Romanesque Architecture - An Overview

Here we are in ancient Rome and we all know what Roman imperial architecture looks like. We are all familiar with the columns, the pediments, the grand urban temples, the great civic architecture of power and prestige. Here are the amphitheatres, here are the bridges, the aqueducts. This is Roman architecture. But what is Roman-esque architecture? It's obviously connected, we can see that in the name, but it's actually a very distinct and different style of building. It dates from almost a thousand years after the Roman Empire. Its purpose is very different. It looks very different. Hello and welcome to another Lockdown Learning with myself, Paul Holland, and in this session we are looking at Roman-esque architecture. This is a really interesting period of architecture. It's the first one to emerge after the fall of the Roman Empire, but quite a long time after the fall of the Roman Empire. We're talking about the 9th to the 12th centuries, but it's also the first truly Christian style, if you like. This is the first style to emerge from the Christian culture, the Christian civilization that took over Europe throughout the Dark Ages and into the Middle Ages. So what I'm going to do with this particular session is we're going to have a really general overview of where it came from, how it developed, what the elements are that make it up, and we'll be looking at a lot of examples. We'll be looking first of all at the external parts of the buildings and then going inside and looking at some more details which will help you to identify why this is such an important and beautiful style of architecture. The term Roman-esque developed, as they often do actually, as a pejorative and negative term after the Renaissance when they were looking back at these buildings they decided that they were Roman-like, Romanesque, but not quite as good as the Roman stuff, not quite as powerful or elegant as the classical style. Well I hope you'll agree at the end of this video that there are actually lots of very very beautiful fine buildings and that this is is one of the great styles of European architecture. This is the semicircular arch, the round arch, and it's absolutely essential to understanding Romanesque architecture. The Roman arch, the one-point arch, is a very simple straightforward semicircle. As you can see it's made with your pair of compasses using just one point and it forms a semicircle. It's pretty straightforward, the Romans had been using it very innovatively in their architecture for centuries and centuries. It's the building block, if you like, of their bridges, their aqueducts and their amphitheatres and theatres. The Roman arch continues to be used all the way through into the later Romanesque style and it's one of the defining things of this style. When you look at a building and you spot the round arches you can immediately say this is Romanesque and therefore you can date it from around about 800, 900 all the way through to the 13th century. In English of course we call it Norman architecture. Take a look at this diagram here which as you can see is a cutaway of a really important type of building from the ancient Roman imperial period. This is a basilica and although I've taken you right the way back to the Roman period, even though we're here to look at Romanesque, the basilica or the law courts is a really important key to understanding how Romanesque developed and why it took the forms that it did. Every town and city across the entire Roman empire had one of these basilicas on its main square and as you can see it's a long building divided lengthways by columns in rows forming sometimes three, sometimes five aisles. Here from this very simplified diagram is the form of the basic basilica and as you can see it also had semicircular apses at each end which is I think where the presiding judges or magistrates sat and the entrance was at the side. The reason that we need to look at basilicas is because these were the buildings that were taken up and used by the early Christians and in fact remember when the first Christians appeared they were persecuted, they worshipped in secret, underground quite literally in catacombs but as they became more tolerated and as Christianity became the religion of the Romans increasingly they needed buildings and they needed buildings that suited their particular pattern of worship. The basilica is very well suited to this indeed and as you can see from this diagram here the churches became bigger, transepts were added onto the side. These transepts allowed more east facing wall to accommodate smaller chapels so you have not just one altar but several altars. Sometimes the east end was extended as you can see here, the transepts and the extra east bit also made the whole thing into the shape of a cross which suited the Christians even more and eventually this is the form of the church that we can recognise right the way through into the middle ages and beyond. So here from this diagram you can see that the basic Romanesque structure is based on a long building divided lengthways into aisles and with a circular or semi-circular apse on the end and so we have the beginnings of Christian architecture. This is often called early Christian, there often isn't a particular style associated with it. These are let's be frank converted basilicas, they're not particularly innovative, they've simply taken a form of a building, they've adapted it to something different and there are a few stylistic innovations but effectively we are still in the world of the post-Roman empire. But certainly by the time we reach the 8th, the 9th and certainly into the 10th centuries we find that we've definitely got a new style that's developed here and this is the Romanesque and the Romanesque has flourished by this point right the way across Italy into France and Germany and across the channel to England. So let's have a look at a few actual buildings now and hopefully we'll be able to see how Romanesque as a style functions, how the various elements and patterns fit together to create this very recognisable style of building. It's worth pointing out now that everything we'll be looking at here is ecclesiastical architecture, it's the churches and the cathedrals that have survived. The houses of the poor were certainly not made to last, the castles of the rich were variously knocked down or ruined or replaced but the churches very often are the buildings that through continuous use and repair and restoration have come down to us and survived about a thousand years. Given that it's very rare that you find a Romanesque church that is completely intact and hasn't been changed. Most of our places of worship have had some kind of interventions over the years. Bits were knocked down, new windows were inserted, things that were considered rather old-fashioned were replaced by the latest fashion, the gothic and then later the classical, but there are clusters in certain parts of Europe where we find Romanesque churches that have more or less come down to us intact and these are very special places that really do feel as if they've got a sense of continuity across an entire millennium of use and worship at the centre of their communities. So let's start with the exterior of these buildings, in fact let's start with the apse, a really particular defining element of the Romanesque, this semi-circular end of the building if you like, where the altar is housed and you'll see from these pictures that follow that the semi-circular arch is obviously the main form of arch for the windows but it's also used decoratively there at the top and also here you'll notice even though it's actually quite a crude rough stonework there's still plenty of possibilities for the architect to use these kind of patterns with the arches and although what I'm showing you here are buildings that are increasingly ornate and patterned and they show a real flair for decoration and ornamental design, generally the effect of a Romanesque building is one of solidity, of simple elegance, a building that feels very rooted, very much a part of its landscape if you like and something that's almost austere, you'll notice big solid walls even when as you can see from this building later architects have inserted more elegant windows, the basic oval form is giving us an impression of heaviness and strength and solidity, windows are generally quite small in the Romanesque period and there's a lot of heavy buttressing. What you'll also notice is that the Romanesque, certainly in France in particular, tends towards a pyramid-like structure or composition leading up to a central tower dominating the whole building or the whole skyline and you find this very often in the centre of France, in the Auvergne, where there's a collection of some fantastic Romanesque churches which really do feel as if they are speaking to us out of a completely different time, a completely distant distant past and south of the Alps in Italy one finds perhaps a little bit more decorative style in their Romanesque, perhaps a little more frivolous but still a real sense of solidity and strength. Here's Pisa Cathedral, a fantastic building in itself and of course in the background the Campanile, the leaning tower of Pisa, a brilliant piece of Romanesque architecture. Towers actually in this period become a real feature of the Romanesque, sometimes they're massive and thick set towers like this one here, possibly often because they were used for places of refuge for the local population in times of crisis. This place, Saverne, and the next place in Célestin, these are in Alsace and although that's French today these were very much in the heart of German territory when they were built so this is very much German Romanesque, perhaps a little more heavy, a little more thick set possibly, but certainly reflecting the local material, the local redstone. And towards the end of the Romanesque period very very elegant towers indeed are being built, here they are pointing the way really towards the Gothic style that will eventually take over from Romanesque. And we also begin to see much more interest in the front, the façade of the building, the ground entrance if you like, here are some good examples of Romanesque really trying to create some kind of dramatic entrance, dramatic impression as you approach the place of worship. This one's a particular favourite of mine, this looks incredibly decrepit but clearly somebody's put a lot of effort into creating patterns, alternating the white stone with the local dark volcanic stone that you find all around Clermont-Ferrand. Here we can see some very fine artistry in the sculpture all around this arch. This is also the period of course when monasteries begin to become quite an important force in the religious and the social life of Western Europe, so obviously with monasteries come cloisters and so here are some examples of wonderful Romanesque cloisters, places of peace and quiet where the monks could meditate or read the bible or sometimes copy out manuscripts. Good, so now let's go inside one of these Romanesque churches, let's get a feel for the interior and immediately looking at this particular building, this is San Miniato in Florence, you'll notice that it comes in a direct line, descended straight from the Roman basilica. We even have Roman columns there, probably reused, we've got Roman arches but this is now used as a church and as designed as a church and moving on as well if you can see here what's happened is those columns have been very much simplified into big solid square piers but the effect is still one of simplicity, one of austerity almost and the other thing to notice as well, you can see it more from this angle, is the roof is incredibly simple as well, it's a wooden, a light wooden roof that's been placed over the top and in fact I think this photo sums up very clearly how you can really see the structure of a Romanesque building, it is those vertical walls with a roof placed very clearly on top and there's not much more to it than that. Slowly as the technology improves or if there was more money available we see these wooden roofs replaced with stone roofs, it's in the vaults underneath the church, underneath the body or particularly underneath the apse of the church that we find stone vaulting being used at first but then gradually we begin to see it turning up in the church upstairs as well. Compared with the vertical, dynamic, soaring quality of Gothic buildings, these Romanesque churches, even the biggest ones, tend to exude a feeling of calm, a sort of atmosphere of serenity, almost purity here's a very famous one in Vesele and here we are in Pisa Cathedral, a massive cathedral, a Romanesque building on the grandest of scales but still there's quite a calm, horizontal effect actually throughout the whole building. Well we've looked at the structure of the buildings, let's look a little bit more at some of the details, the Romanesque period is a fantastic period for carvings and we'll just have a look at a few examples of these carvings, particularly appearing on the capitals of columns and pilasters and you can see these carvings very often from a distance look as if they're Roman capitals, in fact you can see here we have actually got some Corinthian ones but actually more often than not they are full of bizarre, grotesque, often nightmarish sculptures, monsters devouring people, often trying to either retell the bible stories in stone or give warnings to people not to live a sinful life, some of them are the stories of saints, some of them, goodness knows what they are, some of them are just quite inexplicable and seem to be quite alien. There is a church in Herefordshire in the village of Kilpeck which also boasts some fantastic grotesque statues running all the way around the outside of the church, some of them incredibly rude, far too rude for me to put into this particular video, go and check them out yourself. You will have also noticed that quite a few of these still have some of the original colour attached to them, it's always something that feels quite odd when we think of these as brightly coloured sculptures, every so often you come across a church where probably in the 19th century they decided to restore the colour to show you what it would have looked like, the result is always rather garish and frankly rather kitsch for our modern tastes, if anything it seems to detract from the beauty of the lines that have been sculpted. We also have the sculpture that we find above the doorways in that semi-circular space that's called a tympanum and these increasingly in the Romanesque period are beautiful examples of the return of sculpture almost, since the Roman times there had been very very little sculpture of any real quality to be frank and then gradually throughout this period we begin to see a real artistic renaissance culminating in some wonderful famous sculpture, particularly in France. And when the Romanesque arrives here in England, as you can see it's still very recognisably Romanesque, there's the round arches and again a certain serenity, a certain calm throughout the whole building, but we don't call it Romanesque, we tend to call it Norman because the Normans primarily brought it across with them, there had been a little bit of Norman style building here in this country before the Normans arrived, before 1066, but certainly when William came over from Normandy he and his bishops and his architects brought with them much more Romanesque architecture and this is what we see throughout the next century and a bit in this country before Gothic takes over. And here are just a few diagrams from the excellent but ancient book by Bannister Fletcher showing some of the differences between the Italian, the German, the French Romanesque styles, I'll put them up in sequence. Compared with Gothic which comes next, which has really very distinctive differences between the national styles, Romanesque really doesn't show as many differences, it's not quite as easy to spot what makes an Italian Romanesque building as distinct from a German one, but there are a few subtle variations, not least the materials but also a certain use of decorations and certain motifs that appear amongst the different regions of Europe. So that's Romanesque architecture, just a general overview, I hope you enjoyed that and I hope it was useful for you. If you enjoyed it please subscribe, thank you, and maybe have a look at some of the other things that I've got about art history and other bits and pieces in my playlist on lockdown learning. Thank you very much and see you next time, goodbye.