More Than What Meets the Eye

Romanesque artists were expressionists: they didn’t just represent the world, they spiritualized it.

In the previous post, we studied Romanesque art as an architectural style that, over the course of seven centuries,¹ converted western Europe into a vast network of harmonious structures that beautified the medieval landscape and reified medieval spirituality. But cultural historians have extended the term “Romanesque” to other forms of visual art—painting, sculpture, stained glass, manuscript illumination, metalwork—that were practiced before the transition to Gothic aesthetics in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The “luxury arts”—fine craftmanship involving precious metals and stones—were highly esteemed during the Romanesque period. This is the stunning front cover of the early-thirteenth-century Berthold Sacramentary, which is held by the Morgan Library and Museum. Sacramentaries were books used for religious services during the early and high Middle Ages.

It is perfectly fitting that all these arts should be included within the Romanesque architectural style, because they were all literally included within Romanesque architecture: murals, iconographic reliefs, decorative windows, liturgical books, golden chalices, and so forth brought Romanesque interiors to life, filling them with light and colors and shapes and textures that were not only beauti-full but also, and more importantly, meaning-full. In fact, the British art historian Carola Hicks made a striking statement about medieval aesthetics:

Romanesque art … has had to wait for the revolution in taste brought about by modernism in order for its expressionistic distortion and stylization of natural forms to be widely appreciated.

The civilizations that produced Romanesque and modernist art are separated by social, ideological, and psychological chasms of epic proportions. How could modernism possibly teach us to appreciate Romanesque? The answer lies in the visual dynamics of representation and expression. Though modernism pushed expressionistic techniques so far that artwork often lost beauty and viewers often lost interest, it helped to reawaken an aesthetics of meaning—that is, a sensitivity to visual elements that depart from representational accuracy in order to more fully express emotional, spiritual, and symbolic truths.