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The remarkable historical phenomenon now called Charlemagne's renovation an energetic, brilliant emulation of the art, culture, and political ideals of Christian Rome occurred during the late eighth and early ninth century. This represents the Carolingian period in art, learning and architecture. Out of the confusion attendant on the migrations and settlement of the barbarians, Charlemagne's immediate forerunners built, by force and political acumen, a Frankish empire that contained or controlled a large part of western Europe. Charlemagne wanted to create a splendid empire and thus made many rehabilitation's in art, learning and architecture. In his eagerness to reestablish the imperial past, Charlemagne also encouraged the revival of Roman building techniques; in architecture, as in scripture and painting, innovations made in the reinterpretation of earlier Roman-Christian sources became fundamental to Medieval designs. Although northern Europe was bottled with Roman colonial towns that contained many large and impressive stone structures, the Germanic tribes had always relied on the vast forests to supply them with building materials; northern architecture was a timber architecture and continued to be so well into the Middle Ages.
In 789, Charlemagne visited Ravenna, and historians have long thought that he chose one of its churches as the model of the Palatine Chapel of his own palace at Aachen. A view of the interior of the Palatine Chapel, which is a great example of the Carolingian period, shows that the floating quality of San Vitale has been converted into blunt massiveness and stiffened into solid geometric form. The conversion of a complex and subtle Byzantine prototype into a building that expresses robust strength and clear structural articulation foreshadows the architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the style we call Romanesque. The models the carried the greatest authority for Charlemagne and his builders were those from the Christian phase of the late Roman Empire, and it was the adoption of the Early Christian basilica, rather than the domed, central plan of Byzantine churches, that was crucial to the subsequent development of Western church architecture in general and to the Romanesque style in particular. The term Romanesque is used to describe a period and movement in art and architecture that spread across Europe from approximately 800 AD to 1100 AD, reaching its height in the 11 th and 12 th centuries.
The given name of the period, Romanesque, associates the style with its Roman architectural influence. In fact, Romanesque seems to have been the first pan-European style since Roman Imperial architecture. The spread of the Romanesque style was due, in part, to the general mobility of the people at this time. Merchants, knights, artisans and peasants traveled across Europe for business, war, and religious pilgrimages. To each country they visited, they brought their knowledge of what art and architecture in other cities looked like.
Some of the key characteristics of Romanesque architecture are, in general, a simple massive structure, and more specifically the use of vaults, slightly pointed arches, rotundas, small windows, bays and the use of stone. Two of the most important structural developments of Romanesque architecture were the use of stone and vaults. Most buildings of this time had open fireplaces and were therefore often filled with smoke and prone to fires. The use of both stone and vaults provided an alternative to the fire-prone wood structures of the earlier period. In barrel or groin vaulted ceilings, the stone construction was supported in the middle by a heavy arch construction that would tend to buckle the walls outwards. To counteract this outward thrust, large piles of stone were stacked along the wall.
Therefore, the walls of Romanesque structures were thick and the windows were small in order to maintain the walls strength. Because of this, Romanesque interiors were very dim. Both the small windows and often a sunken ground floor worked to maintain heat in the buildings. Most of the architectural and artistic development of the period centered on the church and the spread of Christianity. Large numbers of people traveled on pilgrimages to visit sites of saints and martyrs. The most famous of holy places became very well traveled and required larger buildings to hold the growing crowds.
The layout of the churches also needed to be changed to create a better flow for foot traffic, as many visitors just passed through these places. Romanesque churches began to take the shape of the Latin cross. The visitor would enter the church through the nave, the long bottom portion of the cross. They would then walk down the nave and come to the crossing where the vaults of the nave and the transepts would intersect at a groin vault. This allowed for a good traffic pattern for the large crowds.
The large expanses of walls within Romanesque buildings were excellent canvases for monumental frescoes. Frescoes were not only large in scale, but were also bold in color. Churches also commissioned sculptors to create relief carvings for the decoration of church portals. The adoration of the church, in both art and architecture, were at the root of Romanesque.
A fascinating building of the Romanesque period is the church of St. Philibert at Tours on the Saone river in Burgundy. The long and complex building history of this church explains, in part, the curious assembly of various vaulting systems found in it. The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine is also an example of Romanesque architecture.
It has round arches that represent the Romanesque period. References Horse, De La Croix, Richard, G. Taney, Diane, Kirkpatrick. (1987) Art Throughout The Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company web
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Research essay sample on Art Learning And Architecture Art And Architecture Romanesque
