“Frozen Music”: Rediscovering the Romanesque

And why did Chesterton associate Gothic architecture with murder?

The most enchanting physical structure I’ve ever seen in person is the Basílica de Santa María la Real (Basilica of Saint Mary the Royal) in Covadonga, Spain.

This masterpiece in dusty-rose-colored limestone, built during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, wondrously exemplifies the medieval style that inspired its designers.

It is massive, not as in “enormous” but as in French massif: impressively solid, heavy, and stable, as though founded in the depths of the earth, as though somehow endowed, as the psalmist says, with supernatural permanence: “God in her midst, she is not moved: / God helpeth her early, in gray morningtide.”

It is geometrically simple, with clear lines and visually powerful interplay of elemental shapes—triangles, circles, rectangles, rounded arches, as though heavenly spheres and triune divinity have been wedded to the blocks and beams that man hacks out of the mountains and the trees.

It is hierarchical, like the feudal society in which it is rooted, with sections that are distinct yet interdependent, conveying subordination but also wholeness. There is higher and lower, but all is equally contained within a liminal realm that joins heaven to earth, just as man, in the ancient Greek conception, is a liminal being, caught between light and shadow, pleasure and pain, mortality and immortality.

It is magnificently symmetrical, a literal monument to the balance and moderation upon which cosmic order, ecological abundance, and human happiness are based. To stand on the centerline of such an edifice, looking through its great portal to the half-light within, is to sense the waning of horizontality and the waxing of verticality. Look to the left or to the right—it is the same. Look up, and everything is changing, moving, converging upon something high above, unseen but felt, overpowering yet silent, awe-full, unfathomable, irresistible.

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Goethe described architecture as “frozen music.” I can think of no better phrase for the deeply pleasing, symphonic effect of a Romanesque church or castle.

The Romanesque church of Lessay Abbey in northern France, originally built in the eleventh century. Notice again the solidity, simple lines, soothing geometries, and harmony-within-hierarchy composition.

I love Gothic architecture, but as an emblem of medieval spirituality, Romanesque takes precedence. The word “Romanesque” is modern terminology and suggests “in the manner of the Romans,” which is an impoverished way of naming an artistic style that beautified seven centuries of medieval civilization and developed into a uniquely eloquent expression of medieval values and aspirations.¹ (At least the suffix -esque was chosen instead of -ish; “Romanesque” sounds a lot better than “Romanish.”) As we see with other cultural achievements of the Middle Ages, what did indeed begin with Roman architecture was molded and enriched by a poetic and deeply spiritualized vision of beauty, human destiny, Creation, and the Creator.

Western monasticism and Romanesque architecture grew up together, and the great Benedictine revival of the tenth and eleventh centuries brought the Romanesque era to its summit. If you take the monastic ideals of western Christendom and translate them into the language of enclosed space, with stones for words and shapes for sentences, you get Romanesque. Or to borrow Goethe’s idea, if architecture is frozen music, then Romanesque architecture is chanted prayer in solid form. To be inside a Romanesque church while monks are singing their ancient Latin psalms is a singular experience—you hear the music and see it at the same time.

A pictorial reconstruction of the church at Cluny Abbey, exemplar of Romanesque architecture and symbol of the union between Benedictine monasticism and Romanesque aesthetics. The three hierarchical tiers forming the main body of the church evoke the three estates of medieval society, and the composition on the chancel side, though appearing a bit crowded in this drawing, is regular, simple, and symmetrical.

Portico to a Romanesque church in southern Italy. The groin vault and hefty pillars are characteristic of Romanesque style, and so is the sense of being surrounded simultaneously by the elegant glory of the heavens and the primal strength of the earth.

An eleventh-century church in Catalonia, amongst the hills north of Barcelona. The principles of Romanesque art scale well, conferring visual candor and geometrical grace on humble and grand structures alike.

Romanesque construction spread throughout western Europe, from Scandinavia and Scotland to Spain, Sicily, Hungary, and everywhere in between. It was the fundamental architectural style of the Middle Ages, and it has been said that architecture was the fundamental artistic endeavor of the Middle Ages—as though their singular zeal for a spiritualized life saw the vast earth itself as the most fitting medium for the re-creation of Beauty. If we include the expressive, narrative, and highly symbolic works of art that adorned their façades and interiors, Romanesque churches are best understood as the preeminent means by which medieval communities gave outward form to their inner life.

The interior of the abbey church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe in France, an eleventh-century masterpiece with massive pillars and a towering barrel vault (image source). Romanesque interiors were alive with color; if they now appear stark, it’s because so much of their artwork has suffered decay or damage.

Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe is an important site for surviving Romanesque murals. This one depicts God speaking to Noah. Note the stylized and expressive, rather than naturalistic and humanistic, style. This was normal for Romanesque interiors, and consistent with medieval affection for the rich symbology of human life.

And this brings us to Chesterton. In “The Hammer of God,” one of his Father Brown detective stories, Chesterton conveys some serious doubts about the spirituality of Gothic architecture, which he rather imprecisely equates with “the architecture of the Middle Ages”:

Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to suicide…. When they saw it from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit. For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air….

“I think there is something rather dangerous about standing on these high places even to pray,” said Father Brown. “Heights were made to be looked at, not to be looked from.”

“Do you mean that one may fall over,” asked Wilfred.

“I mean that one’s soul may fall if one’s body doesn’t.”

His word choice here is overwhelmingly negative—plunged, sickening, suicide, voiceless pit, terrible, monstrous, dangerous. Could Chesterton really speak of Gothic architecture—the style of Chartres and Reims, of Salisbury and Cologne—in this shocking way? He even dares to portray the church as a silent, stone-hearted accomplice in the great crime of murder: its “monstrous … disproportion” and “dizzy places” warp the mind of an Anglican curate, who kills his own brother with a small hammer dropped from Gothic heights.

I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve never studied Chesterton’s architectural theories. If there are any Chesterton experts out there who can shed some light, I welcome your comments.

Gothic features emerged in the twelfth century and coexisted with Romanesque art for a hundred years or so. One scholar describes Gothic style as a “lightening and elaboration” of Romanesque style; the change, as we would expect from medieval culture, was organic growth rather than rupture. Nonetheless, the affinity between the two traditions is less evident in the more audacious Gothic designs.

I like Professor James McGregor’s summary of Gothic style:

Art historians have described the Gothic as an architecture of the sky rather than the earth…. Its distinctive features are its steep arches, vertical towers, and soaring walls. Its heavenly aspirations are reflected in the beaked pinnacles that top every vertical and extend the building’s reach as high as possible into the sky. The sky itself entered the structure through enormous windows. Filtered by richly colored glass that changed intensity as the day passed, light became the most absorbing and lively spectacle within these vast spaces.

This sounds like the closest humanity has ever come to building heaven on earth. It also gives me some insight into why I am more naturally drawn to Romanesque structures: I don’t feel ready for heaven yet. If Gothic is heaven on earth, Romanesque is heaven and earth. Heaven is my destination, but the earth is my home; Romanesque architecture unites them in a harmony that soothes my wearied soul, and reminds me that God and His divine artwork are not only high above me but also all around me.

Romanesque at its finest: Sénanque Abbey in Provence, France. Photo by Chris Down.

1. My Substack colleague Aaron Pattee, a medievalist and architectural scholar who writes Maintaining the Realm, prefers to identify the length of the Romanesque era as about three centuries, and other experts agree with him. The most distinctive and characteristic phase of the Romanesque period was indeed closer to three centuries in length. However, other scholars interpret “Romanesque” more broadly and assign a much longer duration. In this essay I understand Romanesque in the broader sense, highlighting its continuity with Roman forms and its centrality to the culture of the entire Middle Ages. The seven-century length is based on the emergence of early Romanesque buildings around 550 AD and the continued prevalence of Romanesque style until 1200 AD in Europe generally and until about 1250 AD in parts of Germany.