Romanesque Art and Architecture in Europe: 11th-12th Centuries
The Romanesque architecture spread throughout the Iberian Peninsula since the late 10th century, rapidly driven by the existence of pre-Romanesque Art (Visigothic, Asturian, Mozarabic). During the 11th and 12th centuries, it developed around the Camino de Santiago, the great pilgrimage route that boosted trade and culture.
First Catalan Romanesque
From the late 10th and 11th centuries, Catalonia saw the rise of Romanesque churches characterized by their severe and small basilica form, covered with a flat wooden roof except in the apse, with ashlar walls based on small stones and arches decorated externally with pilaster strips, and separate round bell towers from the temple. The most notable examples are the churches of Sant Climent de Taüll (Lleida) and San Vicente de Cardona, as well as the monasteries of San Pedro de Roda and Ripoll, with seven apses in the header and a transept.
Pure or Cluniac Romanesque of the Camino de Santiago (11th Century)
It is linked to the initiative of the monks of Cluny to establish monasteries along the Camino de Santiago.
- The church of San Martín de Frómista in Palencia (circa 1066), a basilica with three naves, three apses, cruciform columns, and a barrel vault, with two round towers on the facade.
- The Collegiate Church of San Isidoro de León. The Royal Pantheon was built in 1059 on an ancient Visigoth church, and its square is divided into nine compartments with domes featuring beautiful paintings.
- The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the most important Spanish Romanesque church and a prototype of pilgrimage churches, was begun in 1075 1. Architects who worked on it include the elder Bernardo, Roberto, Stephanie, and Master Matthew, to whom we owe the completion of the porch at the end of the 12th century. The plan is a Latin cross, with three longitudinal naves and three in the transept, an ambulatory, and an apse with five apses. The nave is barrel-vaulted with stilted arches. It has an octagonal dome at the crossing on squinches.
Sculpture
Romanesque sculpture was conditional on architecture, conceived as part of the building. The preferred material is stone, but wood is also used, usually painted, or ivory, and metal. The stone carving is flat; the size becomes deeper from the second half of the 12th century, with bulkier folded and curved figures. The style is unnatural and symbolic, with a clear tendency to abstraction with Byzantine influence. It has no perspective or depth and is governed by the law of adapting to the framework, which favors deformation. The sculptor does not seek beauty but expression, so figures are disproportionate, and their features are exaggerated or distorted. The sculpture has a clear didactic function, not ornamental. Its purpose was to teach. Images should educate and excite the piety of the faithful, teaching them how to save their lives by imitating Christ and the saints. It was a Bible in stone.
Relief Sculpture
Tympanum at the Abbey of La Madeleine de Vézelay. It develops preferentially on the covers. In the tympanum, Christ Pantocrator appears in Majesty, blessing with one hand and carrying a holy book or the globe with the other, enveloped in the mandorla or mystic almond, surrounded by the Tetramorphs—the representation of the four evangelists and their symbols in Revelation.
Free-Standing Sculpture in the Round
The most common type of Romanesque Christ was crucified with four nails, with hard and bulging eyes, along with a King’s crown (Majestas Domini) or a bare knee skirt. The Virgin appears with the Child in her arms, as a Virgin Throne of Byzantine influence, represented in a frontal and rigid manner, seated with the Child on her knees.
Painting
Like sculpture, painting is subordinated to architecture. The apse is the preferred location for this decoration. Its purpose was educational, as well as decorative. Mural painting used the fresco technique—on a base of mortar, sand, lime, and water, where colors are applied when the surface is still wet. The color is intense but flat, with no shades or shadows, and little variety (red, yellow, blue, ochre, green, white). The backgrounds are smooth. The drawing is very linear; figures are delimited by a thick black line, or lines indicate the more delicate features inside. Its subjects are almost always the same as in sculpture; scenes from the lives of saints and martyrs will be represented.
5 Key Aspects of the Romanesque Period
- The Romanesque is the first international European style, which took place in the 11th and 12th centuries and spread rapidly throughout Western Europe.
- Its birth is related to the terror of the year 1000, when it was believed the world would end. To thank God that such a catastrophe did not occur, Europe was filled with churches and monasteries.
- Feudalism was consolidated. Society was divided into three estates (nobility, clergy, and commoners) according to whether or not they had privileges.
- Romanesque is also related to the rise of monasteries and pilgrimages. Reformist Benedictine monks of the Order of Cluny—black monks—were the promoters of Romanesque churches and monasteries, along with kings and nobles.
- The custom of venerating the relics of saints spread, and the faithful flocked in pilgrimage to the places where they were kept because they believed that the relics had magical properties and that touching them produced miracles. The main routes of pilgrimage were Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela.
Architecture
The construction material is carved stone blocks to build solid buildings and avoid the danger of fires. The walls are filled with gravel. The semicircular arch is normal or stilted. Barrel vaults reinforced with arches are used for the central bays, groin vaults for the aisles, and quarter-sphere vaults for the apses, on squinches or pendentives at the top of the transept. They also feature very thick walls, reinforced by buttresses, columns with capitals and various non-classical proportions, and the cruciform column. The openings are few and splayed, wider on the outside than inside. In the decoration, geometric patterns are common (checkerboard, saw teeth, balls, zigzag), as are arches and pilaster strips.
There is a clear predominance of religious architecture. The churches had a variety of plans; the favorites were the basilica with three naves and a Latin cross in memory of the Passion of Christ. In the churches of pilgrimage, the transept is marked, and an ambulatory or deambulatory after the header allows pilgrims to visit the relics. The header, oriented to the east, is formed by semicircular apses, with small chapels and apsidioles. The naves have tribunes on the side aisles, open as a clerestory to the nave, to house pilgrims. An external tower, called a dome, illuminates the transept, and there are two towers at the foot. The porch, or entrance to the heavenly Jerusalem, is splayed with archivolts and a lintel on which the semicircular tympanum rests, supported by the mullion.
France has the richest and most varied display of Romanesque churches. The monasteries, located in rural areas or the suburbs of cities, became centers of economic learning and safeguarded traditional culture. From the 10th century, they were built following the model of the monastery of Cluny.