15
Romanesque Sculpture in Northern Europe
The most useful historiographical studies for Romanesque sculpture up to the early nineteenth century, at which stage the study of sculpture starts to separates from architecture, are those which are specifically focused on the architecture of the period.1
Without doubt, the most comprehensive such work is by Bizzarro, which looks specifically at the formative centuries in France and England.2 Frankl, on the other hand, deals mainly with the medieval appreciation of the style and also provides a general background.3 When it comes to looking at Romanesque sculpture, the most valuable study has to be the annotated bibliography on French Romanesque sculpture by Lyman, which parallels that of Glass for Italy.4 A short but good introduction on the historiography of this subject especially for the appreciation of the style in the United States is given in Cahn and Seidel,5 while an interesting essay by Forsyth6 outlines a number of recent trends, developments, and issues in the historiography of French Romanesque sculpture and that of cloister studies in particular.7
If France has not fared well, the subject has been almost entirely neglected in neighboring Germany. This is not unique in that little historiographical research has been undertaken there and certainly not by German scholars. What has been undertaken is by American scholars, and deals with German contributions to the development of style or research in countries other than their own. One such work, which has tangential bearing on Romanesque sculpture, is by Brush, who has written on the contributions of Vöge and Goldschmidt against a general historiographic background of their period.8
Apart from Bizzarro, Cocke is one of the few scholars to have dealt with the subject in England. He has documented its historical development and Kahn has extended his work into the modern and more theoretical period.9 Apart from these three countries, historiographic studies of Romanesque sculpture remain almost totally neglected in Austria, Ireland, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia apart from some general asides.10
Up to the start of the twentieth century Romanesque sculpture was primarily studied in terms of its architectural associations and was never treated as a separate entity. It is true that most Romanesque sculpture is indeed architectural11 and as such has always played a secondary position to its context.12 Unlike Gothic sculpture, which in many ways came to assume an equal role with the architecture of that period, that of the Romanesque period never received the same universal acclaim.13
Romanesque sculpture was never seen as a distinct style in itself but rather as a formative phase in the development of the Gothic. The taste for Romanesque sculpture, it is claimed, has to be acquired – it is a style that cannot be easily understood and the viewer does not immediately relate to it (fig. 15-1). It is easy to see how this style, with its elements of stylization and distance from the classicizing beauty of what preceded and followed it, could be described as “barbarous” and “unfinished.” It is not a style that is easily understood because of its break with the traditional canons of representation and this has also acted against its wider acceptance (fig. 15-2).
FIGURE 15-1 Tympanum showing Christ and the Four Beasts surrounded by fantastic animals and grotesques above the lintel with the twelve apostles, Rochester Cathedral, c.1160. Photo © by Colum Hourihane.
FIGURE 15-2 The prophet Jeremiah showing the stylization characteristic of much French Romanesque sculpture, porch trumeau, Church of St Pierre, Moissac, c.1115–31. Photo © by Jane Vadnal.
Romanesque sculpture was viewed as being less forceful and lacking any redeeming features – its emphasis on capital sculpture, tympana, and absence of portal figures, archivolts, or large iconographic programs meant that it was relegated to a secondary role in the early phases of art history.14 In terms of production, its relatively short history of approximately two centuries, uneven distribution, and lack of documentary material did not give it popular standing.
Scholars of this style would be amazed to see the difficult history that it has undergone to gain the recognition that it presently has. It does not, as a general rule, appeal to the mass audience – unlike the Gothic. There are few surviving sculptural programs that match the importance of Moissac, Vézelay, or Autun and more often than not its appreciation is dependent on isolated fragments or small buildings in remote locations (fig. 15-3). Much of what survives is still in situ and it is not well represented in museum collections. On the other hand, it should be said that some more recent large-scale exhibitions and effective museum displays are adding to its popular profile.15
The historiography of Northern Romanesque sculpture is essentially that of France, Germany, and England16 with a focus on stone rather than the many fine wooden carvings which have only recently entered the mainstream of scholarly study. Different chronological phases have been proposed (not all of which focus on art), but which usually divide the period into three. This chapter will propose yet another refinement, and attempt to merge some of the overlap between existing proposals. Proposals such as those by Mortenson17 (for Latin historiography from 1500 to the present) and Lyman (the historiography of Romanesque French sculpture from 1700 to the present) stress the gradual process of refinement and definition. Understandably, my historiographical analysis is based on what has been published, and attempts to take into consideration trends and changes in scholarship.
FIGURE 15-3 The Last Judgment, attributed to Giselbertus, tympanum, Cathedral of St Lazare, Autun, c.1120–35. Photo © by Jane Vadnal.
The four phases are:
1 The Age of the Antiquarian (The Renaissance to 1820)
2 The Age of Structure (1820–1900)
3 The Age of Theory (1900–45)
4 The Age of Modernism (1945–present)
All are dominated by the influence of major scholars such as Evans, Focillon, Kingsley Porter, Mâle, Montfaucon, and Schapiro, to name just a few, and each phase has its own characteristics, which in many cases were instigated by such figures. The first phase was the age of the antiquarian – or to use Lyman’s terminology, “The Age of Documentation.” At this stage, all medieval architecture and sculpture had been undefined in terms of style, period, or region; this would only begin to happen with the amassing of a substantial corpus of material. It also has to be remembered that the whole concept of style, and indeed its use as a term of definition, did not start until the Renaissance. Most of the work undertaken in this phase was by archaeologist-antiquarians who were driven mainly by nationalistic ideals to define not only the history of the Middle Ages but also to document their own cultural background and to achieve artistic superiority. The second phase is marked by a more structured approach to documentation with the creation of a nomenclature. It is heralded by the actual definition of the stylistic term “Romanesque” and has been seen as marking the independence of this period from the Gothic and the gradual separation of sculptural from architectural studies. This was also the period in which art history developed as a formal discipline and the whole field of medieval studies opened up on an unparalleled scale. It was soon followed by the most crucial of all four phases, characterized by some of the most innovative ideas and thinkers of the entire period, whose work was fortunately based on an understanding and appreciation of Romanesque sculpture. This phase is marked by iconographical studies with a strong background in Christian values and nationalism and an opening up of the field to international scholarship. It is claimed that this phase was “marked by hermeneutics and an interest in the history of ideas.” It is difficult to characterize the fourth and final phase, as we are still in the middle of it. Some old issues have been re-evaluated, some new ideas proposed, some aspects of previous scholarship have fallen by the wayside, and the work goes on.
In many ways the backdrop to these four phases has been a series of political, ideological, and nationalistic factors, which have strongly influenced its development. Its historiography has evolved in terms of a few specific major themes, including a search for its origins, a need to apply a dating structure, and the more recent socio-cultural analysis of sculpture. In between these two bookends lie a number of paths which scholarship has taken and which include categorization, cataloguing, chronology, political influences, religious iconography, reception, and the role of the artist, all of which will be discussed below.
Phase I, The Age of the Antiquarian
We know very little of how the medieval mind actually viewed their art forms,18 and it is clear that many of the comments that survive deal with architecture rather than sculpture.19 The art and architecture of the Romanesque period was clearly recognized as being different from the Gothic before the end of the Middle Ages.20 These comments have been described by Frankl and van der Grinten, who have used such terms as opus francigenum, opus arcatum, and opera romano to describe Romanesque architecture.21 By the end of the Middle Ages, however, the past centuries could be viewed more objectively and it was at the start of the sixteenth century that the whole concept of a medium aevum or Middle Ages was first defined and with that the first chronological and stylistic breakdown of the preceding centuries. It was also at this time that the term “Gothic” was first used to describe the sculpture, but principally the architecture, from late antiquity to the Renaissance.22 Romanesque sculpture was not to be defined for at least a further three hundred years.23
In the post-medieval period, the historiography of Romanesque sculpture is largely given over to antiquarian studies. Problems of terminology and classification were being tackled, and although some of these studies illustrate sculptural elements it is always in secondary positions. Typical of such scholarship is the work of John Aubrey (1626–97) who is generally credited as the first cataloguer of the Romanesque in England. His asides are few and unillustrated, and are included in his pioneering study Monumenta Britannica, a work largely documenting Roman rather than Romanesque antiquities. Another whose research attempted to define and catalogue English Romanesque was William Wilkins the Elder (1778–1839), whose studies separated the early Romanesque or Saxon from the later architecture of the period then referred to as Norman. Implicit in his division, which has lasted to the present, albeit with a different emphasis nowadays, is a stylistic development and elaboration. His work on Norwich Castle (1795)24 sheds considerable light on all the architectural components of the building and on its stylistic development and was to provide a base line for other studies (fig. 15-4).
These studies – whether in England, France, or Germany – are largely concerned with documentation rather than analysis of style or form, but they attempted to be as scientific as possible. Where any analysis takes place, it varies from a general appreciation of the style to the more commonly found criticism of it as a debased version of a Roman original. One critic who was not afraid to voice a positive opinion on Romanesque sculpture was Roger North (1653–1734) who wrote c.1698 about Durham and Gloucester Cathedrals as well as Norwich Castle and, indeed, of Romanesque architecture in general that it “hath a strength and reasonableness beyond the other [Gothic].”25
In France of the same period a number of scholars were attempting to document architecture and to record and disentangle different schools and styles. Here, as elsewhere, the historiography of medieval art takes on a strongly nationalistic bias, which was to develop even further throughout the century. French antiquarian studies begin not with sculpture but with painting26 and were soon followed with the establishment of formal bodies to promote and document the arts. Typical of these is the founding in 1648 of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, from which most of the principal art historical works in France were to emanate.27 One scholar whose work stands out in this period is Dom Bernard de Montfaucon, whose two main works – L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (1721–2) and Les Monumens de la monarchie françoise (1729–33) – were to provide one of the first illustrated histories of French art. Contemporaries such as Blondel (1705–74) and Ducarel (1713–85) were to provide a platform for future cataloguing and documentation and it was also at this time that the trend for non-nationals to study the art of other countries started, with Cotman and Ducarel being amongst the first.
If England and France had their topographical and antiquarian studies, art history as a formal discipline was to develop in leaps and bounds in Germany of the mid-eighteenth century, thanks to the studies and influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), the father of art history. Winckelmann was to move beyond his contemporaries’ “mere narratives of the chronology and alterations”28 into formulating a systematic analysis of the history of art history. His influence was to pave the way for future work in this whole field, especially iconography and the evolution of style and his avoidance of the role of artist or maker, which was to shape the work of numerous scholars in the following centuries particularly in the field of Romanesque sculpture. Romanesque sculpture or architecture failed to capture the imagination of Goethe, all of whose writings stress the verticality and uniqueness of the Gothic style in what he mistakenly believed was a manifestation of German creativity.
FIGURE 15-4 Bigods Tower, Norwich Castle, 1795. Studies such as this by William Wilkins on Norwich Castle, with their focus on architecture, are typical of eighteenth-century antiquarian research. From Wilkins, “An Essay towards an History of the Venta Icenorum of the Romans and of Norwich Castle,” Archaeologia XII (1795), plate XXVI, p. 154.
Phase II, The Age of Structure
There has been much dispute as to who first coined the term Romanesque, but it is now accepted that it was William Gunn (1750–1841), an English parson, who first published this term in 1819.29 At around the same time, the term romane was coined and promoted to describe the same period in France, and it was not long after that the term romanische was used in Germany.30 With a stylistic definition in place, the boundaries of this style expanded beyond national borders and its acceptance seemed to be ensured. Bizzarro has written of her belief that the application of such a term to the architecture of this period was its saving point. The separation of Romanesque from Gothic – and it has to be remembered that the former was initially applied only to the architecture of the period – was certainly a major advantage, but it was not to herald the instant acceptance of arts other than architecture at this time.
For most of the nineteenth century, the study of Romanesque sculpture was still largely neglected when it is compared to that of the thirteenth century. Romanesque sculpture in particular was rejected because of the overriding acceptance that Classicism was the ideal and that the sculpture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the antithesis of this. On the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that this style was promoted thanks to the simmering belief that all French art was good and representative of the genius of that country.
The political struggles in the first three decades of the nineteenth century highlighted many studies which now became even more Franco-centric. The interest in the art of the medieval period in Germany coincided with the same development in France and has been seen as growing out of the strong nationalist movement, which led to the foundation of the German Empire in 1871. Three national schools were defined, centering on Saxony, the Lower Rhineland, and the South, including Switzerland and Austria. Classical art belonged to Greece and Rome, and the Renaissance had its birth in the south, but early medieval art and that of the Romanesque period in particular was believed to have had its origins in the Holy Roman Empire.
Scholarly research into Romanesque art in Germany and France in the late 1880s and early 1890s coincided with a popular interest in the subject outside the university environment. Carolingian and Ottonian art was to the fore in this nationalistic movement, and much of this research was initially based in Normandy and the northwest – an area that was then seen as the most important center for Romanesque sculpture in France. It was here that the Service des monuments historiques de France, founded in 1830, was first based and from which it extended to all areas. This national inventory of sculpture, which to this day is still one of the most complete and thorough catalogues of French monuments, highlighted the importance of Romanesque sculpture, which now began to assume its rightful place. It was also at this time that art history was first taught as a university subject in the United States, where the initial focus was either on the Classical or medieval period. Such survey works as that written by Allan Marquand and Arthur Frothingham in 1896 are typical of the period.31 Although Romanesque sculpture is dealt with briefly, it is clear that the recognition of this period as a time of revival would open up the field to future studies.
One such study to deal significantly with the subject, albeit in relation to architecture and style, was that by Karl Schnaase (1798–1875). Direct in line to Hegel’s theories, Schnaase devoted the entire second volume of his magnum opus to “Die Romanische Kunst.” There is nothing iconographical in a study such as this, but it does provide the background that would enable Emile Mâle to undertake his work some 50 years later, and in many ways Schnaase’s belief that the visual arts complement religious thought also links these two scholars.32
The work undertaken in the museum world by scholars such as Alexandre Lenoir (1761–1839) and the slightly later and more significant Louis Courajod (1841–96), director of the Department of Sculpture at the Louvre, did much to help promote this neglected area. Courajod, like Lenoir, used his position as museum director to publicize French sculpture and, whereas their initial works are largely descriptive catalogues, they were instrumental in making the wealth of this pre-Gothic corpus publicly known.33 Courajod was strongly influenced by Vöge’s theories and the need to unravel the origins of style. There was at this time a growing preoccupation with the issue of style, partly in response to Vöge’s theories, which influenced not only his German colleagues but also his French compatriots. Ironically for Vöge, Romanesque sculpture did not exist – for him, the sculpture at Chartres was of the utmost importance and in many ways prevented him from seeing anything other than the works at that site. Such theories, highlighted more by other scholars than by Vöge, form a distinct historiographical nucleus, which looked specifically at this art and sculpture from a Christian perspective. This nucleus can really be credited with defining the importance and acceptance of Romanesque sculpture, and their interest was primarily driven by the subject matter.
From the middle of the nineteenth century there were two distinct views of Romanesque sculpture, which were to change with its acceptance as a fully fledged style. It was, first, perceived as a phase of the Gothic and not really a style in itself. Its barbarous treatment of its subject matter was little but an exploratory phase in the evolution to the Gothic. On the other hand, there were some who were prepared to see it as a distinct style, which was fully developed and required an adjustment in perception as to its relations with what preceded and followed it. The development of modern art and the break in the traditional means of representation have been seen as pivotal in influencing our acceptance of what was unusual in Romanesque sculpture. Inherent in much of the writings on sculpture of this period is the belief that even though figures such as those at Vézelay are “barbarous,” they also have an element of genius. This was to change later in the century with the belief that this barbarous element should not be viewed as negative but as a positive counterbalance to Classicism. What is also interesting is the fact that many of the scholars such as Baltrugaitis, Cahn, Focillon, Panofsky, Seidel, and Schapiro, who wrote on Romanesque art and most significantly on its sculpture, also researched modern art.
Searching for origins in the Byzantine world, the Near East, and Italy, French scholars such as Fernand Cabrol (1855–1937), Charles Cahier (1807–82), François-René de Chateaubriand (1769–1848), Alphonse-Napoléon Didron (1806–67), Émil Mâle (1862–1954), Albert Marignan (1858–1936), Barbier de Montault (1830–1901), and Walter Pater (1839–94) were the first to look at the entire range of medieval sculpture and not just that of the Gothic period. This group of scholars suddenly approached the works from the perspective of their subject matter and shifted the emphasis using Christian dogma. One of the most influential of these writers, and one who paved the way, was Chateaubriand, in his Génie du Christianisme (1802) in which Neo-classicism and rationalism were weighed against the concept of genius and spirit as represented by the world of medieval art. If Chateaubriand justified the study of art in all its forms from a slightly conceptual stance, it was Didron who actually enforced a more comprehensive iconographical approach. Suddenly, the concept of beauty in sculpture such as those at Vézelay and Moissac was discovered in the Christian ideas they personified and embodied. The makers of these works and their role in Church organization were also looked at, but to a significantly lesser degree. There is a noticeable paucity of any stylistic analysis, which is in complete contrast with the general scholarship of this period. Based largely in France, this group worked independently of German scholarship, which was more focused at defining form and the problems of stylistic development. Nevertheless, it was to be a school of thought that was to influence general scholarship for many decades to come and was to create a unique identity for Romanesque sculpture.
They were also to be the first iconographers of Romanesque sculpture which culminated in Mâle’s L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (1898). The publication of this work in advance of what should have been the first volume in his study – on the twelfth century (1922) – has been explained in a semi-apologetic way by Mâle. While admitting that he should have written the second volume first, he also says that he was drawn instinctively to the thirteenth century where “all is order and light.”34 It was not until the start of the twentieth century that scholars accepted that the eleventh and twelfth centuries were not to be viewed as a transitory and ill-defined period. Mâle admitted in 1922 that “monumental sculpture was born in the eleventh century in southwestern France.” After many years, the sculpture of this period was defined as that of a renaissance and was heralded as being in a direct line to that of the Classical period. All of his studies went some way toward correcting the view that the sculpture of the twelfth was “unfinished,” whereas that of the following century was “a finished system.”35 It was also at this time that iconography, and indeed the study of Romanesque sculpture, became irrevocably text driven – a feature for which Mâle is generally either credited or criticized.36
Mâle has been seen as heralding this interest in twelfth-century sculpture, which indeed he did, but his studies were also a factor of the age and an increasing research into the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He was the scholar who capitalized on the research undertaken in the fields of archaeology, history, and Christian studies. The 1880s and’90s saw the establishment of art history as an academic discipline throughout Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, paralleling what has been defined as a period of critical self-examination that swept through the whole field.37 This period also saw the publication of a number of large-scale scientific surveys of medieval art in both Germany and France, with Romanesque sculpture taking its place in the wider art historical picture and also being studied by itself. A typical study is Beenken’s 1924 semi-scientific survey of some 135 works.38 With its focus on the development of style, it is also one of the earliest works to look at the role of the creator. The immediate period after World War I was particularly fertile in research and publications, which resulted from the crisis in the liberal arts that ensued after the war. It was also an attempt by Germany to regain its position and realm of influence, especially in the area of Romanesque studies.
It was also at this time that Schnaase’s work of some 30 years earlier was extended, with the writings of scholars such as Bode, Braun, Léon, Molinier, Enlart, Brutails, Hasak, Von Reber, and Goldschmidt. Some of these were contemporary with Schnaase, others were slightly later and bridge the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they are all similar in their belief that the arts of the Middle Ages were built upon and indeed mirrored those of previous periods. While most German scholars of this period wrote on French monuments, there were also signs of a burgeoning interest in the Romanesque sculpture of their own lands – a movement which was badly affected by both world wars and from which research never really recovered. German studies on Romanesque sculpture never equaled that of France or England, and the insightful initiatives of some 20 years earlier were later reduced to the level of localized studies.39
The start of the twentieth century saw the arrival of some eminent scholars, including Robert de Lasteyrie (1849–1921) and Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis (1862–1923), who along with François Deshoulières were responsible for establishing the relative chronological development of the period and hierarchical structure for the monuments. It was this that was questioned and countered by Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883–1933), the American scholar. His work, based on a stylistic comparison as well as a robust use of documentation and dating, offered an alternative to the progressive and gradual evolution of Romanesque architecture and sculpture throughout the entire country on a regional basis and instead looked at monasticism and pilgrimage as influential forces.40 Porter’s beliefs of a possible origin for French Romanesque sculpture in Burgundy was not to be accepted until well into the next historiographical phase, with the admission by Francis Salet that he might have been right. The origins of Porter’s theory brings us to one of the most eminent historians of the whole period, Henri Focillon (1881–1943), whose research on style in particular has remained significant to the present.41 This was driven by a strong belief in an analysis of style and technique and he theorized on a widely dispersed evolutionary pattern of stylistic development.42 Kingsley Porter’s studies have suffered most and are now seen as being slightly outdated. After his untimely death, the mantle was taken up by Paul Deschamps (1888–1974), whose work in 1947 on the regional nature of French sculpture has also come in for recent criticism.43
By the third decade of the twentieth century, Romanesque sculpture had became one of the most important areas for research.44 Publications studied individual monuments and also included relatively large-scale catalogue-type studies. A favorite platform for such studies was the Bulletin Monumental, first published in 1834 under the auspices of the Société française d’archéologie, Musée des Monuments Français, and which to this day is still one of the most important avenues for new research.
The interest in Romanesque sculpture in England at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not heralded by any comparable studies, and the division between the antiquarian works of the preceding period and this phase is imperceptible. Romanesque sculpture in England and Ireland differs considerably from that of mainland Europe. Organized on a more localized regional and school-type structure than France, different influences came into play at various times and in different areas with little uniformity. Its popular and indeed scholarly acceptance was impeded to a certain extent by these influences. Cahn has further theorized how this sculpture fared worse than book illumination in England and has proposed that the Reformation, Puritan movement, iconoclasm, and weather all militated against its popular acceptance.45 Its entry even into the museum world is also relatively late in England, with the first display of Romanesque sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum taking place as late as 1916. Its study in the academic world was similarly neglected until the founding of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932. It is not surprising therefore to find that catalogue-type works predominated at the start of the century and were to do so for many decades. Instead of having the antiquarian stance of the nineteenth century, they instead tried to analyze form and iconography from a more focused perspective. Typical of such scholarship are those by Keyser and Bond with their formative studies on tympana and fonts. World War II was naturally to disrupt scholarship in the entire world of art history, but it was also to prove to be a benchmark period in which scholarship took on a new emphasis and life.
Phase IV, The Age of Modernism
Even though his work belongs largely to the third phase, the influence of Meyer Schapiro is felt most in this final phase with the legacy that he was to impart with his publications and through his many students. Beginning in 1935 with a study on Moissac, Forsyth has summarized Schapiro’s approach as being very much based on the belief that form and meaning were inseparable.46 He lacks many of the entrenched views prior to the outbreak of World War II.47 Both world wars were adversely to affect scholarship on Romanesque sculpture, especially in Europe, but also with positive results for its future study in America where interest increased. France was naturally to retain its pre-eminent role in scholarship on the subject after World War II, and was also to hold onto its slightly entrenched Franco-centric view. The focus once again was the ongoing issue of the origins of the style, and numerous studies both reinforced the belief of a French genesis and its gradual movement throughout the rest of the country.
This was also a period of controversy in France with various official and unofficial theories forwarded as to the origins of monumental sculpture in terms of place and dispersal, with Francis Salet, head of the Société française d’archéologie, playing a central role.48 Despite the series of disputes and controversies, Lyman has documented how this was a period in which Romanesque sculpture entered popular acceptance and was no longer under the sole control of the scholar.49 It was also at this time that a number of studies began to use the socio-historical approach that was first developed in relation to history by such scholars as Georges Duby. The need and value of having a complete documentary and photographic record of all Romanesque sculpture was first proposed by Focillon and its aims remain as valid today as when they were first stated well over half a century ago. The publication in 1954 by Jean Baudry of the first volume in a regional survey of French Romanesque sculpture titled Bourgogne Romane began one of the foremost surveys of this subject, which has since moved outside its national borders with the publication in 1999 of volume 88 on Westphalia. It has paved the way for a similar series of hardcopy publications in the United States50 and the more recent large-scale electronic undertaking in Britain of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland which was founded by George Zarnecki some 20 years ago. All of these undertakings are adding significantly to our understanding of this sculpture and in many ways continue the role of the antiquarian started some 300 years ago.
More recent French research by scholars such as Baylé, Boss-Favre, Cabanot, Durliat, Fain, Gould, Vergnolle, and Wirth has focused on the general as well as the regional nature of the sculpture and is now being driven from a greater understanding of what exactly has survived and how it can be viewed in relation to the broader picture.51 These studies have looked at the functionality and creative powers behind such works from an interdisciplinary perspective, which has blended archaeology and art history with slightly less of an emphasis on iconography.52 The great period of iconographical research certainly seems to have gone and its role now appears to be secondary or equal to such issues as form or function.
French sculpture has continued to attract foreign scholars such as Borg, Cahn, Evans, Montagu, Rupprecht, Seidel, Stratford, Tcherikover, Travis, and Zarnecki, to name just a few, who have helped in removing some of the nationalism attached to such studies in the past and have also opened up the field to different issues. Our perceptions of the material have changed and there seems to be less of an emphasis on developing an absolute chronology for the entire period. Many of “the chronological implications of some general theories on the nature of Romanesque (were) formulated in the early decades of this (last) century”53 and have tended to overshadow subsequent research and directed the approach of scholarship which is now being questioned. Occasional studies such as Anne Prache’s recent work still place a high emphasis on the search for the origins of the style, which is going to be a question that will remain with us for a long time.54
Studies have also looked at the more localized monument or group of carvings, and we are developing a more organized and paced approach to understanding the development of style. If research continued in France after the war, it was not to be so in Germany, where some of the country’s most established scholars fled their own lands and in many ways also left the subject of Romanesque sculpture behind them. Erwin Panofsky, for example, was one such scholar whose earliest work was on German Romanesque sculpture,55 but who was never to write on the subject again after he moved to America. Nowadays, German scholarship on the subject is limited, little remains in situ, and the pre-war nationalistic associations that it evokes may lie in the modern avoidance of scholarship on the subject. Apart from the work of Kiesow, Legner, Lobbedey, Schütz, Müller, and von Winterfeld, little else has been written on this subject.
The highpoint of research on Romanesque sculpture in England began in the middle of the twentieth century with the general survey-type works on sculpture by scholars such as Prior and Gardner (1912), Gardner (1935), Zarnecki (1951, 1953), Saxl (1954), and Stone (1955) and after a short hiatus, interest was revitalized with the exhibition on Romanesque art that was held in 1984.56 Localized studies now also predominate which are very much driven from an archaeological perspective and, as in France, there is an emphasis on understanding form, style, and function with little work being done on iconography or reception. Ireland, like England, after the pioneering work by Françoise Henry and more recently by O’Keeffe, has eagerly awaited the completion of the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture, and scholarship here as elsewhere has been diverted into adding to this resource.57
We may have identified the hands of a few more sculptors since the pioneering work of the early part of the century, but this is an area that could benefit from greater research. Unusually for a topic so current in other areas of medieval scholarship, little study has been undertaken on reception issues in Romanesque sculpture.58 We still remain relatively ignorant as to how these programs were viewed from the variety of contexts that exist and this is an area of research that will pay dividends in the future. Similarly, the need to contextualize this sculpture in the broader framework of Romanesque art still remains. Manuscript and metalwork studies have been linked, but sculpture still remains the isolated medium in the broader picture. The historiography of Romanesque sculpture has been guided by the attempts of the early historians to impose far-reaching rules regarding creation, date, dispersal, form, and style, which have recently been questioned with greater research into the minutiae of the style. This is a process which will only increase with time and greater knowledge, and will add to our understanding of what is clearly one of the most important periods in the history of sculpture.
This essay is dedicated to George Zarnecki, doyen of British Romanesque art history, for all his help and encouragement. Thanks are due to Conrad Rudolph for inviting to me to contribute to this volume. Many colleagues have helped with my queries and these include Jens Bove, Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Christian Heck, University of Lille, Alison Stones, University of Pittsburgh, Adelaide Bennett, Giovanni Freni, Andrea Campbell, Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, and Andreas Petzold, Open University. I would like to thank Jane Vadnal, University of Pittsburgh, for permission to reproduce the images and to John Blazejewski, Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, for his help with photography.
1 [On Romanesque architecture, see chapter 14 by Fernie in this volume. See also chapter 16 on the modern origins of Romanesque sculpture by Maxwell in this volume (ed.).]
2 Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism.
3 Frankl, The Gothic.
4 Lyman, French Romanesque Sculpture; Glass, Italian Romanesque Sculpture.
5 Cahn and Seidel, Romanesque Sculpture.
6 Forsyth “Monumental Arts.”
7 After a long period of relative neglect it is rewarding to see an increasing interest in individual scholars such as Meyer Schapiro, whose extensive studies on the sculpture of this period were the subject of a session at a College Art Association meeting (Philadelphia, February 23, 2002) entitled “Reassessing the Legacy of Meyer Schapiro.” Two of the papers, by Forsyth (“Narrative at Moissac”) and Cahn (“Schapiro and Focillon”), were subsequently published in Gesta. The work and character of Arthur Kingsley Porter, after a long period of neglect, was also recently studied by Richardson (“The Fate of Kingsley Porter”) and Neuman de Vegvar (“Shadow of the Sidhe”) and he was the subject of a paper at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo 2003 (session 203, “Michael Camille and Kingsley Porter: Modernity, Medieval Margins and the Monstrous,” Janice Mann).
8 Brush, Shaping of Art History.
9 Cocke, “Pre-19th-Century Attitudes in England” and “The Rediscovery of the Romanesque.” See also Kahn, “La Sculpture Romane.”
10 See the Grove Dictionary of Art: <http://www.groveart.com/index.xhtml>.
11 Largely consisting of capitals, corbels, bases, jambs, lintels, cornices, and relief panels such as those found on tympana. The repertoire also includes liturgical furniture including fonts, altars, pulpits, and thrones as well as funerary slabs, but can also include freestanding figures such as those found in twelfth-century Germany.
12 The term “Romanesque” was first applied only to the architecture of this period, which of course included elements of the sculpture and was only applied to all the arts of the period at a later stage.
13 [On Gothic sculpture, see chapter 19 by Büchsel in this volume (ed.).]
14 [On sculptural programs in general, see chapter 26 by Boerner in this volume (ed.).]
15 See Forsyth, “Monumental Arts,” p. 23.
16 Romanesque sculpture is sparsely represented in the Low Countries (with little surviving outside the Tournai and Meuse regions, and what is there being largely derivative), Switzerland (where historically it was part of the Holy Roman Empire and would have come under the influence of France and Italy), and Austria (which again was part of the Holy Roman Empire and has significantly more and better quality carvings surviving). Scandinavia has similarly been neglected in terms of scholarship and little has been written of this sculpture, which represents the first relief sculpture in that area (see <http://www.groveart.com>).
17 Although not published since first given at the First European Congress of Medieval Studies at Spoleto, Mortenson’s ideas have fortunately been preserved by Constable (“Introduction,” p. xiii).
18 See Rudolph, Things of Greater Importance.
19 See Frankl, The Gothic; van der Grinten, Elements of Art, pp. 5–7, Doolittle, “Relations Between Literature and Medieval Studies”; Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth Century France; and Cocke, “Pre-19th-Century Attitudes.”
20 There have been no historiographical studies of Romanesque sculpture per se in contrast to that of the Gothic period. Bober gives one of the best general outlines in the preface to the English language edition of Mâle (Religious Art in France, pp. v–xxiv). Also of interest are Beer, “Gothic,” and Cocke, “The Rediscovery of the Romanesque.” See also Fernie, “Contrasts” and Romanesque Architecture.
21 Frankl, The Gothic; van der Grinten, Elements of Art.
22 One of the most comprehensive studies on the negative application of the term
“Gothic” is given in Frankl, The Gothic. For Vasari, the word “Gothic” was defined as non-Roman or Barbarian – it was an art and period which lay outside the Classical or Roman world (see also Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism).
23 Whereas post-medieval scholarship may not have chosen to distinguish between the Romanesque and Gothic, it is clear that the two styles were viewed separately in the Middle Ages where both Panofsky (“Friedsam Annunciation”) and Fernie (Romanesque Architecture, p. 1) have pointed out the use of Romanesque architectural and sculptural forms, especially in fifteenth-century Northern painting, to denote a period removed from their own.
24 Wilkins, “An Essay.”
25 North, Of Building, p. 111.
26 Typical of these early works are Pierre Monier’s “Histoire des arts qui ont rapport au dessin” (1698).
27 Also founded at this time were the École des Chartres (1804), the Société des antiquaries de France (1821), Congrès archeologique de France (1834), and the Commission des monuments historiques (1837).
28 Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History, p. 22.
29 See Frankl, The Gothic, p. 345; Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, pp. 155–6; Gidon, “L’Invention du terme,” pp. 268–88.
30 Prior to Gunn, this style was referred to in England as Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Gothic, Monastic, or Opus Romanorum (see Cocke, “Rediscovery of the Romanesque,” p. 360).
31 Marquand and Frothingham, A Text-Book.
32 Schnaase, Geschlichte der Bildenden; Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle; Religious Art in France.
33 One of Lenoir’s most significant contributions is his Description historique et chronologique des monument de sculpture réunis a Musée des monumens Français (1803).
34 Mâle, Religious Art in France, p. xxix.
35 Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle, pp. iv, v.
36 It was Mâle who first described the sculptors of the Middle Ages as “writers in stone” – an approach later discussed by Camille, “Mouths and Meanings,” pp. 43–54.
37 Brush, Shaping of Art History, p. 1.
38 Beenken, Romanische skulptur.
39 Isolated regional studies of Romanesque sculpture such as that by Fastenau, Romanische Steinplastik, were certainly under way before World War I, but were to be disrupted until the early 1930s. Pinder’s 1925 study, Deutsche plastik, is one of the first to post-date the war, but was sadly not followed by other works in this area.
40 Porter, Les Débuts and Romanesque Sculpture.
41 One of the most revelatory documents from a historiographical perspective is a bibliography on Romanesque sculpture compiled by Focillon while lecturing at New York University. Divided under headings such as “Principles of Style” and “Historical Development,” it provides a personal documentation of what he considered important works on the subject (see Focillon, Romanesque Sculpture in France).
42 Focillon, L’Art des sculpteurs Romans. See also Francastel, L’Humanisme roman, pp. 194–200.
43 Tcherikover, High Romanesque Sculpture, pp. 1–2, provides a synopsis of the changing perspectives on this theory in general and shows how she believes it has hindered modern scholarship in that it was accepted verbatim.
44 One of the pivotal studies in the reversal of this theory was by Terret in 1914.
45 Cahn, “English Romanesque Art,” p. 276.
46 Forsyth, “Narrative at Moissac.”
47 See Cahn, “Focillon’s Jongleur,” and Schmitt, “Images and the Historian.”
48 Lyman, French Romanesque Sculpture, pp. 159–60.
49 Ibid., pp. 160–1.
50 Cahn and Seidel, Romanesque Sculpture.
51 Although Grodecki’s insightful work (Le Moyen-Age retrouvé) is now slightly dated, it still remains an invaluable study on this subject.
52 This shift in emphasis is nicely demonstrated when studies on Romanesque Normandy with their changing perspectives are examined: e.g., Gould, La Sculpture romane; Musset, Normandie romane; Baylé, Les Origines, Architecture normande.
53 Tcherikover, High Romanesque Sculpture, p. 1. This is reinforced by a number of similar statements from other scholars. Her study is typical of the current trend in reassessing published corpora, especially in France by scholars such as Baylé, Borg, Boss-Favre, and Vergnolle.
54 Prache, Initiation à l’art roman.
55 Panofsky, Die Deutsche Plastik.
56 See Cocke, “Rediscovery of the Romanesque” for all these works, except Gardner, A Handbook. Interestingly, the number of carvings in the actual exhibition (some 81) reflects an unusually high and unparalleled emphasis which must reflect that of the organizers.
57 Henry, Irish Art; O’Keeffe, “Lismore and Cashel.” The historiography of Romanesque Irish art is dealt with in detail in O’Keeffe, Romanesque Ireland.
58 One of the foremost treatments of this subject is in Kahn, Romanesque Frieze.
Maylis Baylé, Architecture normande au moyen âge: Acts du Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 28 Septembre–2 Octobre 1994, 2 vols. (Condé-sur-Noireau, 1997; 2nd edn. 2001).
——, Les Origines et les premières dévelopements de la sculpture romane en Normandie (Caen, 1971; 2nd edn. 1991).
Hermann Theodor Beenken, Romanische skulptur in Deutschland (11. Und 12. Jahrhundert) (Leipzig, 1924).
E. S. de Beer, “Gothic: Origin and Diffusion of the Term; The Idea of Style in Architecture,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11 (1948), pp. 143–62.
Tina Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism. A Prehistory (Cambridge, 1992).
Francis Bond, Fonts and Font Covers (London, 1908).
Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History. Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmodt, and the Study of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1996).
Walter Cahn, “English Romanesque Art 1066–1200. Review of the Exhibition,” Art Journal (1984) pp. 275–8.
——, “Focillon’s Jongleur,” Art History 18 (1995), p. 345.
——, “Schapiro and Focillon,” Gesta XLI/1 (2002), pp. 129–36.
Walter Cahn and Linda Seidel, Romanesque Sculpture in American Collections, 2 vols. (New York, 1979–).
Michael Camille, “Mouths and Meanings: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art,” in Brendan Cassidy, ed., Iconography at the Crossroads. Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art Princeton University 23–24 March 1990 (Princeton, 1993), pp. 43–58.
Thomas Cocke, “Pre-19th-Century Attitudes in England to Romanesque Architecture,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series 36 (1973), pp. 72–3.
——, “The Rediscovery of the Romanesque,” in George Zarnecki, Janet Holt, and Tristram Holland, eds., English Romanesque Art 1066–1200: Hayward Gallery, London, 5 April–8 July 1984 (London, 1984), pp. 360–6.
Giles Constable, “Introduction,” in H. Damico and J. B. Zavadil, eds., Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 1 (New York, 1998).
Benedetto Croce, Theory and History of Historiography, trans. Douglas Aunslie (London, 1921).
Paul Deschamps, French Sculpture of the Romanesque Period Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Florence, 1930).
——, La Sculpture française, époque romane; photographies prises par Eliane Janet-Le Caisne (Paris, 1947).
Dorothy Winn Doolittle, “The Relations between Literature and Medieval Studies in France from 1820 to 1860” (Ph.D. Thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 1953).
Nathan Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth Century France towards the Middle Ages (New York, 1946).
J. Fastenau, Die Romanische Steinplastik in Scwaben (Esslingen, 1907).
Eric Fernie, “Contrasts in the Methodology and Interpretation of Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture,” Archaeological Journal 145 (1988) pp. 344–64.
——, Romanesque Architecture: Design, Meaning and Metrology (London, 1995).
Henri Focillon, L’Art des sculpteurs Romans, recherches sur l’histoire des formes (Paris, 1931).
——, Romanesque Sculpture in France. A course of lectures given in April–May 1936 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1936).
Ilene H. Forsyth, “The Monumental Arts of the Romanesque Period: Recent Research. The Romanesque Cloister,” in Elizabeth C. Parker, ed., with the assistance of Mary B. Shephard, The Cloisters, Studies in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary (New York, 1992), pp. 3–25.
——, “Narrative at Moissac: Schapiro’s Legacy,” Gesta XLI/1 (2002), pp. 71–94.
Pierre Francastel, L’Humanisme roman; critique des théories sur l’art du XIe siècle en France (Paris, 1942).
Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations Through Eight Centuries (Princeton, 1960).
——, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs (London, 1879).
Arthur Gardner, A Handbook of English Medieval Sculpture (Cambridge, 1935).
M. F. Gidon, “L’Invention du terme l’architecture Romane par Gerville (1818),” Bulletin de la Société des antiquaries de Normandie (1935), pp. 268–88.
Dorothy F. Glass, Italian Romanesque Sculpture. An Annotated Bibliography (Boston, 1983).
Philip Gould, “La Sculpture romane in Basse Normandie” (Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Paris, 1953).
Evert F. van der Grinten, Elements of Art Historiography in Medieval Texts: An Analytic Study (The Hague, 1969).
Louis Grodecki, Le Moyen-Age retrouvé (Paris, 1986).
Françoise Henry, Irish Art in the Romanesque Period (1020–1170 AD) (London, 1970).
Deborah Kahn, ed., The Romanesque Frieze and the Spectator, The Lincoln Symposium Papers (London, 1992).
——, “La Sculpture romane en Angleterre: état des questions,” Bulletin Monumental, 146 (1988), pp. 307–40.
Charles Edward Keyser, A List of Norman Tympana and Lintels, with Figure or Symbolical Sculpture still or till recently existing in the Churches of Great Britain (London, 1927).
Thomas Lyman, with Daniel Smartt, French Romanesque Sculpture. An Annotated Bibliography (Boston, 1987).
Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France; étude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration par Émile Mâle (Paris, 1898).
——, Religious Art in France, The Twelfth Century, A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography (Princeton, 1978).
Allan Marquand and Arthur Frothingham, A Text-Book of the History of Sculpture (New York, 1896).
Lucien Musset, Normandie romane, photographies inédites de Zodiaque. Traduction Anglaise de Paul Veyrriras et David Rowe. Traduction Allemand de Hilaire de Vos, 2 vols. (Saint-Léger-Vauban, Yonne, 1967–74).
Roger North, Of Building: Roger North’s Writings on Architecture, ed. H. M. Colvin and J. Newman (Oxford, 1981).
Tadgh O’Keeffe, “Lismore and Cashel: Reflections on the Beginnings of Romanesque Architecture in Munster,” Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 24 (1990), pp. 118–52.
——, Romanesque Ireland: Architecture and Ideology in the Twelfth Century (Dublin, 2003).
Erwin Panofsky, Die Deutsche Plastik des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1924).
——, “The Friedsam Annunciation and the Problem of the Ghent Altarpiece,” The Art Bulletin 17 (1935), pp. 433–40.
——, “Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir,” The Art Journal 28 (1968), p. 30.
Wilhelm Pinder, Die Deutsche plastik des Vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1925).
Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, 1982).
Arthur Kingsley Porter, Les Débuts de la Sculpture Romane (Paris: 1919).
——, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (Boston, 1923).
Anne Prache, Initiation à l’art roman, Architecture et sculpture sous la direction d’Anne Prache (Paris, 2002).
Donald Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford, 1998).
Hilary Richardson, “The Fate of Kingsley Porter,” Donegal Annual 45 (1993), pp. 83–7.
Conrad Rudolph, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia, 1990).
Gert Schiff, ed., German Essays on Art History (New York, 1988).
Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Images and the Historian,” in A. Bolvig and P. Lindley, eds., History and Images Towards a New Iconology (Turnhout, 2003).
Karl Schnaase, Geschlichte der Bildenden Künste im Mittelalter (Düsseldorf, 1871).
Anat Tcherikover, High Romanesque Sculpture in the Duchy of Aquitaine c.1090–1140 (Oxford, 1997).
Carol Neuman de Vegvar, “In the Shadow of the Sidhe Arthur Kingsley Porter’s Vision of Exotic Ireland,” Irish Arts Review Yearbook 17 (2001), pp. 49–61.
William Wilkins, “An Essay Towards an History of the Venta Icenorum of the Romans and of Norwich Castle,” Archaeologia XII (1795), pp. 132–80.