Patrimoine: it’s a French thing, but not beyond our understanding. The exhibition currently at the Louvre (in the space underneath the Sully staircase) until 6 June has the open-spirited title Romanesque France (“La France Romane”). This would seem to allow that other Romanesque styles might have existed elsewhere; I can cite Spain and England, for example. Yet the exhibition goes a long way to explain why the French see themselves as the inventors of the Romanesque style in Europe. It is so replete with many fine examples of French Romanesque sculpture, painting, and metalwork that the viewer is easily brought over to the French point of view.
The vast expanse of Romanesque artistic production in France will astonish you if you have not spent much of your life studying the art of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The exhibit contains a variety of objects from nearly every corner of France. However, most of the objects are small and finely detailed and so necessitate close attention. People cluster around the immured glass cases, and visibility can be limited. Go early in the day if you can so you don’t have to wait on line. The show will be much more enjoyable when it isn’t too crowded.
The didactic labels on the wall are in French and English and are both comprehensive and concise. They describe historical context, various religious movements, and stylistic developments in the different regions of France around which the exhibition is organized. But the individual labels are placed so close to the ground that they are only suitable for Lilliputians. They are necessarily in dim light, and that further reduces legibility. With so many objects on display (there are 296 catalogue entries) you either need to make several visits or need to cull the essence of each room. In fact, the exhibition is so large and so encyclopedic that it is easy to lose your way.
It may be helpful to focus on some of the highlights and, if desired, come back for a second visit to pick up on some of the other pieces. There is an audio guide (5 euros, available in French, English, and Spanish) and, to judge by the objects chosen for discussion, the narrator has chosen some of the most important. One final caveat: don’t use up all your energy on the first three rooms or you’ll never get to appreciate the last three. Bearing that in mind, this is a show that can well be enjoyed by any viewer curious about the history and culture of France and its illustrious patrimony. La France Romane can serve
to open your eyes to one of the most important artistic developments in the medieval period: the Romanesque style.
The exhibition focuses on France in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when Europe was a perilous place. Government was local and not very stable, poverty was the lot of most of the population, and there were few urban centers. Power rested with the Church but not necessarily centered in cities.
It was in the monasteries that there was order, food, and education. The monks were, in a sense, the keepers of the flame. In a population where most people could not read or write, the monks did both. It was in their scriptoria that texts were copied and manuscripts illustrated so that Christianity could expand throughout Europe. Additional prayer books, evangelaries, missals, lectionaries, and sacramentaries were all necessary if the religion was to spread and flourish.
The section of this exhibition that deals with monasteries has some wonderful examples of Romanesque manuscript illumination. For example, there are two full-page illuminations from a manuscript of the Life of Saint Aubin of Angers (cat. no. 101*) produced in Angers c.1100. St. Aubin was a monk, abbot, and finally Bishop of Angers who died in 550. Important to the local monastery, his life was inscribed and illustrated some 550 years later, and in the sixteenth century someone wrote commentary on the scenes on the top of each folio. On the left-hand folio, the saint excommunicates a couple at a banquet table; on the right folio, he blesses the holy bread, the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Both pictures are vividly colored, primarily in blues and reddish-orange tones. Complex architectural frames surmount both scenes, a motif that descends from symbolic representations of the Heavenly Jerusalem. All the figures are outline drawings, and their robes fall in neat calligraphic lines. The artist emphasized eyes and gestures most lprobably because he was used to illustrations in the Ottonian tradition from the previous century. At the banquet, the six diners balance a severely tipped table on their supposed laps. As tableware was not yet in use, note that this is still finger food, with generous slices of bread provided by one of the other diners. In both illustrations the artist has used very economic means to indicate the crowds of people who attend Saint Aubin. One or two faces are drawn, with the tops of their heads indicating the rest of the mass. This technique does not do much to convince us that there is actually room for all those people. A monk/artist who worked at Cluny at about the same date was also asked to draw a crowd, here to illustrate the Feast of Pentecost (cat. no. 168 A). But he’s working from a different artistic tradition. He’s not so much influenced by Ottonian art as he is by Byzantine ivories and wall painting done by Byzantine artists in the West. The draperies are more graceful, and they do not totally disguise the body beneath it. On the other hand, the Cluny scriptorium is not exempt from Germanic influence. The letter “A” is filled with Germano-Saxon interlace. Stylistic cross-currents were also felt, on a larger scale, in the architectural sculpture…
Patrimoine: it’s a French thing, but not beyond our understanding. The exhibition currently at the Louvre (in the space underneath the Sully staircase) until 6 June has the open-spirited title Romanesque France (“La France Romane”). This would seem to allow that other Romanesque styles might have existed elsewhere; I can cite Spain and England, for example. Yet the exhibition goes a long way to explain why the French see themselves as the inventors of the Romanesque style in Europe. It is so replete with many fine examples of French Romanesque sculpture, painting, and metalwork that the viewer is easily brought over to the French point of view.
The vast expanse of Romanesque artistic production in France will astonish you if you have not spent much of your life studying the art of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The exhibit contains a variety of objects from nearly every corner of France. However, most of the objects are small and finely detailed and so necessitate close attention. People cluster around the immured glass cases, and visibility can be limited. Go early in the day if you can so you don’t have to wait on line. The show will be much more enjoyable when it isn’t too crowded.
The didactic labels on the wall are in French and English and are both comprehensive and concise. They describe historical context, various religious movements, and stylistic developments in the different regions of France around which the exhibition is organized. But the individual labels are placed so close to the ground that they are only suitable for Lilliputians. They are necessarily in dim light, and that further reduces legibility. With so many objects on display (there are 296 catalogue entries) you either need to make several visits or need to cull the essence of each room. In fact, the exhibition is so large and so encyclopedic that it is easy to lose your way.
It may be helpful to focus on some of the highlights and, if desired, come back for a second visit to pick up on some of the other pieces. There is an audio guide (5 euros, available in French, English, and Spanish) and, to judge by the objects chosen for discussion, the narrator has chosen some of the most important. One final caveat: don’t use up all your energy on the first three rooms or you’ll never get to appreciate the last three. Bearing that in mind, this is a show that can well be enjoyed by any viewer curious about the history and culture of France and its illustrious patrimony. La France Romane can serve
to open your eyes to one of the most important artistic developments in the medieval period: the Romanesque style.
The exhibition focuses on France in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when Europe was a perilous place. Government was local and not very stable, poverty was the lot of most of the population, and there were few urban centers. Power rested with the Church but not necessarily centered in cities.
It was in the monasteries that there was order, food, and education. The monks were, in a sense, the keepers of the flame. In a population where most people could not read or write, the monks did both. It was in their scriptoria that texts were copied and manuscripts illustrated so that Christianity could expand throughout Europe. Additional prayer books, evangelaries, missals, lectionaries, and sacramentaries were all necessary if the religion was to spread and flourish.
The section of this exhibition that deals with monasteries has some wonderful examples of Romanesque manuscript illumination. For example, there are two full-page illuminations from a manuscript of the Life of Saint Aubin of Angers (cat. no. 101*) produced in Angers c.1100. St. Aubin was a monk, abbot, and finally Bishop of Angers who died in 550. Important to the local monastery, his life was inscribed and illustrated some 550 years later, and in the sixteenth century someone wrote commentary on the scenes on the top of each folio. On the left-hand folio, the saint excommunicates a couple at a banquet table; on the right folio, he blesses the holy bread, the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Both pictures are vividly colored, primarily in blues and reddish-orange tones. Complex architectural frames surmount both scenes, a motif that descends from symbolic representations of the Heavenly Jerusalem. All the figures are outline drawings, and their robes fall in neat calligraphic lines. The artist emphasized eyes and gestures most lprobably because he was used to illustrations in the Ottonian tradition from the previous century.
At the banquet, the six diners balance a severely tipped table on their supposed laps. As tableware was not yet in use, note that this is still finger food, with generous slices of bread provided by one of the other diners. In both illustrations the artist has used very economic means to indicate the crowds of people who attend Saint Aubin. One or two faces are drawn, with the tops of their heads indicating the rest of the mass. This technique does not do much to convince us that there is actually room for all those people.
A monk/artist who worked at Cluny at about the same date was also asked to draw a crowd, here to illustrate the Feast of Pentecost (cat. no. 168 A). But he’s working from a different artistic tradition. He’s not so much influenced by Ottonian art as he is by Byzantine ivories and wall painting done by Byzantine artists in the West. The draperies are more graceful, and they do not totally disguise the body beneath it. On the other hand, the Cluny scriptorium is not exempt from Germanic influence. The letter “A” is filled with Germano-Saxon interlace.
Stylistic cross-currents were also felt, on a larger scale, in the architectural sculpture of the Romanesque era. The auspicious entrance to the exhibition displays six historiated capitals arranged in two opposing cusps. This grants the visitor a mini-survey of the development of the art of carving, a fabulous compendium of the changes in Romanesque sculpture. Of course, the historiated capital does what capitals have always done; it sits atop a column and connects the shaft with whatever architectural element it is meant to support. But before the Romanesque sculptors, nobody had even thought to decorate the capital with a story, figure, or legible event. Right here are six fine examples of how they adapted figure carving and story telling to a small surface that had to be legible way above eye level in the nave and the choir of the church.
These six capitals are not arranged chronologically, but clearly the most developed of the group is the first one on the right (cat. no. 275*), dating most probably from the early twelfth century. It comes from Cluny, the mother house of the Cluniac Reform Movement, the same monastery that produced the manuscript with the image of Pentecost. Larger than Rome’s Old St.Peter’s, Cluny III was the largest church in Europe. A model of a section of the nave appears near the end of the exhibition. Unfortunately, there is no human figure in the model to give you an idea of its vast scale.
On the capital exhibited here Cluny’s love of plain chant is alluded to in the four musicians (playing cithara, cymbals, lute, and bells), each man surrounded by an inscribed pointed mandorla. Notice how flexible the figures appear, how full of movement the hems of their robes are, how deep the carving is with some evidence of the use of a drill in the eyes and the stems of the plants near the base of the capital.
This must have been one of the capitals from the choir. The capitals in Cluny’s nave were not historiated but decorated only with leaves. Take note that the capitals were carved on all four sides. Of these six, only one other capital here is carved on four sides (cat. no. 277*). But in that example, the fourth side has been partially effaced because it was saved from an earlier church and imbedded in a wall at Ste-Genevieve.
On the next capital on the right, made a generation earlier in Nantes (cat. no. 272), only the eyes show signs of drilling, and the human figure is less human, more static and unarticulated. This capital, and the even earlier one from Bayeux next to it (cat. no. 271), shows a stronger relationship to the block of stone than you find on the Cluny capital. The Bayeux standing figure of Christ appears flat, and his feet are not cut but are incised into the stone at the base. From the third quarter of the eleventh century in Bayeux to 1120 at Cluny, Romanesque sculpture has moved from flat to round and from stasis to movement.
The stained-glass window on the wall behind the capitals (cat. no. 187*), although later than the sculpture, is nonetheless a static image. It is not a narrative but rather a symbolic representation of the Virgin and Child shown as the Throne of Wisdom, an idea from the Old Testament. It uses an exceptional range of colors: more than one shade of blue, several yellows that slip into off-white, different browns and green. The glassmaker has painted the faces and some of the details in the drapery as well as the decoration of the jeweled golden mandorla.
Another window, this from Le Mans (cat no. 201*), dated 1120, is found in the middle of the exhibition. Here the narrative of the Ascension of Christ is shown. However the image of Christ, which undoubtedly would have been in a mandorla held by angels, is missing, along with the upper portion of the window. Compared to the Virgin and Child, the balance of colors is very different. The window is divided into 8 strongly tinted rectangles: four blue and four red. The figures are smaller and grouped in twos and threes in each panel. The individual pieces of glass are smaller as well, with as many as 34 in the figure of Mary.
In my opinion, the sections on the Cult of the Saints and the Crusades are particularly worthy of attention. As they are seldom exhibited outside of Nancy, you should make it a point to see the wonderful statue of the embracing couple (cat no. 107*) who tenderly slip their flattened arms around one another as they stop on their return from a Crusade. It would seem that they have not moved in some time; unlike the Cluniac draperies that swirl around the legs of the musicians, the clothes of these figures hang limp and motionless, their bodies rigid, stoic expressions on their faces.
Just behind them, backed on the same partition, is a gospel book (cat no. 122) that could only have been decorated as a result of the Crusades. It combines non-figurative patterns with repoussé metalwork. You can see how thin the metal is if you look at the right side of the book cover, where some of the metal has disappeared. All of this dates from the pre-Romanesque, Ottonian era. However, the third element on this cover marks the work as Romanesque. It is the imbedded Byzantine ivory, a “souvenir” from some pillaged Eastern Church visited on a Crusade.
The exhibition is filled with objects that signify French Romanesque art. We are presented with the chasses and reliquaries that held the bones or remnants of sainted Christians, the carved wooden figures that represent important saints and that held relics of their earthly bodies, and the enamel roundels that originally decorated a chasse whose wooden core has long since disintegrated.
One wooden statue, less deteriorated than disassembled (cat. no. 296*), is shown in the final room of the exhibition. It consists of a torso of the crucified Christ from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which is displayed with, and most probably belongs with, a head of Christ from the Louvre. It is wonderful to think that this exhibition allowed the curators of both museums to share information that led to the reunion of these two pieces. It is equally sad to recognize the crass materialism that led to their separation in the first place.
One more word of caution: for the sake of inclusiveness, the curators of the show chose to display reproductions, water colors and drawings, after various wall paintings from the time. While the importance of wall painting should not be underestimated, these substitutes for the real thing can hardly communicate the impact that they have in situ.
That quibble aside, this is a wonderful show, with important, seldom-seen works of art, made in the service of the Christian world at a time when France was covered with a white mantle of newly constructed Romanesque churches. This exhibition give us a sweeping view of a small proportion of the work produced in, around, and for the French Christian community from the late tenth to the first half of the twelfth centuries: patrimoine indeed.
