Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [19]
With the Roman Catholic faith firmly established, a wave of church construction throughout feudal Europe occurred from 1050 to 1200. Builders borrowed elements from Roman architecture, such as rounded arches and columns, giving rise to the term Romanesque for the art and architecture of the period. Yet because Roman buildings were timber-roofed and prone to fires, medieval artisans began to roof churches with stone vaulting. In this system, barrel or groin vaults resting on piers could span large openings with few internal supports or obstructions.
Pilgrimages were in vogue at the time, and church architecture took into account the hordes of tourists visiting shrines of sacred bones, garments, or splinters from the True Cross brought back by the Crusaders. The layout was cruciform, symbolizing the body of Christ on the cross with a long nave transversed by a shorter transept. Arcades allowed pilgrims to walk around peripheral aisles without disrupting ceremonies for local worshipers in the central nave. At the chevet (“pillow” in French), called such because it was conceived as the resting place for Christ’s head as he hung on the cross, behind the altar, were semicircular chapels with saints’ relics.
The exterior of Romanesque churches was rather plain except for sculptural relief around the main portal. Since most church-goers were illiterate, sculpture taught religious doctrine by telling stories in stone. Sculpture was concentrated in the tympanum, the semicircular space beneath the arch and above the lintel of the central door. Scenes of Christ’s ascension to the heavenly throne were popular, as well as grisly Last Judgment dioramas, where demons gobbled hapless souls, while devils strangled or spitted naked bodies of the damned.
Plan of St. Sernin, Toulouse, France. This typical segmented, Romanesque structure includes multiple semicircular chapels and vaulted square bays.
The nave of St. Sernin showing barrel vaults, c.1080-1120.
Last Judgment from west tympanum, Autun Cathedral, c.l 1 30-35. In Romanesque sculpture, reolism yielded to moralism. Bodies, distorted to fit the masonry niche, were elongoted with expressions of intense emotion.
GIOTTO: PIONEER PAINTER
Because Italy maintained contact with Byzantine civilization, the art of painting was never abandoned. But at the end of the 13th century, a flowering of technically skilled painting occurred, with masters like Duccio and Simone Martini of Siena and Cimabue and Giotto of florence breaking with the frozen Byzantine style for softer, more lifelike forms. The frescoes (paintings on damp plaster walls) of Giotto di Bondone (pronounced JOT toe; c. 1266-1337) were the first since the Roman period to render human forms suggesting weight and roundness. They marked the advent of what would afterward become painting’s central role in Western art.
Giotto, “Noli me tangere,” 1305, fresco, Arena Chapel, Padua. Giotto pointed human figures with a sense of anatomical structure beneath the drapery.
HOW TO TELL THEM APART
St. Trophime, late 12th century, Arles, France.
Romanesque churches had round arches and stylized sculpture. Gothic cathedrals had pointed arches and more natural sculpture. Keeping Romanesque and Gothic straight means recognizing the distinctive features of each, like the following:
Reims Cathedral, west facade, c.1220-36, France.
ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS. With hordes of pillagers looting and razing cities of the former Roman Empire, monasteries were all that stood between Western Europe and total chaos. Here monks and nuns copied manuscripts, keeping alive both the art of illustration in particular and Western civilization in general.
By this time, the papyrus scroll used from Egypt to Rome was replaced by the vellum (calfskin) or parchment (lambskin) codex, made of separate pages bound at one side. Manuscripts were considered sacred objects containing the word of God. They were decorated lavishly, so their outward beauty would reflect their sublime contents. Covers were made