Catalogues

No one viewing a medieval, especially a Romanesque, tympanum or capital for the first time can fail to be struck by the inherent tension which gives this art its unforgettable dynamic impact. For there the simplest geometric form, a triangle, circle or square, can metamorphose into a wildly expressive grotesque or luxurious foliage as well as the most dignified narrative. It was in the 1930s, excited by the links between Cubism and "primitive" African art, that a Baltrusaitis thought he could explain all Romanesque sculpture as a simple schematic development from a simple form like a palm leaf, until Meyer Schapiro [1] pointed out he had neglected the meaning of its content. Indeed, the tension is not only with some arbitrary abstract form, but within the subject matter itself. For why should the monsters on the capitals and ambo in St Ambrogio in Milan be devouring each other? Why should a grimacing devil appear within the confines of a holy space at all?

Form

Certainly, there is a tension when the potentially formless, or the unnatural form which is the monster, is subjected to very tight formal constraints, whether of capital, jamb and pediment, or of page layout and its demands of legibility. In this way it can veer to the purely expressive [2] or the purely formal of linear or more or less geometric decoration [3], and, at best, set up a centrifugal or centripetal force within a frame, like a Bach fugue. Just as clearly, however, formal criteria do not explain why medieval decoration, if that is what it is, takes such a lively turn.

If it is easy to point to some of the formal antecedents of this art which were to hand in 1000AD, - the friezes and sarcophagi of antiquity, the knot-work and interlace of insular manuscript illumination [4], the cloissonné jewellery of Celtic and German craftsmen, - it is far from easy to see why a simple corinthian capital should have been subjected to such varied treatment that a St Bernard could descry this Formosa deformitas while betraying his admiration [5].

Again, it is not enough to invoke the building frenzy of the 11th and 12th centuries, unsurpassed in fecundity [6], when a network of abbeys, priories and churches, coinciding with the birth of the new religious orders, - Carthusians, Premonstratensians, regular canons, Cluniacs, Cistercians, - spread across Europe; nor to point to the sense of exploration and struggle with materials found in this art, - where the perfection of metal forging in the shape of the anvil allowed better tools for the mastery of stonework, so evident from the 11th century on, - which echoes the experimentation with boundaries of form.

We do know at least that Romanesque art parades its extraordinary variety of invention within the recognisable structure of the One Church, just as the variety of romance languages from which the term derives, all sheltered under the canopy of the unitary Latin which is their parent, like the sinners under the cloak of the Madonna della Misericordia.

We know too, that it was an art born from relief, seemingly two-dimensional and linear in outlook and technique (though the play of mass and volume in sculpture is paramount), drawing rather than painting (though colour was prized above all else). If it is a graphic art [7], whose late descendant is the cartoon (though there relation between image and text is reversed), it is so in the sense of foregoing the illusion of reality as a surface appearance, of declining to trick the senses, and instead aiming to deliver the truth of a message, to tell a story as economically as possible. After all truth is not the same thing as reality, and when they meet, it can only be in a form of representation, what we say, for example, or a work of art.

In fact, the error of 19th century art appreciation was to apply the term primitive [8] to what was not understood, and to misrecognise for example what Boris Uspensky has called the inverse perspective used in medieval art [9]. Rather than the single vanishing point in the picture corresponding to the position of the viewer outside the frame, the viewpoint is within the picture plane itself, where a viewer becomes part of the narrative unfolding in various directions.

We can see, finally, that it is an art of movement, driven by something. In an era of metamorphoses, - of antiquity into Christianity, of Ovid into courtly poetry, of a monster into a pillar of the church and back again -, it mattered whether the impulse was towards nature, meaning the form our drive takes when it bogs us down in a mute and not necessarily pleasurable enjoyment, as a plant or animal [10], or whether it spurred one towards more pleasing speech and greater animation [11].

Whether this stricture of form become a limitation, a mental prison, a depiction of the suffering of sin, cast in Aristotelian terms [12] as absence of movement, or whether it represents a struggle for liberation of the spirit, the agency of happiness, from the heaviness of matter, - as it does in Romanesque art when one order of being (animal) is seen struggling to escape the suffocating embrace of another (vegetal), - or even when it conveys the fathomless bounty of creation, in which every creature however base participates in the lauding of creation [13], there is never a stasis.

This movement of the drive in art, its living impulse, is the same as the one with which we quest for our daily satisfaction. Thus, the real pleasure we derive from the interlace initials in medieval art [14] has something to do with the fact that it relates to a branch of mathematics known as topology, the art of knots, some figures of which happen to parallel the structure of the mind insofar as this latter also constitutes a real space for each one of us [15]. Secondly, it initiates a movement which returns back on itself, just as the satisfaction we derive from the activity of a drive (whatever we do to when we are hungry, say) comes when the pulsation returns from an external object (food) to the orifice on the body from whence it departed (mouth).

However, if the devouring maw, with which Hell and its offspring are so often represented, does not swallow all of creation but only its own kind, it is because we find in the dynamism of Romanesque art something open ended, dialectical, something that tends towards something greater, or something invisible, or just mysterious, at any rate, something that meant that one day, in the face of the inevitable theological schematism, its apparent opposite could appear, a Galileo for example, whereas further East, - despite, or perhaps because of, the Greek science they transmitted to the Latins in their translations, where the Aristotle commented by an Averroes had perhaps more far-reaching effects than at home, - the repetitive, geometric and arbitrary tendency of ornament in much of Islamic art, which produced the famous "arabesque", evokes mostly a fatalistic acceptance of what seems as fixed for all eternity as the stars in the last circle of the Ptolemaic system [16].

Medieval art reflects the open-ended nature of the creature's dialogue with its Creator, meaning that if sin is everywhere, even in the holiest places, so is redemption.

We could therefore venture that form and content come together when decorative motifs, sometimes suggested by architectural form, express the mysteries of a creation shaped by salvation.

David's Salvation

Until it was replaced by the cogito of Descartes, a shift from which one can date the beginning of the modern era, the guiding idea of the Middle Ages, the primary subjective framework, the concept without which any subjectivity was (and still is) unthinkable, to an extent unimaginable today, was salvation.

What allows us today to call ourselves civilised, the idea of the worth of every individual called the "sanctity of human life", is , albeit in a secularised form since the French and American revolutions, the major contribution of Christianity and a consequence of the idea of salvation.

This all-embracing, overarching, primary notion, closely linked to a concept of happiness of which the Church has always constituted itself the guardian, informs all medieval art. We find it at the dawn of Christianity, even before the dark ages, in 3rd century catacombs, as Daniel in the lion's den, or the three Hebrews in the furnace, or Isaac saved from his sacrifice. We find it later on when a monk or scribe, signing off his manuscript finis est deo gratias, also asks the reader to pray for his soul [17], when patrons, who commissioned works to be donated, asked in return for masses for their soul, and even, here in the vernacular of middle English, inserted in the middle of the Office, when the need to pray for souls in purgatory is stressed [18]. And we find it, of course, in the very architecture of sacred spaces and their decorative programmes. It explains why the image-idea of Christ as Salvator Mundi is present from the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages, from the Good Shepherd who took over from Orpheus, through its appearance on most Romanesque tympanii to the copy of the now lost Eyckian painting in a Bruges Book of Hours [19]. It also explains the focus on the Last Judgment as detailed in the Apocalypse and its anticipation of reward on the part of the saved, so prominent during the Romanesque period.