ROMANESQUE, ART. - The term "Romanesque" denotes that particular moment in European artistic culture, comprised between the 11th and 12th centuries, which stands intermediate between the manifestations of Ottonian art (v.) and the various late offshoots of Carolingian art (v.) on the one hand, and the first clear manifestations of Gothic art (v.) on the other.
It is connected to the particular fervor of life typical of that age throughout Europe. Then, with the intensification of commercial and spiritual exchanges, there also occurs in the fields of art a more intimate and complex interweaving both of the themes and motifs that had been handed down from classical antiquity and of Oriental contributions, whether Byzantine, Arab or Sassanid. Culture, sentiment and the cult of beauty spread everywhere, while art, which is understood above all as an expression of originality, is as it were strengthened by a new naturalistic spirit. This, on the other hand, does not oppose but rather favors the internationalization of culture, whereby its various currents, which travel the same roads as merchants and pilgrims, often interweave in almost unforeseeable encounters. New vital centers of confluence and diffusion are then generated which, in turn, enriched by new contributions, assume, in the varied attuning of taste, a new force of expansion; thus currents are determined capable of overthrowing or suddenly surpassing what in traditional modes of expression often represented merely the weight of custom. And it is in this intense mutual motion, in this warm cultural life that knows no barriers of boundaries between nation and nation, in this concord of spirits evident in the identical goals that are pursued, that one identifies one of the happiest moments in the life of the great European nation. It is not
It is not surprising that at the same time decorative forms of distinctly Arab character appear in Spain, in England, in Sicily and in northern Latium; that in France, at Pisa and in Apulia the same architectural forms deriving from Asia Minor are encountered; that Lombard architects reach as far as Scandinavia, or Roman sculptors are summoned to London to carve the tombs of the English kings, while those who were erecting churches in Burgundy or on the banks of the Rhine were posing problems similar to those of those who were erecting churches in Milan and Bari.
Despite this, the more these problems are investigated and examined in depth, the more that intense spiritual and cultural life will appear determined and guided by a very clear and consequential evolutionary logic. Nevertheless, in the artistic manifestations of the Romanesque period any discussion of priority with a more or less overt chauvinistic basis is absolutely futile. It is always a question of power and felicity of expression, of accomplished realization in the form of beauty of those vital spirits that in the Romanesque period stir consciences and that, at first with somewhat confused and vague movements, then with a more agile step and a more precise direction, orient themselves toward determining in northern Europe the laws of Gothic art; here in Italy, the forms that will be illuminated with new beauty during the Renaissance. In this sense France and Italy were the liveliest and most interesting centers. In France, in fact, those new vital spirits seem to be stronger than elsewhere, determined also, with the advent of the Capetians (987), by the rise of feudalism born from the disintegration of the Carolingian administration. It is the time when pilgrimages to the Holy Land first and then the Crusades reveal to the eyes of so many Frenchmen the splendors of the Eastern world. When those Frenchmen return to their homeland they feel the need to renew their own life; cities are rebuilt, castles, churches, and above all monasteries arise. And while in the architectural forms reminiscences frequently appear of what had been seen in Syria and in Asia Minor, the poets narrate marvelous stories whose background is the mirages of the East, of Roland, of Alexander the Great, and evoke Rome the Great, Thebes and Troy.
In the field of architecture we witness a definition and then a development of certain themes of the Carolingian period founded on the tradition of Roman classicism. This is especially so with regard to construction technique, that is, the manner of building piers, vaults, arcades, etc. At the same time, especially as regards decoration, elements are applied both drawn from antiquity and Byzantine and Irano-Syriac; the latter having penetrated into France especially from Spain. Thus from Catalonia there came into France a certain Eastern manner of turning vaults, such as that of the church of St. Philibert of Tournus. The essential characteristics of the French Romanesque architectural taste reveal themselves differently disposed according to the regions, even if a sense of austere, heavy imposingness is constant and the use of turning vaults on piers is extremely widespread, especially in the side aisles. Thus in Normandy, in the ancient ruined abbey church of Jumièges, in that of the Trinity and in St. Stephen's at Caen. In Poitou, on the other hand, the buildings have a more intimate tone, and so do the church of Notre-Dame and that of St. Hilary of Poitiers, the latter with seven naves and five domes. At the same time, in Burgundy, the great architectural school established in the gigantic structures of the ancient abbey of Cluny announces in the extremely slender lines of the central naves the advance of the Gothic taste. Then in Auvergne the use of colored stones, red, white and black, gave a wholly particular, often festive tone to the constructions. Thus in Notre-Dame of Clermont, in Notre-Dame du Puy, in St. Paul of Issoire. Without doubt, especially in the second half of the 11th century and the first half of the 12th, France was the most vital architectural center of all Europe. This even though, in some of its aspects, Spain, Catalonia above all, seems to precede it in time. In England, on the other hand, the forms of Normandy soon became acclimatized, almost accentuating their initial characteristics. More closely bound in its austere architectural organisms, which have typically Romanesque modes, and it was natural that this should be so when one thinks of the power and the value of Ottonian art, was Germanic architecture, especially in the Rhenish region: the cathedrals of Mainz, of Speyer and of Worms are its typical examples. In some aspects they also recall the contemporary Lombard architecture.
The sculpture of the Romanesque age had a similar evolution, also in the sense of a similar predominance, in quality, of French works over those of the other northern regions of Europe. Indeed during the 11th century, although production was fairly abundant, one would say that the masters of the chisel found it difficult to carve human forms from the marble, still marked by ingenuousness and roughness. But the sense of composition is already harmonious, and sculpture, which has eminently decorative tasks, subordinates to these any intent of naturalistic reproduction, even in the representations where events of the Bible and the New Testament are narrated. But in the 12th century the plastic forms that already in the various French regions adhered to the taste and spirit of the architectures - and one thinks of the Christ in Glory that decorates the apse ambulatory of St-Sernin of Toulouse and the other sculptures of that church, as of the sculptures of the cloister of the Abbey and of St. Peter of Moissac or those of Notre-Dame la Grande of Poitiers and of the portal of St-Trophime of Arles or of that of the cathedral of Chartres - incline ever more toward the elegances, the projections, the soaring, the spirituality of Gothic forms. Then in the anthropomorphic monsters of the gargoyles, in the dragons that chase one another up the façades of the cathedrals, in the minute carving work of friezes and cornices with vegetal motifs, but often animated by a most lively form, there is also clear the wholly Romanesque taste for the complex game of setting oneself to overcome problems bristling with technical difficulties, but perhaps more that of resolving as image what until then had been the object of most ancient barbaric terrors. Also in England as in Spain the sculpture of the Romanesque age, apart from the development of some element by then traditional to the regions, is for the most part tributary to the spread of French plastic taste. In some aspects the same can be said of Germany. Here, however, some works, such as the wooden doors of the church of St. Mary of the Capitol in Cologne, testify that in wood sculpture Germany initially was certainly not behind also compared with France. This is especially so as regards what in the plastic culture of the time is the reflection of the very lively Ottonian figurative taste.
In painting too, what was done in the European regions north of the Alps and in Spain seems, more than anything else, the logical prelude to the development of Gothic forms. The paintings that covered entire interiors and that, through a series of vicissitudes, have come down to us only in minimal part were, especially in the 11th century, painted in flat tones and combined in a very limited number of colors distributed within fields clearly defined by precise contours. In such paintings the foundation, and not only the iconographic one, is very often the miniatures, whether they came from the East or derived from the major centers of Carolingian or Ottonian production. In Spain the paintings of Tahull, now in the Museum of Barcelona, in France those of the abbey church of St-Savin (Vienne), in Germany what remains of ancient paintings in the churches of the Rhineland, all testify to the same tendency to reduce every expression within a narrative rhythm, within an arabesque that soon, in the second half of the 12th century, would herald the new spirits of Gothic taste. Italian figurative civilization, while maintaining through the centuries of the early Middle Ages its own logical way of evolving and its own individual intonation, had come to be shaped mainly according to the contributions that the various contemporary cultures had brought to it, whether of Byzantine, barbarian or Carolingian stamp, with which it had come into contact. Once the 11th century was reached, however, this figurative civilization, while by no means renouncing the contribution of every new element that might represent an enrichment for it, also assumed a new independence with respect to what was being done in the other regions of Europe. At that time, in fact, in Italy (v. ITALIA, VI. Arte, 3), while architectural forms, long depressed for centuries, came together in the almost sudden and widespread revival of building activity, painting and sculpture, having themselves become very active, assumed decidedly new intonations, ever more closely adhering, in the direct modes of expression, to the character and temperament of the Italians.
In architecture, then, two distinct currents can be identified in Italy. The regions of the Po plain
(Piedmont, Lombardy, part of the Veneto, Emilia) as, in many respects, the regions east of the Apennines, participate, albeit with different accents and spirits, in the same architectural orientations that are proper to the regions of central Europe; whereas the regions facing the Tyrrhenian Sea, especially Campania, a great part of Latium and of Tuscany, rework, with a new mentality and a new clarifying spirit, certain forms that sprang from the depths of the classical tradition, often humbled yet never extinguished in the immediately preceding centuries. Thus, while in the northern regions and those of the Adriatic slope there appears the use or the constant aspiration to raise complex buildings with piers on which rest ribbed vaults, loggias and matronea, which emphasize, in a complex play of shadows and lights, the new values of architectural space then in the course of being defined precisely in the heart of Europe, in the regions of the Tyrrhenian slope there prevails, together with the love for the clear harmonies of columns and arches and entablatures pursuing one another toward the tall and luminous apses, the love of broad smooth walls, where painters, inlayers and mosaicists spread their beautiful chromatic fantasies. But alongside these two tendencies, sometimes fused with them, sometimes pure with an independence of forms and accents, especially in the major centers of the coasts, in the maritime cities, there now asserts itself again, and with an extraordinary wealth of motifs, the art of the East in its various gradations. Thus in Sicily, in Apulia, in Campania, at Pisa and above all at Venice, in that prodigy that is the basilica of St. Mark.
No less lively and animated is the profile of sculptural activity. In it one witnesses at first, as it were, a thorough clarification and distinction of the decorative schemes of the early Middle Ages; then, also through the progressive elimination of the old symbolism, one arrives at a concrete vision of reality, whereby the human figure, as a new expression of beauty, frees itself whole from the marble.
Wiligelmo (v.) at the beginning of the 12th century, then Benedetto Antelami (v.) and the master of the Months of the cathedral of Ferrara, testify at that time to the intense vitality of the plastic art in the Po region. A vitality that in Lombardy takes on a tone of more intense popular characterization, while in Venice it assumed a greater refinement through the suggestion of the direct knowledge that was had on the shores of the lagoon of the modes proper to Eastern Neo-Hellenism. Meanwhile in the other regions of the peninsula the same naturalistic spirit that animated the sculpture flourishing in the Po valley met with the elements of the traditional classicizing culture. Thus in Apulia, in Sicily, in Campania, in Latium, in Tuscany, where marbles are sculpted in which the new expressiveness of the images takes concrete form in balanced relationships of form and content. And from this culture, in which it is often clear how the concept of the antique becomes synonymous with the beautiful, derives the greatest sculptor who in the middle of the 13th century announces new times for Italian art: Nicola da Puglia, also called Nicola Pisano (v.).
Analogous movements took place in the field of pictorial activity. Here too the problems that arise, for anyone wishing to trace as clear a scheme as possible of that story, are infinite and extremely complex. For a truly infinite number of frescoes, mosaics, painted panels testifies to the liveliness and richness of a production often of the very highest quality. Such and so many are those testimonies that one might say that between the 11th and 13th centuries the covering of the walls of churches and palaces and even caves with vivid colors had become a common practice for Italians. A country of painters, then, was Italy, of painters who knew how to narrate with liveliness of accent and clarity the stories and miracles of saints and also the actions and activities of men, in compositions where the human figure, the essential motif of the representation, was posed with expressive immediacy, spontaneous and most knowing at once. Naturally then in Italian painting, as in contemporary architecture and sculpture, the elements of previous and contemporary cultures, both Eastern and Northern, often have essential value, but it is also true that those same elements which at times seem to dominate in it, in the very act in which they are taken up by Italians to narrate with liveliness and clarity, change their intonation, themselves become adherent to the mentality of those who express themselves with them in complete spontaneity. It appears then evident how the posing of the various pictorial currents of the Romanesque age has in Italy the value and importance that the "dolce stil novo" had in the literary field, whereby precisely from dialectal forms the new language of Dante was to spring.
Pietro Cavallini, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Cenni di Pepi called Cimabue are the three formidable individualities who conclude the great cycle of Romanesque painting in Italy. They conclude an epoch but also announce a new one. And their gigantic figures then dominate the great cycle of art like those of the true patriarchs of that modern painting which recognizes in Giotto its first master. - See plates LXXIX-LXXXII.
Bibliography5 works
Emilio Lavagnino