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.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream, perhaps the most famous example of artistic expressionism, is a case study in modern expressionistic techniques. Basically everything in the painting—color, line, shape, proportion, perspective—is a distorted version of physical reality. But the distortion is not merely a failure to represent what the eye sees: it’s the artist’s attempt to make visual elements communicate more directly. The primary purpose of the sky, for example, is not to resemble a sky. The primary purpose, accomplished through line and color, is to mean confusion, or to feel like blood, or to evoke anger. The misshapen, excessively simplified face is not artistic incompetence (Munch could paint with captivating realism when he wanted to); rather, its shapes and tones are like letters that spell a visual word meaning “alienation” or “inhuman” or “living death.”

Below is a collection of Romanesque art that gives you an idea of the simplifications and stylized distortions that medieval artists employed.

If you find images like these unappealing (as I sometimes do), think back to what Professor Hicks said: modernist techniques helped people—artists and scholars, I suppose, but maybe the general public as well—to appreciate the “expressionistic distortion and stylization” of Romanesque art. If your aesthetic sensibilities were formed by photography and naturalistic painting, as mine were, Romanesque expressionism looks “wrong,” but it will look less wrong if we ask ourselves the right question: What do these visual elements mean? What is the emotional, spiritual, or symbolic significance of all these “unrealistic” lines, shapes, colors, and proportions?

These are not questions that always have clear answers. In some cases the answers are lost to history. The artists, silenced by the grave, cannot tell us why they did what they did. Deciphering their works by “thinking with a medieval mind” is a quixotic project, for medieval minds were many, and they bore the deep impressions of a world immensely different from our own. Nobody in the Middle Ages (as far as we know…) wrote treatises intended to help future generations understand all the expressionistic details found in Romanesque paintings and sculptures.

And yet, the essence of human nature is the same as it ever was, and medieval thought is revealed to us, though imperfectly, through a vast collection of cultural artifacts. So we all have what we need to start the journey of rediscovering Romanesque art. It’s not a journey that’s likely to end anytime soon.

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Let’s conclude with a few specific examples of Romanesque expressionism. Below is a tympanum—i.e., a semicircular (or triangular) decoration over a door—from the twelfth century.

This is a variation on a common Romanesque theme: Christ in the center presides over a hierarchy of human figures who are lower in authority and therefore also smaller in size. No attempt has been made to accurately represent the physical proportions of the bodies—their spiritual relationships take precedence. The circular elements on the perimeter depict the signs of the zodiac and the labors of the month, suggesting a union of the material and spiritual realms, and notice the attention to geometrical integrity: the sizes and locations of visual elements are subordinated to the space available in the semicircle, a shape that evokes the soothing arches of Romanesque buildings and symbolizes the harmony and perfection of the cosmos.

Another common theme in Romanesque art is the Tree of Life, which in ancient Near Eastern mythology was a tree that gives immortality to those who eat its fruit, and which appears in the Book of Genesis along with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It developed rich symbolic resonance in medieval culture, becoming entwined with the “tree” (i.e., the Cross) on which Christ died to save mankind from death, and with a “tree of life” mentioned in the Book of Revelation—a tree whose fruit never fails and whose leaves “were for the healing of the nations.”

South door of a Romanesque church in Herefordshire, England.

Close-up of the tympanum, with highly stylized tree of life surmounted by strange creatures.

This tree of life looks nothing like a biological tree. Instead, its iconographic elements convey its essential qualities—life-giving fruit, healing leaves, balanced growth—and its formal elements, primarily circles and gentle curves, speak of wholeness and serenity. These elements are brought together into a symbolic composition: in Christian theology, the ultimate source and end of all life is the Holy Trinity, one God in three Persons, just as this tree of life has three branches of equal prominence, and a central branch with a tripartite crown.

The trees of life shown below, though all differing in content, express similar emotions through their basic visual elements. Accurate representation is not the objective.

Romanesque art shows us so much more than our eyes can see, but we must strive to understand its language. In this final example, realism dissolves into an extraordinary visual poem that replaces the hard wood of the Cross with the sinuous lines, soothing shapes, vivid hues, and ascending symmetries of a tree of life, on which the Author of life is dying, and through which the reign of death is ending.

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.