When was romanesque art

Emphasizing the western entrance to the basilica, the westwork was a monumental addition to the church, with two towers and multiple stories, that served as a royal chapel and viewing room for the emperor when he visited. Carolingian murals and illuminated manuscripts continued to look to earlier Roman models and depicted the human figure more realistically than the earlier Hiberno-Saxon illuminators. This early naturalism had a lasting influence on Romanesque and Gothic art. In the early s, concern began to grow about the economic and political control that nobles and the emperor exercised over monasteries.

With rising taxes imposed by nobles and the installation of relatives as abbots, the Cluny Abbey sought monastic reform, based upon the Rule of St. Benedict c. Benedict of Nursia, that emphasized peace, work, prayer, study, and the autonomy of religious communities.

In , William of Aquitaine donated his hunting lodge and surrounding lands to found Cluny Abbey and nominated Berno as its first Abbott. William stipulated the independence of the Abbey from all secular and local authority, including his own. As a result, the Abbey was answerable only to the authority of the Pope and quickly became the leader of the Benedictine order, establishing dozens of monasteries throughout France.

As part of its emphasis on prayer and study, the Abbey also created a rich liturgy, in which art played an important role. Between the 10 th and the early 12 th centuries, three churches were built at Cluny, each larger than the last, and influencing architectural design throughout Europe. Not much is known of Cluny I, but it was a small, barnlike structure. After a few decades, the monastery outgrew the small church, and Cluny II c. Based on the old basilica model, Cluny II employed round arches and barrel vaults and used small upper level windows for illumination.

All of these elements became characteristic of Romanesque architecture. Peter's in Rome, and a model for similarly ambitious projects. In the 10 th century, First, or Lombard, Romanesque was an early development in Lombardy region now northern Italy , southern France, and reaching into Catalonia.

Started by the Lombard Comacine Guild, or stonemasons, the style was distinctive for its solid stone construction, elaborate arching that advanced Roman models, bands of blind arches, or arches that had no openings, and vertical strips for exterior decorative effects.

During the Romanesque era, no longer under constant threat from Viking raids, monastic centers, which had provided cultural continuity and spiritual consolation through desperate times, became political, economic, religious, and artistic powerhouses that played a role in unifying Europe and in creating relative stability. Monastic centers that housed religious relics became stops on pilgrimage routes that extended for hundreds of miles throughout Europe to the very edge of Spain at Santiago de Compostela.

Christians revered Santiago de Compostela as the burial site of Saint James, a disciple of Christ who brought Christianity to Spain, and thus deeply symbolic to Catholic Europe. The faithful believed that by venerating relics, or remains of saints, in pilgrim churches they could obtain saintly intercession on their behalf for the forgiveness of their sins.

Fierce competition for relics sometimes developed between churches and even resulted in the monks stealing relics from other churches, as was the case with the reliquary of St. Foy, in order to attract more pilgrims and, therefore, more money. As ever-larger crowds began to flock to sites, monastic centers expanded, providing lodging and food and farrier services to the pilgrims. As a result of this growth, various craft guilds were employed to meet the demand for Romanesque construction.

Found throughout Europe and the British Isles, the Romanesque style took on regional variations, sometimes specific to a particular valley or town. Mosan art is named for the River Meuse valley in Belgium, where the style was centered around the town of Liege and the Benedictine monastery at Stavelot.

Because of the region's location, it had many political and economic links to Aachen and was greatly influenced by the Carolingian Renaissance. De Claire is credited with the creation of the Stavelot Triptych , both a portable altar and a reliquary containing fragments of True Cross, and Nicholas of Verdun's most noted work was his reliquary Shrine of the Magi Mosan goldsmiths and metalworkers were employed throughout Europe by notable patrons and spread the style's influence.

Norman Romanesque is primarily an English style named for the Normans who developed it after conquering England in 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 metre 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 aesthetic; 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 fascade, while the ground-plan assumed the form of the Latin cross, with a transept coming between the chancel and the nave.

The crossing of 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 lectorium or lectern, from which the Gospels were read.

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 favour 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 crosssvaulting 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 comparable 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 connnecting 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 with 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 , the Southern French barrel-vault was adapted to a cruciform basilica , of the type which had evolved in the North. Only from a 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 neighbouring churches of western Switzerland, in the porch of Romainmotier, or the great collegiate church of Payerne.

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 , when 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 the 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. For more, please see: German Medieval Art c. To describe 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 , 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. In the Rhineland, in the course of the 11th century, a series of cathedrals was built with vaulted ceilings. In , the old cathedral of Trier was rebuilt; and from the same century date the three magnificent cathedrals of Speyer, Mainz and Worms. 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.

It would take too long to describe these developments in detail. A simplification of the prevailing style was effected in the monastery at Hirsau.

The monks, who were trained in the Benedictine traditions of Cluny, always built uniform, flat-ceilinged, triple-naved basilicas, with the 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. Cologne Cathedral : Cologne Cathedral is—after Milan Cathedral—the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, built over a process of years.

Brick Gothic is a specific style of Gothic architecture common in Northern Europe, especially in Northern Germany and the regions around the Baltic Sea without natural rock resources.

The buildings are mainly built from bricks. Nicholas Church. The dwellings of this period were mainly timber-framed buildings still seen in Goslar and Quedlinburg, the latter of which has one of the oldest half-timbered houses in Germany. The method of construction, used extensively for town houses of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, lasted into the 20th century for rural buildings.

Renaissance architecture early 15 th — early 17 th centuries flourished in different parts of Europe with the conscious revival and development of ancient Greek and Roman thought and culture.

As in other areas of Europe, Renaissance architecture in the Holy Roman Empire placed emphasis on symmetry , proportion, geometry, and the regularity of parts as demonstrated in the architecture of classical antiquity , particularly ancient Roman architecture. Orderly arrangement of columns, pilasters , and lintels and the use of semicircular arches, hemispherical domes , niches, and aedicules replaced the complex proportional systems and irregular profiles of medieval buildings.

The earliest example of Renaissance architecture in Germany is the Fugger chapel in St. Baroque architecture began in the early 17 th century in Italy and arrived in Germany after the Thirty Years War.

The interaction of architecture, painting, and sculpture is an essential feature of Baroque architecture, which integrated new fashions to express the triumph of the Catholic Church and was characterized by new explorations of form , light and shadow and dramatic intensity. Zwinger Palace in Dresden illustrated the architecture of absolutism, which always put the ruler at the center thus increasing the spatial composition; for example, a magnificent staircase leading to the figure.

In Rococo , the late phase of Baroque, decoration became even more abundant and used brighter colors. Other examples of Baroque church architecture include the Basilica of the Vierzehnheiligen in Upper Franconia and the rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden.

Classicism arrived in Germany in the second half of the 18 th century. It drew inspiration from the classical architecture of antiquity and was a reaction against the Baroque style in both architecture and landscape design. The most important architect of this style in Germany was Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Famous for its Cluniac inspiration and Romanesque sculptures by Gislebertus, it epitomizes Romanesque art and architecture in Burgundy.

Due to the veneration of relics in this period, the Bishop of Autun ordered the creation of a larger cathedral to house these relics and accommodate the influx of pilgrims into Autun. Work on the cathedral began around and advanced rapidly; the building was consecrated in Autun Cathedral, ca. The interior of the cathedral has a nave and two aisles divided by massive columns with longitudinal carvings punctuated with decorated Romanesque capitals.

The plan of the cathedral has a narthex or antechamber of two bays topped by two towers, followed by a seven-bay nave flanked by side aisles and a transept with the tower-surmounting cross. The nave elevation is composed of three levels: grand arcade , triforium , and clerestory , each marked by a cornice. The three-story elevation of Saint-Lazare was made possible by the use of pointed arches for the nave. Each nave bay is separated at the vault by a transverse rib.

Each transept projects to the width of two nave bays and the west entrance has a narthex which screens the main portal. The cathedral of St. Lazare has a ground plan in the form of a Latin cross, with an aisled nave, a plain transept, and a three-stage choir with a semicircular end.

Many of the historiated capitals that adorn the columns in Saint-Lazare were carved by Gislebertus. These stone-carved scenes from the Bible appear on dozens of capitals in the nave and chancel. Specifically, Gislebertus created used the tendrils of the actual Corinthian capital to create an architectural frame for the narrative to develop. These portal capitals are carved with biblical and traditional scenes. It is ranked among the masterpieces of Romanesque sculpture in France.

The sheer size of the tympanum required support by double lintels and middle column to further bolster the sculpture. The left side of the tympanum displays the rise to the heavenly kingdom, and on the right is a portrayal of demons in hell with an angel and a devil weighing the souls on a balance. Zodiac signs surround the arch vault, with Christ in the center portrayed as a serene figure.

Christ is placed in perfect symmetrical position with a balanced composition of elongated figures. Jesus is flanked by his mother, the Virgin Mary, and his apostles cast as penitents and observers of the last judgment. Peter guards the gate to heaven and looks on as resurrected individuals attempt to squeeze in with the assistance of the angels. Last Judgement : Last Judgement by Gislebertus in the west tympanum. In the Last Judgement, Gislebertus successfully integrated the modern view of heaven and hell and created a sculpture to act as a visual educational device for individuals who were illiterate.

The tympanum inspired terror in believers who viewed the detailed high relief sculpture. Privacy Policy.

Skip to main content. Romanesque Art. Search for:. Romanesque Architecture. First Romanesque Architecture The First Romanesque style developed in the Catalan territory and demonstrated a lower level of expertise than the later Romanesque style. First Romanesque, also known as Lombard Romanesque, is characterized by thick walls, lack of sculpture, and the presence of rhythmic ornamental arches known as Lombard bands. In contrast to the refinement of the later Romanesque style, First Romanesque architecture employed rubble walls, smaller windows, and unvaulted roofs.

Key Terms Romanesque : The art of Europe from approximately CE to the rise of the Gothic style in the 13th century or later, depending on region. First Romanesque : The name given by Josep Puig i Cadafalch to refer to the Romanesque art developed in Catalonia since the late 10th century. Lombard band : A decorative blind arcade, usually exterior, often used during the Romanesque and Gothic periods of architecture.

Cistercian Architecture The Cistercians are a Roman Catholic order whose monasteries and churches reflect one of the most beautiful styles of medieval architecture. Learning Objectives Relate Cistercian architecture to the rational principles upon which it is based. Key Takeaways Key Points Architecturally speaking, the Cistercian monasteries and churches are counted among the most beautiful relics of the Middle Ages due to their pure style.

Cistercian architecture embodied the ideals of the order and in theory was utilitarian and without superfluous ornament. The Cisterian order, however, was receptive to the technical improvements of Gothic principles of construction and played an important role in the spread of these techniques across Europe. Cistercian construction involved vast amounts of quarried stone and employed the best stone cutters.