Romanesque architecture

Romanesque Architecture, Eric Fernie, Yale University Press / Pelican History of Art, 2014, 300 pages, 388 illustrations, hardback.

Two generations of architectural historians have been at work since Kenneth Conant’s Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture appeared in the Pelican History of Art in 1959. Eric Fernie has undertaken the daunting task of replacing Conant’s book with a new survey of the Romanesque. He could have written a selective and thematic book under this title, but he has stoically resisted this temptation and has provided something more wide-ranging and comprehensive. Methodically organised into four sections entitled Definitions, History, Themes and Research Methods, the book is beautifully and thoughtfully illustrated, furnished with excellent maps, and set forth with great clarity of exposition and intent. This is a benchmark publication that anyone interested in this subject must read.

At the outset Fernie points up the danger of treating style as anything more than an intellectual imposition, however rational. There is in fact no such thing as Romanesque as an historical entity, so Conant’s title had been a combination of an imperial dynasty and an art-historical category. But the large historical section of the new book has also to begin with Charlemagne, whose empire coincides with the post-Roman economic recovery and is, in many respects, the real inception of the post-antique period in Europe. Key components of what was to become Romanesque appear in around 800 in the Carolingian revival of Roman and Byzantine imperial style, and over the next three centuries an ever-more-subtle and convincing classical architecture develops in the service of the Latin Church. Just as Constantine’s early Christian basilicas had made few striking concessions to the needs of the Christian liturgy, so in Romanesque buildings form does not always follow function.

The apse/ambulatory eastern plan, for example, supposedly ideal for the circulation of pilgrims, can not be exclusively or even dominantly related to churches with major shrines. If the liturgy had often to be fitted to architectural form rather than vice versa, who was responsible for architectural form? In Germany there is a strong sense of a conservative patrons’ programme, expressive of imperial dynastic ambitions, which appears to have constrained the development of structure. In and around Rome, papal patronage meant the highly conservative repetition of the Early Christian column basilica throughout the early medieval period; the Normans in Sicily followed suit.

These buildings do not fully achieve the Romanesque manner of, for example, their Anglo-Norman contemporaries, where a full and rational system of articulation (such as that found, say, in St Ètienne at Caen) is one of the defining characteristics of the style. That means a proper bay system, expressed uniformly inside and out, fully developed crossings and a legibility of individual parts belonging visibly to an overall ordering system. Puig y Cadafalch’s Le Premier Art Roman (1928) discerned the emergence of these ‘Romanesque’ characteristics in some of the earliest fully vaulted churches in late 10th-century Burgundy, Catalonia and Lombardy. These advances, it is argued, can not be explained by the demands of patronage, and must have been made by masons for whom design and visual effect was the dominant preoccupation.

The majority of Fernie’s book is devoted to the analysis of regional development across Europe and into the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. In each area and instance readers can be confident that they are being given the state of contemporary knowledge without spin or preference. The discussion in this large central historical section of the book, underpinned by political history and topography, is primarily technical and analytical, and requires careful reading. This is especially the case when, inevitably, a building under discussion can not be illustrated and has to be constructed in the mind of the reader. An internet image search can sometimes help.

It is characteristic of his measured objectivity that Fernie chooses to deal separately with the subject of architectural iconography, issues of meaning, significance, the development of individual elements and building types.

The castle – the first monumental medieval building type for which there is no Roman precedent – is now seen as architecture engaged in the psychological projection of power. But Fernie is probably right in suggesting that the pendulum may have swung too far away from functional preoccupations of the ‘boulder-and-boiling-oil brigade’.

The carpenters, who built the majority of castles and secular halls, and whose work was central to the construction of all medieval buildings, get a rather thin time. Walter Horn’s idea that the bay system of some of the early stone buildings derived from their early barns, halls and churches now looks outmoded. There is little evidence that carpentry contributed much to the design and decoration of masonry buildings and in the early chapters Fernie shows how Antique classical precedent can account for most Romanesque elements and details. With the loss of the overwhelming majority of early medieval wooden buildings there seems little to argue about.

The final section, Research Methods, is a limpid summary of the intellectual principles and techniques that underlie recent advances in the study of Romanesque. It makes short work of teleological impositions of the kind to which Conant fell prey when he wrote that ‘With Notre Dame at Jumièges Norman Romanesque was now mature, except for the problem of the high vault, which was satisfactorily resolved in a generation more’. For the builders of Jumièges, the open timber roof, far from being a problem, was an authentic and prestigious attribute of the earliest column basilicas (one of Fernie’s most significant achievements has been to demonstrate the remarkable kinship between the layout and dimensions of the greatest Roman Early Christian basilicas and some of the the huge Anglo-Norman churches of the late 11th century).

Here the author also crushes unhelpful developmental analogies, especially biological ones, and puts a warning notice on terms such as old-fashioned, traditional and archaic, high and classic, loaded as they often are with modern value judgements. Early, Middle and Late he likes for their objectivity as devoid of assumptions as ‘a washing machine cycle’.

This article originally appeared as ‘Form and function’ in Context 141, published by the Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC) in November 2015. It was written by John Maddison, artist and architectural historian.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation