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Romanesque Heritage

IN THE ENSUING CENTURIES the Christian energies radiating from Rome achieved a far wider and more enduring conquest than any imposed by an armed Caesar. The social and spiritual precepts of Christ struck deep into the individual person, touched veins of spirit through which he found a new sort of identity with fellow beings in the worship of God. The Church evolved, and with it, all its expressions in religious orders, liturgy, theology, and the arts. Christian Rome was the fount, her stream of faith flowed everywhere, and heroes of holiness became even greater objects of veneration than kings and warriors. Long worshipful before the visible, man began to find paths of aspiration linked to what lay before his immediate comprehension. One sure way to satisfy such desire was to make a pilgrimage to a holy place associated with a saint, and obtain the blessing of a human spirit in place of that of a stream, a tree, a mountain. Both pagan and Christian impulses were fervent; the latter one exalted humanity itself in the image of God.

Along with Rome, the great shrine of St James of Compostela in Spain drew pilgrims from all Europe. Their myriad steps confirmed the main roads from France to the Peninsula. Other paths also grew within the confines of France. At intervals along such ways, rest-houses evolved into monasteries, each with its church. A principal road for pilgrims led through Clermont, the old city of Vercingetorix. In many reminders, classic Rome survived there, nowhere more so than in the form of the churches; for, bringing home the ordinary news of travel, pilgrims renewed their recognition of the Roman style long ago established in aqueducts, theaters, walls, council halls (basilicae), during the centuries of the unconverted empire. But the monuments to their faith built at home by the medieval believers referred not only to old massivities of Roman power, but also to the familiar and simple elements of the life all about them. Out of their experience at Compostela and other Spanish shrines, the travellers brought, too, echoes of Iberia, with its own remnants which were Moorish, and memories of these gave various details to the Romanesque style as it was evolved above the Pyrenees and the Alps.

By the twelfth century the Romanesque was widespread in Europe and its character became ever more local, until not only the ancient empire but the identity of cities and fiefdoms in their own regions found expression through representations of living creatures as parts of otherwise inscrutable architecture. Humanism entered visibly into engineering by way of prayer and its fortress. All expression sprang from faith. All safety lay in charity. All strength rose through the combination of these, in the mainstream of the inherited culture. Available through the Church, this was the culture of peasant and lord alike. Anyone growing up in it—while he might not even be aware of secular learning—was yet the possessor of a central body of the historical tradition of post-Roman Europe; and the single most powerful recorded analogy of life was the Holy Scripture.

As it was common to all, so must be its monuments. The churches were self-images of their makers, combining aspiration with recognizable images in stone taken from daily experience—the humble realities of what was loved and what feared, ranging from the human person to grotesques out of the world of demons. The Romanesque style made its daily and lifelong impact less through the refined aesthetic than through expressions of power—durability, seemly strength, and impregnable shelter; and what was sheltered was man’s spirit against all threats the world could offer in every life until that life should end. The patience needed to do the work of the early medieval style seemed to prefigure a promised eternity, even if what made it believable in its mystery were the very motes of daily life represented in carved ornament.

Rome gave its arches to the fabric, and where in classical times they had seemed to hang great weights of masonry high in the air, now in the Middle Ages they brought to mind the earth-bound body of man, braced in stone to endure with blunt shoulders man’s earthly passage. If God made Christ in man, other personifications of Christian attributes and saintly individuals came as a logical step from life to art, and back to life again, by way of the vision of those who gazed at either the smallest or the largest of sacred artifacts—a chief function of iconography. Romanesque sculptured ornament—celebration of man and the common sweetness of his visible world—joined with the craft of the mason to hold constant in the great dark churches the power also of that which was invisible, yet describable. Faith itself seemed anything but abstraction.

In fixed quiet, Romanesque ornament celebrated all living things—animals, fish, men and women of the day at their work; plants of the earth in branch, leaf, fruit, as well as figures of the Passion and the personification of the demonic unseen which thus became as real as the rest. Anywhere, from the capital of a double column, or the base of a font, or the frontal of an altar, or the almost hidden groin of a twining stairway, suddenly one could recognize a common face in stone gazing forth as an angel, a fiend, a saint, one of the Holy Family, in constant reminder of how the world went, and how in his own essence one carried these, containing all: the capacity for the divine; for evil; for safety, either through imitation in prayer and act, or perdition through mortal caprice. The powers of piety were inescapable, whose ideal persisted in familiar expression from the times of the earliest religious pilgrimage until, eight centuries later, interpretations of the essential forces of life would take a new turn through the physical sciences.

In Auvergne, as in other regions with strong local flavor, the Romanesque style evolved its own variations. The churches were often made of the dark volcanic stone of the Puy-de-Dôme. Rounded external chapels leaned in support of central chambers like foothills against mountains. Articulated bare columns and arches were lofted to sustain interior galleries of lesser arches. At Clermont, Notre Dame de Port, one of the oldest “Roman” churches in France, created out of its rude ingenuities an abiding grace of deep shadow, shafted height, and a simplicity as powerful as it was unambitious. Its circular ambulatory and side aisles, where the vision was symmetrically interrupted by pillars, offered visible analogy of processions, like those of life itself, which in the liturgy reenacted the ceremonies of worship in all their references to the mortal and the immortal.

The carved saints and the living world merged for the worshippers. At Mozal, the Holy Women at the Sepulchre are peasants in stone, with their strong, almost manly, faces, their voluminous folds of hardy cloth, their hands like those of farmers, all brought to pray in a stubby working grace. Elsewhere, a medieval bishop, already a figure of high consequence by his station, was the apostolic succession made visible; from the earliest time a figure of celebration and authority, in sculpture or fresco often represented as benign in expression, despite awesome mitre and crozier. In medieval glass the light of day was held like “the light of Christ, as in the Gospel.” Color was always an element, no matter how greatly time might turn all gray with age, so that to later eyes the medieval epoch, except for its glass, seemed all monotone. Posterity judged and admired age, failing to see the original youth. Was the glass of the Romanesque an echo of the first Gospel of John—the “lumière de lumière”? It was perhaps the prime glimpse of what was to come in the lofting Gothic style. But in its abiding character, the Romanesque seemed rooted to the earth, while the Gothic sought to leave it.

So the earlier forms were bound to the common land rather than to the aspiring pinnacle—cavern, glen, hill; tilling or feeding creatures, bent in their own small bodily arches to their tasks. Mortality is present; but in terms of supplication, even in the romance of the time—the Chanson de Roland itself:

Save my soul against all threatThe which my life’s sins may beget.

Upon his arm he sinks his head,He joins his hands and he is dead.

Fatality inescapable; but in the very admission of this, in spirit, form, observance, lay appeal to what rested in the common eternity—the promise of life from life, light from light. It was the same spirit which raised the round Roman arch to the Gothic spire, and gave central conviction and unity to a whole vast and various society.