Romanesque Architecture: Churches, Monasteries, and Pilgrimage Sites
Romanesque Architecture: Temples, Pilgrimage Churches, and Monasteries
Introduction: After the artistic fragmentation following the crisis of the Roman Empire, the Romanesque style developed during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the first international style of Western culture, a Christian artistic expression of a culturally united Europe. Romanesque art reproduced forms from various origins: Rome (arches, vaults, symmetry), Byzantium (dome systems, drums, scallops, iconographic repertoire), early Christian art (basilica model and didactic symbolism), the Germanic world (decorative patterns and abstraction), the East (representation forms and themes), and Islam (arches, domes, segmented elements, ornamental motifs). The result was an essentially religious art.
Romanesque art presented a relative unity of style, quite striking considering the political division of the continent, the primarily closed economy, and essentially rural life. Several factors favored this unity and cohesion:
- Religious unity of Europe through Christianity. Monasteries became centers of power and culture, particularly the Rule of St. Benedict, centered in Cluny (Burgundy), which spread across Europe and played a prominent role in ecclesiastical reform, the promotion of pilgrimages, and the construction of Romanesque monasteries throughout Christendom. Cluny encouraged pilgrimages linked to the veneration of relics and directed to holy places, disseminating the new style. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Crusaders introduced Byzantine influences, leading to the description of Romanesque as “Art of the pilgrims,” as it rapidly spread new designs and forms through traveling artisans and quarrymen crews.
- During the tenth century, crises, invasions, and epidemics generated anxiety, leading to the triumph of the prophecy of Revelation, known as millenarianism, with fears about the end of the millennium. After the year 1000, a feeling of exaltation of piety and faith emerged, expressed through an intense renewal of religious art. However, a certain uneasiness persisted, evident in Romanesque art’s monsters, hellish visions, and emphasis on the Last Judgment at temple entrances.
- Romanesque is also considered the artistic manifestation of feudal society, not just monastic art but also an expression of aristocratic power. The nobility built castles, while abbots and bishops demonstrated their authority by constructing monasteries and cathedrals, monuments to God, Christ, and the Virgin enthroned, appearing as “castles of God” due to their strength.
- The economic recovery in Western Europe from the eleventh century, after the Norman, Islamic, and Hungarian invasions, along with the Crusades, contributed to the reconstruction and enrichment of many churches. This led to a great building fervor, extending to cities, which began to re-emerge after a long period of neglect.
Formal affinity is a defining characteristic of Romanesque art. Chronologically, Romanesque flourished in the 11th and 12th centuries. The First Romanesque (1000-1075) was still a simple and functional art, although it widely used barrel vaults, arches, and domes over the transept.
In the Plenary Romanesque (1075-1150), the style reached its peak development, with the appearance of ambulatories, stands (triforia), and transepts (cruises). Pilgrimage churches were built with monumental facades. In Europe, towards the end of this period, elements foreshadowing the Gothic style began to emerge.
Romanesque Architecture: Design and Construction
Architectural contributions are fundamental in Romanesque art, contingent upon sculpture and painting. Almost all elements of Romanesque architecture (ashlar walls, columns and pillars, arches, barrel vaults) existed in previous styles, but now space and formal appearance gained importance. Most buildings were religious: churches, cathedrals, and monasteries, although there were also civilian buildings, urban palaces, and especially castles.
The Romanesque church is presented as a revelation of divinity, subject to rules of harmony, orientation, geometry, and proportion prevalent in the medieval world. The building itself emphasizes its projection towards the altar. According to medieval philosophy and religion, every part of the building has meaning. The Latin cross plan refers to Christ crucified, the central dome to the sky, the pillars to the apostles and prophets, the walls to the Christian people, and each chair to an individual. These symbols were known at the time, as evidenced by preserved sermons and writings. The temple must be understood from this perspective: God is revealed through His work. The collective human effort to create the temple is an earthly manifestation of the order and perfection that dominate the cosmos and the heavens. The Romanesque church is the house of God, a place of rites and liturgies, occasional civil assemblies, and above all, a sacred space.
During the Romanesque period, the Latin cross plan became common, consisting of one or more longitudinal aisles, a transept, the crossing at their intersection, and semicircular apses or chapels forming the head. When aisles extend around the chancel area and choir altar for the clergy, it creates an ambulatory. In the most monumental churches, aisles may have an open gallery with arches to the nave, called a rostrum. Around the ambulatory, radiating chapels may be small, sometimes also in the transept arms, known as apses. Bell towers often rise from the base, flanking the main facade, but may also appear on the head, arms, crossing, or even be isolated. A small transept at the foot is called a narthex if inside the church or a portico if it projects from the facade. Besides the Latin cross, Romanesque also used Greek cross, centralized, and basilica plans.
Constructive and Decorative Elements
Characteristically, the predominance of the wall over the span is evident in very thick stone walls, based on regular blocks. Windows are few and small, with a flare, often resembling cylindrical shaft saeteras. Columns are smooth and do not adhere to classical proportions between diameter and height, sometimes with terraced sculpture, especially on door jambs. Capitals abandon classical orders, often decorated with human figures, plants, or animals (real, fantastic, or monstrous). Important for iconography and history, they feature reliefs narrating sacred scenes from the Old and New Testaments or the lives and miracles of martyrs and saints. These capitals had a clear teaching purpose in an era when few could read or write. The main support element is the pillar, robust to support heavy roofs, consisting of a square or cruciform core with attached columns and half-columns, resulting in a compound pillar that would evolve further in the Gothic style. Wooden roofs were gradually abandoned in favor of stone vaults. The quintessential Romanesque arch is semicircular, sometimes stilted. The most common vault is the half-barrel, often strengthened by longitudinal arches that transfer the roof’s thrust to the pillars, which are linked by arches parallel to the vault’s axis, called transverse arches. To ensure stability, thick walls, arches, and buttresses (strong pillars attached to the outside walls) were used. Alongside the barrel vault, typically covering the nave, the groin vault was used, usually in the aisles, counteracting the nave’s thrust and transmitting it to the walls and buttresses.
The stands, galleries high above the aisles, are covered by barrel vaults and serve to transfer the central roof’s thrust to the outside. Apses and apsidioles are covered with quarter-sphere domes. A dome is usually placed over the central crossing, on squinches if its base is octagonal or scallops if circular. When the set stands out, it is called a cupola tower. Romanesque buildings often have flared openings, doors, and windows. The covers are generally formed by a series of concentric arches, archivolts, decreasing in size as they enter the wall. Jambs are the vertical elements supporting the archivolts.
Decoration is a significant factor in Romanesque art, detailed in the sections on painting and sculpture. It can be fresco painting on walls, vaults, and apses, or stone carvings on capitals inside temples or cloisters, and mainly on the covers.
The Pilgrimage Church
The veneration of relics of saints, and generates a substantial trade, promoted a ceaseless movement of faithful gradually increased and why the construction of new buildings. Thus arose the pilgrim church model characterized by the presence of gallery and ambulatory, and the multiplication of the chapels to house relics. Sometimes under the altar, was on a crypt. They are usually large, and in the ambulatory small chapels built apses. They usually have a well developed head. On the aisles and bays open to the nave stands the gallery housing the pilgrims and opens windows to the outside. They are the most monumental buildings, and are located in the main pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, highlighting San Martin of Tours, Santa Fe de Conques, San Saturnino de Toulouse and the very cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. These churches are seen as places to accommodate large crowds of pilgrims who go to church all day, even walking or resting on them, so they should be widespread. Also attempt to produce an aesthetic emotion of a religious nature, from the Latin cross floor to the walls, pillars and domes carry a symbolism. The temple was the meeting place between man and God, what is needed right climate, in the Romanesque was the silence and gloom.
The monastery
Were important cultural centers and many had large libraries which were copied and illustrated antique books, without the work of these monks, much of the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans and intellectuals of the Middle Ages have been lost. To build remote locations were chosen to facilitate the meditation of the monks. They were walled cities that served as authentic self-sustaining, agricultural land and livestock and everything needed for daily life of monks.
Its features are more or less fixed: its core is the cloister, an arcaded courtyard, surrounded by four arched galleries on single columns, or more commonly paired with a garden divided into four sectors with a fountain, well or tree marks the center where cross symbols spatial coordinates, are arranged around the other offices, church, chapter house, refectory, kitchen, bedroom, etc.