg cathedral, but only a few years later, in the Adam doorway, they have the free and noble bearing of the figures of Naumberg, with their perfect individuality. These date from the beginning of the Gothic period.
Important Romanesque sculptors include Gislebertus (12th century), Master of Cabestany (12th century), Master Mateo (12th century), and Benedetto Antelami (active 1178-1196).
Painting
It is difficult to form any comprehensive idea of Romanesque painting and even harder in the case of the minor arts.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the West was flooded with examples of the minor Byzantine arts; but even before this, ecclesiastical respect for tradition had imposed the forms of early Christian and Byzantine art.
This idiom was very evident in Italy and the south of France; in Germany, the north of France, and England it was gradually superseded. It is often very difficult to decide what was due to Byzantine influence and what to the individual, Nordic sense of form.
For example, the coronation mantle of Henry II is believed to be the product of a Bavarian convent. It was probably women's hands that gave the figures their naively natural attitudes, in spite of the respect for tradition shown by the symmetry of the design.
Painting in the Romanesque period has a notable development because the vast space of smooth walls was appropriate to the pictorial decoration; therefore, the painting also subordinated art to architecture. The need to get a quick religious impromptu in the spectator as soon as they approach the interior of these buildings made the use of painting a valuable resource.
A clear Eastern influence through the art of Byzantium can be seen in the lack of perspective, plain colors, symmetrical composition, the rigidity of the figures, and the blankness and expressiveness in faces, always showing their amazing eyes. Another element is the marked frontality of the figures that strengthen the communication with the spectators.
The technique used is that of the Fresco, notable examples are:
The Catalan Romanesque churches use effulgent colors and abstract motifs of symbolic meaning.
The Italian churches, where painted religious scenes already showed true commitment to copy nature with fidelity.
These are paintings created to decorate and as means of dissemination of religion; therefore topics revolve around those themes. The images of these paintings become an intellectual communication vehicle.
The paintings were destined to illustrate the religious and idyllic passages and reinforce the clear understanding through the narratives; use a simple image representation supported by intense and contrasting colors, as well as black-out liner contours against the simplest background possible.
Romanesque painting has therefore two important features one is its symbolic nature and the other is its narrative sense.
Romanesque painting’s general characteristics
It is used to accentuate religious messages with anti-naturalistic representation of reality.
Clear intent to represent the facts through the simple explanation of the sacred Word.
It has strong religious content through gestural representation.
Intensifies expressive representation through the frontality of the figures.
Bright and intense colors are used.
It uses the spatial hierarchy of topics.
Apply conventions in painting that allow a clear reading of images.
Reiteration in the use of two important themes: The Virgin and the Christ Penetrator (In Christian iconography, refers to a specific depiction of Christ) and narratives of the old or the New Testament.
Symmetrical composition.
The perspective of Tolomeo (divergent lines).
The hieratic and rigidity of the figures intensify the formality or seriousness of the religious theme.
Treatment of the figures in Romanesque painting:
Flat & Elongated
Without perspective or with a false perspective.
Gradually Stepping of characters with different sizes according to their relevance or hierarchy.
Eyes and hands with dimensions disproportionate to emphasize spiritual expression.
It uses a range of bright colors (red, yellow, orange, and blue)
Contiguous stripes of colors intensely contrasted with each other.
Use of the color black to outline the figures against the background.
Simplicity in the details.
Profiles with thick strokes.
Formal outlining.
“V” shaped feet.
The perspective of divergent lines.
Glass Painting in Romanesque Art
The glass painting was in this period also a format used to support religious propaganda, making good use of the possibility to narrate the passages of the bible with a potent vehicle; using the strong power that the light aport coming from the exterior of the buildings through the decorated glass windows. These colored and beautiful windows were definitely an eye-catching element that produce and overwhelming feelings in the spectator; at the same time they give a direct-to-the-point message, driven to effectively represent the fervor and adoration of the religious characters.
The use of barrel vaults made possible the construction of huge interior spaces; built entirely of stone, but since the roofs were extremely heavy, the walls had to be tremendously thick to prevent buckling. Strong walls also meant fewer windows, so the insides of Romanesque churches often look dim and feel like fortresses. It is for this reason that the only sources of natural light become so important and since they were so intensely colored it is hard to miss them.
Early Romanesque style stained glass was influenced by the linear patterning, abstraction of the form and severe frontality also found in Byzantine Art. Most church windows exhibit individual monumental figures with few tiers (a row placed above and behind another row) in lozenge-shaped groupings.
The stained glass technique in the Romanesque period give some significant works of art; been the predecessor of the magnificent glass windows of the gothic period. their beauty; which can still be appreciated in the buildings dated from those early times in the Middle Ages shows the talent of the glass blower artisans who use important skills passed from the Byzantine period and passing them enriched to the next generations.
A strong or sudden change in political, social, and religious conditions through times jeopardized the survival of stained glass beginning in the sixteenth century; making the decline and destruction of a high quantity of those magnificent glasses that unfortunately had been a loss.
This effective format of painting was widely used further by the Gothic style with such profusion, beauty, and perfection in cathedrals and churches that is hard to think of this day in those religious buildings without the images of the glass painting windows coming immediately to our minds.
Since these glass paintings use the possibilities that light itself offers to this format so effectively, they continued used through times to the moderns day; although stained glass as a technique become a lost art; been substituted for new techniques of glass window painting in the renaissance period.
Romanesque Manuscripts
These manuscripts contained some of the best painting from the Romanesque period of art, as they were not restricted by the fresco medium; which was usually applied over thick walls. The manuscripts offer the possibility that could be highly detailed and the pictures were important; as many of the people who looked at the books could not read or write, so the images contribute to communicating the messages.
The majority of illuminated manuscripts are of a religious nature; usually, bibles are the case for the rest of the painting theme in Romanesque painting art. Miniature in many cases using intense and eye-catching colors was sometimes wrapped up by the text or accompanied by Initials or small text. Vivid colors in the figure’s clothing; contrasting with the simple backgrounds in wich they are set, help to get the messages with more effectivity.
The embellishment of text with gold or silver; gave the impression that the page had been literally illuminated, most books were produced by a team rather than by an individual. They were extremely expensive and only the clergy could afford them.
Those manuscripts in the Romanesque period have a distorted and very flat perspective and the feet are turned to the side, but the body is flat as well, similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
In the early Middle Ages, nearly all illustrated manuscripts were produced by monks. However, by the 15th-century artists in the towns were commissioned to do this work. Although they rarely signed their pieces, tax records suggest that these artists were often women.
Romanesque paint over wood board and crucifixes
Paintings over wood surfaces also have the same themes and characteristics as the rest of the painting that was made in the Romanesque period. Influenced by Byzantine elements and culture the Romanesque use vibrant colors and figures over a simple background, linear patterning, abstraction of the form, and severe frontality. The forced perspective and unnatural representation of the figures respond to the symbolic characteristics to carry the messages more effectively.
Detail of a Romanesque paint over a wood board.
Painted Romanesque Crucifix
Murals
From the early 11th century, Romanesque Churches were painted throughout in order to guide their predominantly illiterate congregations - an artistic evolution exemplified by the mural painting at Cluny (now destroyed). After 1100, this form of decoration spread to Cologne, Bonn, and other Rhineland areas of Germany, as well as Spain, where Islamic influences created brighter, more colorful murals.
The cloisters on the Island of Reichenau, in Lake Constance, as early as the tenth century an active artistic centre, enable us to form some notion, from the wall-paintings which are still preserved in the church of St George, at Oberzell, of the permanent wall-decorations to be found in almost all the larger churches of the time.
The paintings run along the walls between wide borders of scrollwork, and on the miters of the arches in the arcades the portrait busts of saints, or of superiors of the Order, are set in medallions. Where the pictures are not easily comprehensible they are elucidated by metrical inscriptions.
Illuminations
Romanesque illuminated manuscripts developed alongside murals.
But most important was the increased demand from the Cluniac, Cistercian and Benedictine Orders for religious books and Bibles, all of which had to be made by hand.
Important illuminated manuscripts included:
the Moralia Manuscript (c.1110),
Vita Mathildis (c.1110),
the St Albans Psalter (1120-30),
the Pantheon Bible (c.1125),
the Psalter of Henry de Blois (1140-60),
the Lambeth Bible (1150), and
The Gospel Book of Henry the Lion (c.1170).
Important centers involved in the making of illuminated manuscripts included:
Citeaux (the first Cistercian monastery),
Bury St Edmunds,
Helmarshausen monastery,
the Meuse river region, and
Salzburg.
General Decoration
We must not imagine Romanesque churches as bare, empty buildings. Even the floors and the flat wooden ceilings were not without decoration.
In the cathedral of Hildesheim, as in the crypt of St Gereon, in Cologne, there are brightly-colored mosaic floors.
We have an excellent example of the paintings on the oldest ceilings in Poeschel's work in the church of Zillis, in the Grisons.
Embroidered carpets and wonderful tapestry art adorned the floors and walls, the altars and stalls.
The long, frieze-like Bayeux Tapestry, worked in colored wools on white linen, which described the conquest of England by the Normans, is one of the best-known examples.
Stained Glass
Stained-glass windows soon began to replace the tapestries: as early as 1000 the Abbot of Tegernsee boasted of their beauty. In Zurich, at Werden, on the Ruhr, and in many other monasteries, there were stained-glass windows even earlier. It is less easy to say when they were first introduced into France and England, but in the Early Gothic cathedral of Chartres are various medallions rescued from the old Romanesque cathedral, which in their strictly linear designs, have retained a wonderfully luminous colouring. According to written records, Saint Remy, in Reims, had stained-glass windows in the second half of the tenth century. After 1100 their use became general. The key centres for stained glass production during the Romanesque period were located in the Rhineland area, in the Ile de France and Poitiers.
Ivory Carving
As well as sculpture and stone-carving, the art of ivory carving was practised with enthusiasm in the Romanesque period. Ecclesiastical accessories of all kinds, in particular, reliquaries, which could be set up in the house like little altars - or even carried by the owner when travelling and fine book-covers, and many other treasures, have been preserved.
Metalwork
No less important, and no less assiduously practised since the time of the Saxon emperors, was the art of metalwork, in gold, bronze and other precious materials. In Hildesheim, under Bishop Bernward, was a school of bronze-casting, whose masterpieces, the Bernward pillars, the bronze doors of the cathedral, and the font, show how greatly this art, originally of the Age of Migrations, had been refined in the Romanesque period. At first the antique forms and Byzantine attitudes were adopted, but later on there was a new refinement. By the end of the 11th century the peoples of the West had chosen to go their own way, even in the minor arts. From the twelfth century onwards the Crusades, with their flocks of pilgrims, the merchants, the craftsmen who wandered to and fro across the face of Europe, and the troops of stonemasons and goldsmiths who travelled from place to place, were preparing the West for that secularization of art which finally wrested it from the exclusive possession of the monks.
First of all, in the minor arts urban industries appeared which rid themselves of the last traces of Byzantine influence, so that even where the church was still the employer, the popular taste had more scope. Gold was replaced by copper and bronze; the process of enamelling on copper made possible a more independent and fluid treatment of the metal base and the enamel than was possible with the more costly Byzantine technique. One can see, even in the minor arts, the same sort of liberation that occurred in monumental architecture in the thirteenth century; nothing more or less than the expression of a new spirit, a new taste: the Gothic.
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