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ROMANESQUE ARCHITECTURE
Posted Date: 22 May 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Travel & Tourism
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Posted By: TULASI KRISHNA Member Level: Gold
Rating:  Points: 1
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A plan drawn on parchment of a now-vanished monastery in St Gall, Switzerland, shows that by the time of Charlemagne (742-814) the Benedictine monastic order had become a large departmentalized institution, but not until almost 1000 did church building begin in earnest throughout the West. At first, the architects were all monks, for the monasteries supplied not only the material wealth but also the pool of learning that made the new initiative possible.
The basilican plan used in earlier times was modified in accordance with the Christian liturgy, in which a member of the clergy led prayer and addressed the faithful, and performed religious rites at an altar. The Christian symbol of the cross was imposed on the rectangular plan of the church by the addition of a transept (perhaps borrowed from Byzantium). This created a spatial distinction between the nave (for the congregation) and the chancel, the space beyond the transept, where the choir (for the monks) and, beyond it, the main altar, were located. The main altar, the focal point of the building, stood in the apse, the semicircular or polygonal recess at the end of the church, girded by the ambulatory, a semicircular extension of the aisles flanking the nave. Subaltars, needed for the celebrations of mass that many monks were required to attend daily, were placed in the transept and in the ambulatory. At the nave entrance was the narthex, an antechamber or vestibule that acted as a reception area for pilgrims. Although many French churches such as—St Savin sur Gartempe (nave 1095-1115), St Sernin in Toulouse (c. 1080-1120), and in Sainte Foy in Conques (begun 1050)—had barrel-vaulted naves, St Philibert in Tournus (950-1120) had transverse arches to support a series of barrel vaults, with windows high in the vertical plane at the ends of the vaults. Ultimately, the groin vault became the preferred solution, because it made possible the use of high windows and created a continuous longitudinal crown, as in Sainte Madeleine (1104) in Vézelay, France, and Worms Cathedral (11th century), in Germany. The semicircular arches of the groin vault form a square in plan; thus, the nave consisted of a long series of square bays or segments. The smaller and lower vaults of the aisles were often doubled up, two to each nave bay, to conform to this configuration.
The greatest monastic Romanesque church, Cluny III (1088-1121), did not survive the French Revolution but has been reconstructed in drawings; it was an immense double-aisled church almost 137 m (450 ft) long, with 15 small chapels in transepts and ambulatory. Its design influenced Romanesque and Gothic churches in Burgundy and beyond. Another important stimulus to French Romanesque architecture was the pilgrimage cult; a convergence of routes led over the western Pyrenees into Spain and thus to Santiago de Compostela, where the pilgrim could venerate what were held to be the relics of St James. Along the routes to Spain, certain points were sanctified as pilgrimage stops, which led to the erection of splendid Romanesque churches at Autun (1120-1132), Paray-le-Monial (c. 1100), Périgueux (1120), Conques (1050), Moissac (c. 1120), Clermont-Ferrand (1262), St Guilhem le Désert (1076), and others.
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