Books Recommended: Cattaneo, L’Architecture en Italie. Chapuy, Le moyen age monumental. Corroyer, Architecture romane. Cummings, A History of Architecture in Italy. Enlart, Manuel d’archéologie française. Hübsch, Monuments de l’architecture chrétienne. Knight, Churches of Northern Italy. Lenoir, Architecture monastique. Osten, Bauwerke in der Lombardei. Quicherat, Mélanges d’histoire et d’archéologie. Reber, History of Mediæval Architecture. Révoil, Architecture romane du midi de la France. Rohault de Fleury, Monuments de Pise. Sharpe, Churches of Charente. De Verneilh, L’Architecture byzantine en France. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française (especially in Vol. I., Architecture religieuse); Discourses on Architecture.
EARLY MEDIÆVAL EUROPE. The fall of the Western Empire in 476 A.D. marked the beginning of a new era in architecture outside of the Byzantine Empire. The so-called Dark Ages which followed this event constituted the formative period of the new Western civilization, during which the Celtic and Germanic races were being Christianized and subjected to the authority and to the educative influences of the Church. Under these conditions a new architecture was developed, founded upon the traditions of the early Christian builders, modified in different regions by Roman or Byzantine influences. For Rome recovered early her antique prestige, and Roman monuments covering the soil of Southern Europe, were a constant object lesson to the builders of that time. To this new architecture of the West, which in the tenth and eleventh centuries first began to achieve worthy and monumental results, the generic name of Romanesque has been commonly given, in spite of the great diversity of its manifestations in different countries.
CHARACTER OF THE ARCHITECTURE. Romanesque architecture was pre-eminently ecclesiastical. Civilization and culture emanated from the Church, and her requirements and discipline gave form to the builder’s art. But the basilican style, which had so well served her purposes in the earlier centuries and on classic soil, was ill-suited to the new conditions. Corinthian columns, marble incrustations, and splendid mosaics were not to be had for the asking in the forests of Gaul or Germany, nor could the Lombards and Ostrogoths in Italy or their descendants reproduce them. The basilican style was complete in itself, possessing no seeds of further growth. The priests and monks of Italy and Western Europe sought to rear with unskilled labor churches of stone in which the general dispositions of the basilica should reappear in simpler, more massive dress, and, as far as possible, in a fireproof construction with vaults of stone. This problem underlies all the varied phases of Romanesque architecture; its final solution was not, however, reached until the Gothic period, to which the Romanesque forms the transition and stepping-stone.
FIG. 90.—INTERIOR OF SAN AMBROGIO, MILAN.
MEDIÆVAL ITALY. Italy in the Dark Ages stood midway between the civilization of the Eastern Empire and the semi-barbarism of the West. Rome, Ravenna, and Venice early became centres of culture and maintained continuous commercial relations with the East. Architecture did not lack either the inspiration or the means for advancing on new lines. But its advance was by no means the same everywhere. The unifying influence of the church was counterbalanced by the provincialism and the local diversities of the various Italian states, resulting in a wide variety of styles. These, however, may be broadly grouped in four divisions: the Lombard, the Tuscan-Romanesque, the Italo-Byzantine, and the unchanged Basilican or Early Christian, which last, as was shown in Chapter X., continued to be practised in Rome throughout the Middle Ages.
