16
Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture
Ever since archaeologists adopted the term “Romanesque” in the early nineteenth century, the label has profoundly influenced the study of eleventh- and twelfth-century sculpture. The act of naming a new style shaped research by signaling the discovery of an art identified as different from Gothic (the period label to which scholars previously attached these works).1 The nature of the difference, however, remained to be explored. The neologism also implied that the sources of the art were to be found in Roman traditions; nonetheless, even that seemingly straightforward notion raised many questions, not the least of which was the actual relationship to Roman building. Romanesque needed definition, more than a name alone could supply.
Archaeologists looked first primarily to the architecture, folding sculpture into the taxonomic layers used to describe arches, vaults, and wall surfaces, but before long discussion of stylistic sources raised questions regarding the role of sculpture in Romanesque development.2 Scholars noted high and low phases – birth, maturity, and decline – in step with art history’s foundational theory of evolutionary progress, but in this schema the birth of Romanesque sculpture was the most perplexing. After all, scholars understood that the production of monumental sculpture had fallen off in the post-antique period. Its resuscitation needed explanation. Identifying the origins could thus offer clues to Romanesque art’s particularity and contribute to an understanding of the distinct qualities that marked it from the art that came before and after.
This chapter surveys several ways scholarship has addressed the origins of monumental sculpture in the Romanesque period, limiting its discussion to three specific approaches to the problem. One approach looked to different geographic regions to explain the style’s distant sources; another considered the problem more philosophically and searched to define sculptural characteristics in metaphysical terms; and a third approach attributed the rebirth of sculpture to a shift in iconographic or signifying value. All three attracted debate, and on occasion doctrinal entrenchment obfuscated the substance of the quarrels, but there is little doubt that these polemics propelled further research and indelibly shaped the field.
From its earliest concerted study, Romanesque art was identified with geography. The Englishman William Gunn and the Frenchman Charles de Gerville first applied the terms “Romanesque” and “roman” in the 1810s to signal a relationship to Roman building traditions.3 Both understood the term in the philological sense as marking both the debased Latinity of post-antique language and the derivative quality of Romance languages. In France, roman also found an analogue in the popular word romanesque, or novel-like, equally at ease describing a tortuous series of events, a dreamy attitude, or an eccentric person. The use of roman for eleventh- and twelfth-century art carried with it some of these connotations: it hinted at the curiousness of this art (in the sense of romanesque) while framing it in the philological sense of cultural erosion.
The impression that this art was somehow derivative, one or more steps removed from Rome itself, received widespread support from the outset, notably in the early lectures of Arcisse de Caumont (1830), the widely influential founder of the Société française d’archéologie.4 His discussion of architecture classified eleventh- and twelfth-century buildings into chronological periods and regional types, categories formulated in relation to the Roman tradition. Sculpture fell into his purview, earning brief stylistic commentary, yet it figured as little more than architecture’s accessory for classificatory purposes. Certain scholars pushed Caumont’s theory even further by contending that Romanesque art in France was more Roman-like than the art produced in other countries.5 In a tradition stretching back to Chateaubriand and forward to Emile Mâle (1917, 1922), the modern Catholic nation as a new Rome partly explained the special success of medieval art on French soil.
Although Caumont was probably Europe’s most influential medievalist, his taxonomy did not satisfy all scholars. In Great Britain, for example, terms such as “Saxon” and “Norman” had long circulated in antiquarian circles and grounded this art in the indigenous history of the British Isles.6 Terms like “byzantine” and “oriental” were also not uncommon in the late eighteenth century, yielding period classifications like “romano-Byzantine primordial” (i.e., 400–1000) and “romano-Byzantine secondaire” (1000–1100) that lingered until the start of the twentieth century.7 All such terms reflected the idea that this art’s pedigree may not have been purely Roman.8 Some scholars considered the Eastern impulse much more decisive. Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, for one, argued that the Crusades provided the conduit of exchange, enabling the West’s interaction with the East. Only when the Latin tradition received this new impetus did it flourish as a new and distinctive style.9
Some scholarship also steered away from Latin and Byzantine sources to discover a distinctly “Northern” quality. Viollet-le-Duc believed, in addition to his Crusades theory, in a northern contribution: after the death of Charlemagne, each region’s people regained its “natural allure,” enabling each country to translate its own genius for the regeneration of its art.10 Louis Courajod developed this notion with greater precision by examining the specific traits of the northern impulse, arguing that Romanesque art drew its influences from the Celts, various Germanic tribes, and also Muslims.11 The search for Northern European sources also found general support among some German and English scholars, including Franz Kugler (1842), Franz von Reber (1886), and William Lethaby (1904), who all described Romanesque at least in part as a “Northern” product. The American Arthur Kingsley Porter wrote an essay in 1909 strongly in favor of the general northern view, claiming that “five centuries of barbarism [were] the only conceivable force that could have had the power to free Western architecture from the trammels of Roman formula.” Owing to the cultural vacuum of the Dark Ages, Porter claimed, art could be reborn, “cut loose from the classical canons.”12
With such sentiments, discussion occasionally tipped into explicit commentary on the race of nations, as in the 1901 work of Josef Strzygowski. Strzygowski championed the Syrian and Palestinian influences on Western Christian art, but he also posited the special innate qualities of the “Nordic” man.13 The increasingly overt racial theories draped a noxious pall over his later studies in particular. Far less sulfurous but no less nationalistic, Emile Mâle answered the Viennese-based scholar, as well as Porter, by saying that Germany was not the privileged birthplace of Romanesque; its origins were in the East and this Eastern impulse took root first on French soil.14 Henri Focillon expressed similarly impassioned opinions and accentuated an East–West rift in geographic debates when he argued that Romanesque art (and all medieval art of quality) was distinct to the West (l’Occident) and foreign to Germanic lands whose rudimentary arts reflected the barbarism of the people.15
In 1911 the Catalan architect and archaeologist Josep Puig i Cadafalch advanced a reverse position with his theory of the primer art romànic or premier art roman.16 He argued that the earliest recognizable Romanesque forms could be found around the Mediterranean, particularly in northern Italy and Catalonia at the start of the tenth century (fig. 16-1). Thereafter, the movement progressed north into Gaul and the Germanic Empire as far as the Moselle. If one wanted to search further for the origins of this first wave, he asserted, one would need to look eastward.17 “One could say that Romanesque art is a Mesopotamian art in the same way that French art of the eighteenth century is a Greek art.”18 Though primarily an architecturally based theory, founded upon types of construction, wall decoration, and vaulting, the idea implicated sculpture by proposing the conditions of the medium’s genesis.
FIGURE 16-1 Map showing the spread of the “First Romanesque” style, from J. Puig i Cadafalch, La Géographie.
While the number of pan-Continental theories multiplied, scholars also paid growing attention to local geographic developments. In France the search for regional stylistic trends became tantamount to uncovering regional identities within national borders. Support for regional schools had much to do with the spread of local antiquarian societies, beginning with Caumont’s own Société des antiquaires de Normandie in 1824 (becoming the Société française d’archéologie in 1834),19 followed within a few years by a dozen regional archaeological associations throughout the country. Since Caumont’s lectures in Normandy stressed classification into regional styles, this approach found its response at the local societies: hometown antiquarian-cum-archaeologists quickly got busy plumbing the distinct qualities of their familiar monuments. Nave tribunes and half-barrel vaults, for example, became defining characteristics of Auvergnat Romanesque and in Poitou, the “hall” church typified the local style.
Caumont’s “geography of styles” won over many archaeologists, though they often disagreed, sometimes quite vehemently, on the number of schools. Caumont identified seven distinct regions (North, Northwest, West, Southwest, Auvergne, Germanic, and Burgundian). Viollet-le-Duc, on the other hand, named seven in one of his Dictionnaire entries and eight in another; in still other essays, he cited eleven and thirteen schools.20 Jules Quicherat, for his part, objected to Caumont’s intuitive deductions and, borrowing terms from Linnaean classification, sought to ground identifications in more scientific data.21 Camille Enlart, one of the most outspoken proponents of the regional approach along with Robert de Lasteyrie, drew distinctions along very old (including Gallic) territorial divisions, thereby suggesting that something special in the soil, climate, and people produced differences among varieties of Romanesque art.22 Although all such regional divisions depended primarily on architectural qualities, scholars understood that sculpture added substantial corroborative evidence. The absence of carved tympana, for example, was typical of Aquitaine, while Burgundian portals exhibited a penchant for Majestas imagery, Auvergnat doorways favored carved, pedimental-shaped lintels, and Languedocian cloisters encouraged historiated capitals. Carving style was a less determinant but implicit part of this categorization.
England’s scholars, too, attached great importance to regional traditions and to the local learned institutions established to study them, but with very different art historical results. After the refounding of the national Society of Antiquaries in 1717, regionalism received a boost with the 1751 incorporation of London’s own Society of Antiquaries that in turn spurred the foundation of other local groups.23 These societies sponsored comprehensive county surveys, such as Edward Hasted’s four volumes on the county of Kent,24 but sculpture was largely subordinate to the authors’ interests (if present at all). Instead, these publications focused mainly on monuments’ history and building accounts. Even into the nineteenth century, when single-edifice monographs such as those by Robert Willis on Canterbury and Glastonbury came to join the regional surveys, authors only considered sculpture as a complement to the architectural construction.25 The first comprehensive sculptural studies did not appear until the twentieth century, and even then Romanesque sculpture did not foster the kinds of partisan border skirmishes that flared up in France.26 If anything, the county studies in England championed not distinctions among counties, but distinctions between English and Continental Romanesque. Centuries-old traditions of stone carving in Britain, stretching back to the Anglo-Saxon period, provided grounds for this attitude, but British scholars nonetheless failed to reckon fully with the incumbent period categories like “Norman” or “Saxon”; the relation of twelfth-century sculpture to Anglo-Saxon or Irish high crosses, for example, remained problematic and unexplained. It was only in the twentieth century that, with the appearance of good surveys of this material, research began to entertain such questions.
Scholars of all nationalities reserved their fiercest debates for French monuments. The most famous volley came from the American Porter, seen (aside from its art historical merits) as an assault on the French academic establishment.27 Porter overturned the usual hierarchies and argued for Spanish and Lombard priority in sculptural matters, and, within France itself, Burgundy’s precedence over Languedoc. He based his position on scrupulous analysis of works and corroborating texts (dated foundation charters, altar consecrations, etc.). And rather than posit merely natural evolution touching one region after another, he believed social phenomena such as pilgrimage and monastic reform helped explain stylistic progress and exchange.28
The French academy bristled at Porter’s rejection of their regional hierarchy and assailed his stylistic judgment and reading of texts. Paul Deschamps led the charge, publishing virulent corrections of Porter’s textual evidence,29 while others, such as François Deshoulières, Charles Dangibeaud, and Eugène Lefèvre-Pontalis, produced essays to reassert the schools classification.30 When a few French scholars, such as the widely respected Georges Gaillard working on Spanish sculpture and Charles Oursel working on Burgundy,31 offered research that supported some of Porter’s theses, the tension ebbed; true détente did not reign, however, until the deaths of Porter and Deschamps in the 1930s. The dispute nonetheless left traces in subsequent scholarship and continues to mark especially Burgundian, Languedocian, and northern Spanish studies.
In Germany, Romanesque sculpture was late to garner specialized interest. When it did, the majority of nineteenth-century scholars remained attached to the study of abstract and formal qualities (cf. infra), rather than geographic sources.32 After all, many believed that Romanesque sculpture represented simply a continuation of Ottonian forms and types, so the gradual distinctions that arose between the two periods could be explored best on aesthetic terms. A number of scholars in the early twentieth century, however, did pronounce on sculpture’s geography and joined these debates. Julius Baum (1910), for one, stood behind Roman and Latinate origins, while Paul Frankl (1926) was perhaps Germany’s strongest exponent of the “northern” theory. Frankl, building upon the studies of Courajod and others, sketched broad historical genealogies within Europe but tied regional styles to local conditions. Germany, in this view, held on longer to the Carolingian traditions, and thus continued a style consistent with the older forms. This was important since there were significant sculptural examples from tenth- and eleventh-century Germany, including works in stucco, that remained to be considered against the full Romanesque style. France and Italy, according to Frankl, likewise maintained traditions little different in form from Carolingian art, but by about 1080 developed their own regional styles – dependent on local temperament and conditions – that yielded the mature Romanesque. Frankl thus wove the study of regional specificity into a pan-European theory, melding the two outlooks most widely favored at this time.
Interest in geographic origins remained a constant, although less polemical, concern through much of the twentieth century. Kenneth John Conant maintained that Romanesque art had strong northern, Carolingian roots, and Charles Rufus Morey in 1942 echoed earlier scholars when he argued that the putatively Roman quality of Romanesque art was really a Germanic interpretation of late Classical traditions.33 Partisans of southern theories were not lacking either. Edson Armi traced the origins of the new style to the appearance of “continuous orders” in Catalonian and southern French churches,34 while Roberto Salvini drew parallels between the premier art roman and linguistic forms of provincial Latin that developed in particular social climates of southern Europe.35 Such studies from the second half of the century, however, began to integrate the search for origins with other concerns, initiatives begun already in the 1920s and 1930s to which we turn below.
Categorization had dominated the study of Romanesque art since the day of Gerville and Gunn, yet ongoing partisanship in geography discussions distracted somewhat from advances made in other areas of scholarship. In Germany, for example, nineteenth-century scholars were more steeped in aesthetics and stylistic qualities than in geographic (or scientific) explanations for Romanesque sculpture. F. W. Hegel’s philosophy inspired scholars such as Carl Schnaase to discuss Romanesque sculpture in terms of stages in aesthetic evolution, and others under Heinrich Wöfflin’s influence sought to define the style on purely formal terms. Some, such as Richard Hamann-MacLean (1908), Margret Burg (1922), and Eugen Lüthgen (1923), speculated on the particularities of sculpture as a medium,36 particularly in relation to Carolingian and Ottonian sculptural traditions. Explanations of origins therefore occupied only the margins of such studies. Nonetheless, one scholar (also Hegel-inspired) who did address formal stylistic origins in a profound way was Henri Focillon, arguing that the new style was born of sculpture’s own material conditions.
Focillon was convinced that the historicist, archaeological endeavors of the nineteenth century unsatisfactorily served works of art. In his first book-length publication on a medieval subject, he argued instead that history experienced strong and weak periods, as well as moments of rupture, paroxysm, and repli that defied linear stylistic progress. Most significant, he believed, were “breakthrough” moments, those periods or episodes that revealed history’s structure. As he said, there were several stages of humanity, or of human geology whose stratigraphy must be taken apart to find the “present and the hidden” structure.37 Form expressed itself through adherence to certain principles, guided for example by the exigencies of the sculptural canvas (“law of the frame”) or the architectural field (“law of architecture”), and understanding these might hold the key to understanding the essence of Romanesque sculpture. The way to discern the patterns or laws was to attend to forms, their origins, survivals, and reawakenings, and from these patterns – a kind of structure or logic – one would arrive at an understanding of the history of a style, the history of art tout court.
In an important 1938 article, Focillon set the research agenda, as well as the method, for generations of scholars to come. He identified the year 1000 as crucial, one of those moments of both rupture (with the immediate past) and reawakening (of more distant traditions). Close study of this period’s sculpture, therefore, should offer rare insight into the universe of forms specific to Romanesque and provide a basis for understanding the special logic that separated this art from Gothic. His students (notably J. Baltrušaitis) consequently adopted the eleventh century as their field of predilection, publishing on the formal and geometric qualities of early sculpture in France.38
Following this methodological course were two Polish-born scholars, Louis Grodecki, one of Focillon’s students, and the Courtauld-trained scholar George Zarnecki. They were perhaps their generation’s most influential advocates of research into the rise of Romanesque sculpture as a distinct medium. Whether discussing sculpture in England, France, Switzerland, or Germany, both sought out the evidentiary forms that would demonstrate the evolution from early, rustic blocked-out capitals to fully mature historiated works of the twelfth century. The debt to Focillon surfaces in much of their work, whether in Grodecki’s methodological essay on the inherent duality of Romanesque carving (described as both figure and architecture) or in case-studies, such as on Bernay’s sculpture, or in Zarnecki’s research into the early sculptural group at Payerne, Switzerland (fig. 16-2).39 Even this latter choice of subject derives from concerns laid out in Focillon’s own writings, as in his reflections on Dijon’s crypt capitals (fig. 16-3). When these scholars looked across the Channel, they also applied their Continental perspective to English sculpture.40 Zarnecki, for example, argued that the impulses that gave rise to Romanesque sculpture were not indigenous to Britain, but brought from Normandy; for this reason English Romanesque sculpture does not properly begin until after 1066.41 Viking and Anglo-Saxon art, he felt, were simply “quite out of step with the new architectural sculpture evolving on the Continent.”42 For these scholars, Romanesque production marked a new stylistic stage that wedded material and formal exigencies to produce works of unprecedented figural complexity.
These studies framed research for the next generation of scholars, although perhaps with more lasting effect in France than in England. Few in England maintained the interest in material origins along these lines, in spite of Zarnecki’s status as one of Great Britain’s most influential scholars.43 When, for example, scholars addressed the distinctive character of Romanesque sculpture, as in Deborah Kahn’s 1991 study of Canterbury Cathedral’s earliest sculptural group, contextual considerations weighed more heavily than formalist study. In France, on the other hand, Grodecki published an influential “state of the question” essay that outlined in very clear terms the important issues facing the study of French sculpture for the next generation of students.44 Like Focillon’s similar essay 20 years earlier, Grodecki championed the value of renewed research into the experimental impulses and ancient traditions that spurred on a slowly changing art form in the early years of the eleventh century.
Two subsequent generations have continued this interest, first in the work of Marcel Durliat, one of Grodecki’s protégés, and in the work of Durliat’s own students. Durliat, whose research has focused on southern France and northern Spain, also in time published a “state of the question” article in 1968 setting out for future generations the issues that needed attention.45 This article, however, demonstrates how far the orientation initiated by Focillon had strayed, for Durliat, while noting that research into origins had turned fruitfully to the Loire valley, hoped to draw attention to other issues, such as the role of pilgrimage, the identity of sculptors, and the still unshakeable “schools” debate.46
FIGURE 16-2 Capital. Payerne, Switzerland. University of Pennsylvania Image Collection. Photo: David Robb.
FIGURE 16-3 Crypt Capital, Orans figure, Dijon, France. Photo: Robert A. Maxwell.
Even with this expanded query, however, the subsequent generation has continued to refine formalist inquiry to understand the qualities that make the sculpture Romanesque. Their research has produced a series of impressive regional studies: Maylis Baylé on Normandy, Eliane Vergnolle on the Loire valley, Jean Cabanot on Bordelais and southwest sculpture, and Marie-Thérèse Camus on Poitou.47 Each explored the kinds of formal and material-based qualities that so intrigued the earlier scholars, while also bringing texts and other source material to bear, notably on proposed chronologies. Characteristic of these works is their careful attention to artists’ working practices, particularly the preparatory blocking out of capitals (épannelage), interpreted as affecting the choice of decoration and its manner of display (fig. 16-4). This series of scholarly volumes, though independent projects, offer interconnecting pictures of the eleventhcentury sculptural revival, and they fulfill in many ways the wish uttered by Focillon in 1938 that an understanding of sculpture’s formative development would only come once scholars had at their disposal detailed surveys of regional foyers.
FIGURE 16-4 Diagram of capital profiles and épannelage. Reproduced from E. Vergnolle, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire.
This focus on the emergence of sculptural forms sometimes relegated iconographic questions to the background, although increasingly since the 1980s research has looked to reconcile form with issues of content. Rows of men crouched under a capital’s abacus appeared to conform to the “law of the frame,” but was this all there was to the figural impulse in early sculpture? The rich portal at Moissac, already the subject of much text-based research, would prove a prime test subject: Grodecki, Durliat, and Vergnolle all published on the abbey’s portal group and argued that the tympanum’s Last Judgment was not simply a translation from other pictorial sources, as Mâle had insisted (see below).48 Instead, the tympanum’s organization and its elaboration of eschatological themes had much to do with the constraints of the sculptural field and how those constraints engendered certain iconographical solutions; for them, neither a pre-existing text nor a chain of formal evolutions could alone “explain” the decorative program. In this sense, Focillon’s legacy was coming full circle: it had initially set new formal study at a distance from iconographic interpretation as practiced by Mâle, yet now decades later a muted formalism reintegrated iconographic study. This approach received confirmation in a recent survey of Romanesque monumental arts, in which Vergnolle addressed on equivalent methodological terms the early sculpture of St-Génis-des-Fontaines and later work at Cluny.49 Although not slavishly faithful to Focillon’s work, this latest discussion continues the exploration of form’s origins as an interpretative means for unlocking the defining qualities of the Romanesque as a distinct period style.
Content, Context, and the Sculptural Revival
For many nineteenth-century amateurs of the Middle Ages, religious meaning, not form, was medieval art’s greatest legacy. The task of the archaeologist was to uncover the theological bases for the assorted beasts, plants, and tunic-clad figures that decorated these millennium-old objects. This line of research produced voluminous compendia of iconographic interpretations, yet such works on the whole failed to consider subject matter as a defining quality of Romanesque sculpture or to entertain the possibility that content or meaning was somehow related to the condition of the period style. This position changed dramatically at the start of the twentieth century and within just a few decades scholarship’s preoccupation with texts and contexts inflected even geographic and formalist approaches to sculpture’s origins.50
This shift owed a great deal to Emile Mâle, whose publications made an important contribution to the specific definition of Romanesque sculpture in iconographic terms. Resurgent enthusiasm for Catholic teaching in France, as well as the philological underpinning of much art historical practice, drew Mâle and others to look specifically for sculpture’s origins in religious texts.51 Although some simplified the matter to a purely philological issue, viewing pictures as just another form of textual transmission, Mâle viewed the rise of sculptural imagery as linked additionally to the survival of iconography in other visual media, especially from early Christian sources. “Christian iconography, born in the Near East, came to us ready-made,” kept alive for centuries in the West through illuminated manuscripts (fig. 16-5). Romanesque sculptors incorporated novel motifs and ideas for the new medium, but all the same, the illuminated miniature “explains both the contorted aspect of our nascent sculpture and profoundly traditional character of our iconography.”52 The “rebirth” of sculpture was thus crucially bound to iconographic expression in a textual mode. It is no wonder then that Mâle considered monasticism crucial to this revival, for the religious orders were the link to early Christian textual/iconographic traditions. “Twelfth-century art is above all a monastic art,”53 and sculpture was its religious codex in stone.
This codicological view of origins overlapped with another growing concern, namely the relation of monumental sculpture to the minor arts.54 Comparisons to other media showed that the art of monumental carving, considered to have been entirely lost since late antiquity, was perpetuated in miniature form through metalwork, ivories, and gemstones. German scholars in particular had for a long time acknowledged sculpture’s debt to Carolingian and Ottonian art production,55 an orientation that reflected that country’s long-standing scholarly commitment to those periods. German specialists understood the revival of sculpture in the eleventh century as simply part of a continuous chain of stylistic and technical development, and so, whether researching the sculpture of the Rhineland, Saxony, or the Netherlands, drew upon the corpus of surviving Kleinkunst to demonstrate continuity with ninth- and tenth-century art.56
Some authors working in this tradition sought more than stylistic comparisons, however, and attempted to understand the traits that set eleventh- and twelfth-century work apart. For them, the decisive change in Romanesque art was its new conception of scale and its mastery of volume that projected a truly sculptural presence. Wilhelm Vöge developed an approach to address these changes in his discussion of the “monumental” quality of early Gothic sculpture.57 Although he applied this term to the mid-twelfth-century figures of the Royal Portal at Chartres, it effectively articulated the sentiment that large sculpture was but a translation in scale of precious objects. In Germany, Vöge’s evocative writings profoundly influenced a generation of students, including Hermann Beenken and a young Erwin Panofsky.58 There was in these works a formalist strain, and many scholars, applying Stilkritik indebted as much to Wöfflin as to the evolutionary aesthetics of Schnaase, produced stylistic categories without so much furthering discussion of monumentality or the material origins of the period style.59
FIGURE 16-5 Vision of St John: comparison of sculptural (above) and manuscript iconography (below). Tympanum, south portal from La Lande-de-Fronsac, Pierre (above) and from Beatus Apocalypse, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv.acq.lat. 1366, fol.12v (below). Reproduced with permission from James Austin, the Bibliotèque nationale de France, and Princeton University Press. Reproduced from E. Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century, figs. 7, 8.
A more contextual strain of German and French scholarship viewed the issue slightly differently. Some authors viewed the problem as one of religious value, attributing the rise of freestanding sculpture to a shift in importance of cult objects. Louis Bréhier was one of the first to draw attention to the statues of the seated Madonna – “Vierges reliquaires” – as signal elements for the rebirth of sculpture,60 and a number of scholars followed in this path. In Harald Keller’s important study of Ottonian precedents,61 the reliquary function legitimated sculpture in the eyes of the Church; it is only through this specific liturgical role that sculpture gained a foothold among accepted artistic forms. Some scholars, though, such as Paul Deschamps62 and Hubert Schrade63 (whose essay directly challenged Keller’s thesis), while more or less acknowledging that liturgical function played some role in sculpture’s rebirth, diluted the effects of this one cause by setting it within broader considerations. Schrade emphasized changes in religious experience and belief, and for Deschamps, among many others, material and technical aspects illuminated sculpture’s affinities with other types of object. These latter discussions therefore considered monumental reliefs and metal retables as a single class of object (namely cultic) that naturally shared traditions of technique and craft; as the role of monumental productions grew, sculptors merely graduated to ever grander lapidary exploits.64 A number of surveys, such as those by Arthur Gardner (1931) and Millard F. Hearn (1981), endorse this general perspective. Thomas Lyman (1978) offered a qualifying note to the theory when he asserted that it was precisely a decline in metal arts that made skilled artists available.65
Origins for these scholars lay not in geographical explanations or philosophical approaches, but in material developments that addressed religious needs and functions. Over the course of the twentieth century, liturgical use, patronage, and artist’s techniques occupied an increasingly important place in sculpture studies as scholars looked outward from the object to understand the conditions of its production.66 Whereas Bréhier had drawn in 1912 a parallel in form and sacrality between large-scale sculpture and small, tenth-century Marian cult statues, when Ilene Forsyth treated the same subject in 1972, the methodological gulf between them had widened considerably. Forsyth’s attention to a complex set of cultural conditions, chief among them changes in liturgy, doctrinal theology, popular devotion, and sculptural praxis, evinced a profoundly contextual turn, for which the origin of sculpture was not reducible either to form or content alone.
Although Mâle’s text-bound studies did much to promote interest in areas such as pilgrimage, monastic spirituality, and liturgical drama, Meyer Schapiro’s studies collectively provided an equally important model for the contextual, or social-historical, approach. They addressed the specific problem of sculptural revival in terms of social critique. Pointing to images of secular musicians carved in the cloister at Silos and gestures of feudal homage at Souillac, and drawing upon the history, liturgy, and economics of those two sites, Schapiro drew attention to a set of social circumstances that he felt conditioned, even enabled, the sculptural revival.67 These specific sculptures provided testimony to the clash of the sacred and secular worlds, irrevocably brought together in the new twelfthcentury economy, and, most important of all, of the rise of the artist as an individual within an emerging class structure. The irruption of profane motifs into traditionally religious themes and settings marked for Schapiro not only a defining moment of Romanesque sculpture, but of history itself.
For other scholars, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, the contextual view produced a different result. Sculpture’s revival was, if not an expression of the tensions caused when rising secular society invaded the once hermetic domain of religious art, as Schapiro believed, at least emblematic of an awakened human spirit. Jean Adhémar and Pierre Francastel discerned a self-consciousness in the iconographic developments of the eleventh century, particularly in the reuse of motifs from antiquity.68 For Francastel, the manipulation in the twelfth century of lingering Classical traditions marked a significant shift in artistic consciousness. On one hand, he said, the late eleventh-century sculptural programs (such as at Toulouse) represented a monumentality that was a burden to the artist, too much under the weight of tradition; yet the sculptural play later (as at Charlieu) bore witness to a new freedom from tradition’s constraints.69 There is no way to explain this “miracle,” not by reference to Near Eastern iconographic roots or the belief in a genius artist, other than by the rise of a liberated spirit, the collective soul of a humanistic Renaissance. It is worth recalling that a similarly hopeful nostalgia, but in formal terms, framed Focillon’s writings of about the same date, as when he saw in an early eleventh-century capital at Dijon the human form emerging from material bonds, creative humanity awakening after a long slumber.
Focillon’s approach had little in common with the methodological positions of Mâle or Schapiro; yet, as this final example demonstrates, the various theories of origins often shared some common intellectual ground. Different positions overlapped and they certainly did so with more complexity than this brief chapter can adequately portray. Many of the scholars named above weighed in on not one but several approaches to the problem of origins. Focillon, for example, shared beliefs in the geographic sources of iconography with Mâle, just as Puig i Cadafalch and Baum understood their architectural research as contributions to the definition of Romanesque sculpture as a distinct medium. The methodological lines drawn above, therefore, should be considered not as reflective of absolute doctrines but as representative of the intellectual spaces in which conflicting and complementary theories struggled to understand a style that had been introduced into academic discussion only relatively recently.
What is clear, however, is that these queries on origins were set in motion from the moment the art “became” Romanesque through the coining of that term. The discovered style (and period) required definition and clarification, whether through formal or iconographic criteria and whether tracing the style’s genesis to a place, a metaphysical essence, or a context. Some of these queries set about trying to understand Romanesque sculpture après la lettre; that is, the descriptive term determined the manner of research. This is particularly evident in the geographic research, for the name pressed the art historian onward to seek out what was Roman and what was not. The question of course could only have been so posed once the art was called Romanesque. Even those opposed to the notion of a Roman inheritance, looking to the North or the Near East for the style’s origins, placed too much faith in the heuristic value of the modern term, and they took to arguing against the term as if it were as determined as the style itself. The intertwined invocations of nations, regions, and race, resembled a search as much for Romanesque art’s origins as modern cultural ones.
Scholarship since the 1970s has focused less on resolving the specific place or time of Romanesque sculpture’s genesis. Many would agree that the reappearance of monumental sculpture on a wide scale in the eleventh century was a form of continuity with cultures past – Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian, for example. Certain factors (social or political), as pointed out by Mâle and Schapiro among others, may have provided a special impetus along the way, giving a boost to sculpture as a crucial artistic commodity in evolving cultural contexts. It is perhaps not without some significance that content and contextual studies, such as those by Mâle, Francastel, and Schapiro, as well as a few of those that look to the minor arts as precursors, “postpone” the revival of sculpture until the twelfth century. These scholars’ interests in iconography and context find better examples in that later period than in the abstract or geometric sculpture of the early eleventh century. Whereas discussion of geographic origins drew the Romanesque style back in time to Rome or the Near East, contextual studies brought the so-called birth of Romanesque sculpture out of the eleventh century and into the twelfth. So much so, that Schapiro’s and Francastel’s studies even attribute to this sculpture qualities that are often also associated with the Gothic period: the secularization of a new bourgeois Christendom, on the one hand, and individualistic humanism, on the other. Students of context brought Romanesque forward, closer to their era, and there too the search for Romanesque origins seemed at times equally as much a search for modern ones.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of Marie-Thérèse Camus, Claude Andrault-Schmitt, and Eliane Vergnolle, who in warm conversations shared with me their perspectives on a number of issues addressed above. I am especially grateful to Eric Fernie and Walter Cahn, who very kindly read an earlier draft and whose suggestions greatly improved the essay.
1 [See also chapter 15 on Romanesque sculpture in Northern Europe by Hourihane in this volume. On Gothic sculpture and sculptural programs in general, see chapters 19 and 26 by Büchsel and Boerner (ed.).]
2 [On Romanesque architecture, see chapter 14 by Fernie in this volume (ed.).]
3 Bizarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism. I thank also W. Cahn for his valuable input on this subject.
4 Caumont, Cours, vols. 4 and 6.
5 Courajod, Leçons, pp. 13–14.
6 Cocke, “The Rediscovery.”
7 Bourassé, Archéologie chrétienne. As applied esp. to sculpture, see de Verneilh, Des Influences byzantines.
8 Cf. references infra; also, Maxwell, “Misadventures.”
9 Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire, VIII, esp. p. 166. [For more on medieval art and the relation between East and West, see chapters 23 and 24 by Folda and Papacostas, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
10 Ibid., p. 119.
11 Courajod, Leçons.
12 Porter, Medieval Architecture, vol. I, p. 165.
13 Strzygowski, Orient; Ursprung.
14 Mâle, L’Art allemand.
15 Cahn, “L’Art français.”
16 Puig i Cadafalch et al., L’Arquitectura romànica.
17 Puig i Cadafalch, Le Premier art roman, p. 154.
18 Puig i Cadafalch, La géographie, p. 401, with other references to Eastern origins; cf. Focillon, Art of the West, p. 112ff, with similar observations.
19 Preceded by the Société d’Emulation de Caen, 1823.
20 De Lasteyrie, L’Architecture religieuse, p. 407; see also Deshoulières, “La Théorie.”
21 Quicherat, Mélanges, pp. 99ff, 484.
22 Enlart, Manuel d’archéologie; de Lasteyrie, L’Architecture religieuse. Among critics, see, Crozet, “Problèmes de méthode,” and Francastel, L’Humanisme.
23 Evans, A History.
24 E.g., Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine; Surtees, The History and Antiquities.
25 Willis, “The Architectural History.”
26 Prior, An Account; Keyser, A List of Norman Tympana.
27 Porter, “The Rise”; “La Sculpture.”
28 [On pilgrimage art, see chapter 28 by Gerson in this volume (ed.).]
29 Cf. Deschamps, “Notes sur la sculpture romane.”
30 E.g., Deshoulières, “Nouvelles remarques,” and “La Théorie”; Dangibeaud, “L’Ecole.”
31 Oursel, L’Art roman, pp. 203ff.
32 [On formalism, see chapter 5 by Seidel in this volume (ed.).]
33 Morey, Medieval Art, pp. 180, 228ff.
34 Armi, “Orders and Continuous Orders.”
35 Salvini, “Pre-Romanesque.”
36 Burg and Lüthgen were especially influenced by Riegl. Burg, for example, sought to understand the “Willen zur Monumentalen” and analyzed the various stages in the “Drang nach rundplastischer Gestaltung.” Cf. also Sauerlandt (Deutsche Plastik, p. vi), who viewed early Romanesque plasticity as a struggle between ground-bound forms and “liberated” expression.
37 Focillon, L’Art des sculpteurs; Art of the West.
38 Quarré, La Sculpture romane; G. Micheli, Le Décor géométrique; Baltrugaitis, La Stylistique ornementale.
39 Grodecki, “Dualité” and “Les Débuts”; Zarnecki, “1066” and “Sculpture,” p. 146.
40 Grodecki, “L’Art roman en Angleterre.”
41 Zarnecki, English Romanesque, pp. 8ff.; “Romanesque Sculpture”; “1066”; “Sources of English Romanesque.”
42 Zarnecki, “Sculpture,” p. 146.
43 Exceptions: Borg, “The Development of Chevron”; Henry, La Sculpture irlandaise and Irish Art; cf. also Cherry, “Recent Works,” and Kahn, “La Sculpture romane.”
44 Grodecki, “La Sculpture du XIe siècle.”
45 Durliat, “Les Premiers Essais”; “Les Débuts de la sculpture romane”; “L’Art roman en France.”
46 Cf. also Durliat’s more recent bilan, “La Sculpture du XIe siècle.”
47 Baylé, La Trinité de Caen; Vergnolle, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire; Cabanot, Les Débuts de la sculpture romane; Camus, Sculpture romane du Poitou.
48 Grodecki, “Le Problème”; Durliat, “Les Premiers Essais”; Vergnolle, “Chronologie et méthode”; see also Mézoughi, “Le Tympan.”
49 Vergnolle, L’Art roman en France.
50 Cf., for example, the effect on Ganter’s formalist perspective (Romanische Plastik), or Porter’s (Romanesque Sculpture) emphasis on pilgrimage as a stylistic catalyst.
51 [On art and exegesis, see chapter 8 by Hughes in this volume (ed.).]
52 Mâle, Religious Art, p. xxxi.
53 Ibid., p. xxx.
54 [On the sumptuous arts, see chapter 22 by Buettner in this volume (ed.).]
55 E.g., Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte; Reber, Kunstgeschichte des Mittelalters.
56 Bachem, “Sächsische Plastik”; Klein, Die romanische Steinplastik; Wesenberg, Frühe mittelalterliche; Ligtenberg, Die romanische Steinplastik.
57 Vöge, Die Anfänge.
58 Beenken, Romanische Skulptur; Panofsky, Die deutsche Plastik. See also n.36 above.
59 Novotny, Romanische Bauplastik, offered a different solution: he believed that close formalist study of regional developments (Austrian, in this case) would correct the sweeping evolutionist (and too aesthetic to his taste) views advanced by Panofsky and Beenken.
60 Bréhier, “Les Origines de la sculpture romane”; “La Cathédrale de Clermont.”
61 Keller, “Zur Entstehung.”
62 Deschamps, “Etude sur la renaissance de la sculpture”
63 Schrade, “Zur Frühgeschichte.”
64 E.g., Wesenberg, Frühe mittelalterliche, pp. 96f, 102–3 and passim; Durliat, “Les Débuts”; Pächt, “The Pre-Carolingian Roots”; Schapiro, “A Relief.”
65 Gardner, Medieval Sculpture; Hearn, Romanesque Sculpture; Lyman, “Arts somptuaires.”
66 [On patronage, see chapter 9 by Caskey in this volume (ed.).]
67 Schapiro, “From Mozarabic to Romanesque”; “The Sculpture of Souillac.”
68 Adhémar, Influences antiques; Francastel, L’Humanisme.
69 Francastel, L’Humanisme, pp. 199 and 202; cf. Cahn, “The Artist.”
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——, “Les Débuts de la sculpture romane dans le Midi de la France et en Espagne,” Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 9 (1978), pp. 101–14.
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——, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages (London, 1963 [1938]).
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——, Religious Art in France: The Twelfth Century. A Study of the Origins of Medieval Iconography (Princeton, 1978 [1922]).
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