There are four Romanesque churches of the Rhine valley which still have their wall paintings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, namely, the double church at Schwarz Rheindorf, near Bonn, with paintings that were originally executed about 1150, the chapter-house of the Abbey-church at Brauweiler, near Cologne, and the crypt of St. Maria im Capitol at Cologne. The baptistery of the Church of St. Gereon has some wall paintings of the thirteenth century, and still older work in the crypt.
Perhaps the most important and most interesting of these old wall-paintings are those that adorn the lower church at Schwarz Rheindorf, although they have been completely repainted recently, but it must be admitted the present colouring of them is characteristic of the Romanesque colour, and can hardly be very far wrong. The subjects appear to be highly imaginative and poetical conceptions of Biblical scenes, and there are large figures of the Apostles and Hebrew prophets. The treatment is in the usual flat method of colouring with strong outlines. The original paintings were discovered under coats of whitewash in 1853. The Chapter-house at Brauweiler has some examples of wall-paintings, dating from the end of the twelfth century, the subjects being scenes from the Epistle to the Hebrews. In the apse of the church there are other paintings of the later Gothic period.
In the crypt of the Church of St. Maria im Capitol, at Cologne, there are some interesting wall paintings of the twelfth century, but they are in a faded state. This church, however, is remarkable for its rich modern colouring, and furnishes one of the best examples of the revival of Romanesque decoration in Germany. It may be said that every inch of the surfaces of the interior is covered with richly-coloured ornamentation and figure-paintings, which includes the columns and piers. The east end is in plan trefoil-like, having three semicircles with their diameters touching, and the three semi-domes above have figure subjects that were designed, and the painting begun, by Steinle, but finished by other artists.
In the crypt of the Church of St. Gereon at Cologne there is a very interesting series of wall paintings, consisting of single figures of a colossal size, each painted in curved recesses in the walls. The figures are noble in design, but the colouring is much faded. They date from about the twelfth century, and appear to be examples of the original work, that have not been restored. It may be mentioned here that the floor of the crypt is a mosaic pavement of the eleventh century. It is Roman in character, though of German workmanship. The design consists of figure subjects, where David, Samson, and Delilah are represented, and also the signs of the Zodiac. These mosaic pavements were discontinued after the eleventh century, when encaustic and glazed tiles of brown, red or green colours were used instead of mosaic for floor pavements. The walls of the baptistery of this church are decorated with painted figures, of thirteenth-century work. Full length figures of saints and warriors are arranged in pairs, two of them occupying the upper half of each arched bay between engaged pillars, and between each two figures is a small painted column. The lower halves of the bays have each an ornamental border immediately under each pair of figures, and the rest of the space below the border is painted in imitation of suspended tapestries. Altogether this makes a very satisfactory and interesting scheme of decoration. Such schemes were very common in the decoration of the Gothic period in Germany and other countries. The rest of the interior of this church, like that of St. Maria im Capitol, is lavishly decorated in richly-coloured and gold ornamentation being a modern revival of Romanesque colouring. The profuse surface decoration used so much in the Romanesque period was of Byzantine origin, and consisted of an almost endless variety of forms and motives, such as conventional vine leafage, fruit and tendrils, flowers of various kinds, scale patterns, interlacings, frets, geometrical combinations, chevrons, zigzag patterns, ribbons, garlands, and various representations of carved Byzantine ornament, and other architectural features, such as arcading, all treated flatly in colour.
There are other numerous examples of Romanesque painting, colouring and ornamental decoration still found in other parts of Germany, besides the examples we have just noticed. The walls and ceilings of the choir and transepts of Brunswick Cathedral have a complete series of Romanesque wall paintings of the twelfth century. The finest example of this style of painting in Germany is the magnificent ceiling of the great nave of St. Michael’s Church in Hildesheim. It is a flat ceiling of wooden construction. Running the whole length of the central portion of the ceiling the space is subdivided into a series of square panels; on each side of this central space the bands are divided into a great many small oblong panels, and outside these is a broad enclosing border of scroll-work containing in circular spaces in this border half-length figures of saints. The adjoining border has its oblong panels filled with small full-length figures of Apostles and Prophets. The larger square panels of the central part have lozenges and quatrefoil forms inside each square, in alternation. The latter forms contain the seated figures of kings and other personages that illustrate the genealogy of Christ, or the Root of Jesse. The Fall is also represented, and the corner spaces outside the lozenges and quatrefoils are filled with ornament and small medallions that add great richness to the design without giving to it any appearance of confusion. The colour is very strong and rich, and the whole of the decoration is painted on a blue ground.
The small stained-glass windows of the Romanesque period add a further note of colour to the interiors, although coloured glass was quite secondary to the painted decoration of this time. The only figure-work attempted in the glass was that in the small circular medallions and lozenge-shaped panels, containing scriptural subjects, which were placed at intervals amidst a rich setting of leaf patterns and other ornamental forms.
In the Gothic period, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, when the walls of churches became less in extent and area, and the windows became larger and more numerous, glass painting gradually became the chief factor in providing the colour of church interiors, and consequently the art and craft of the glass painter or “glazier,” as he was called in the old documents, became a more important one than that of the painter and decorator. When the Gothic builders perfected the rib vaulting system, their greatest discovery, and the keynote of the style, they found that walls were not necessary as active agents of the construction, but of use only in filling up the spaces between the voids, and were therefore more or less inert masses. They found that they had no use for walls except to close in the building from the weather, and so we find that walls began to disappear in Gothic buildings, and the windows being more numerous and larger, the Gothic churches were becoming great glasshouses. To prevent this look it was necessary to fill the windows with coloured glass, which subdued the otherwise great glare of white light that would come through clear glass, and would give the interiors a more comfortable appearance, at the same time adding colour decoration to the buildings. Many Gothic churches have more area of glass than of walls; the clerestory of the choir in Amiens Cathedral, for example, has forty times more area of the void or window space than of the solid stone, and in some cases there are no walls, as in the highly scientific construction of the upper portion of the choir in the Cathedral of Prague, where all is glass set in the stone vaulting shafts. Other large churches or cathedrals built in the Gothic style might be given as illustrations where the proportion of void to solid is very great and consequently the windows are very large, such as Chartres, Cologne, Canterbury, Lincoln and York. In the smaller Gothic churches of England, or on the Continent, this proportion of void to solid was generally reversed, and owing to this, and also to the greater use of wood in the roofs and screens, the smaller churches everywhere were at this time more richly treated in colour than the larger ones. The painter and decorator also found more employment in the treatment of secular buildings with coloured decoration in the Gothic period than he did on the cathedrals. It was only in rare instances that important wall paintings have been found in churches of this period; the colour and decoration, apart from the stained glass, was, especially in the case of the cathedrals, confined to mouldings, vault ribs, capitals, piers; and sometimes the webs, or ceilings of the vaults, were wholly filled with arabesque decoration, but often only partially so, around the bosses that marked the intersection of
PLATE XXIV