The style, so far as is known, was for a long time almost, if not absolutely, the same over a very large part of Western Christendom, and it has received from Mr. Freeman the appropriate designation of Primitive Romanesque. It was not till the tenth century, or later, that distinctive varieties began to make their appearance; and though that which was built earlier than that date has, through rebuildings and enlargements as well as natural decay, been in many cases swept away, still enough may be met with to show us what the buildings of that remote time were like.
The churches are usually small, and have an apsidal east end. The openings are rude, with round-headed arches and small single or two-light windows, and the outer walls are generally marked by flat pilasters of very slight projection. Towers are common, and the openings in them are often divided into two or more lights by rude columns. The plan of these churches was founded on the basilica type, but they do not exhibit the same internal arrangement; and it is very noteworthy that many of them show marks of having been vaulted, or at least partly vaulted; and not covered, as the basilicas usually were, by timber roofs. Even a country so remote as Great Britain possessed in the 10th century many buildings of Primitive Romanesque character; and in such Saxon churches as those of Worth, Brixworth, Dover, or Bradford, and such towers as those of Earl’s Barton (Fig. [166]), Trinity Church Colchester, Barnack, or Sompting, we have specimens of the style remaining to the present day.
By degrees, as buildings of greater extent and more ornament were erected, the local varieties to which reference has been made began to develop themselves. In Lombardy and North Italy, for example, a Lombard Romanesque style can be recognised distinctly; here a series of churches were built, many of them vaulted, but not many of the largest size. Most of them were on substantially the same plan as the basilicas, though a considerable number of circular or polygonal churches were also built. Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan, and some of the churches at Brescia, Pavia, and Lucca, may be cited as well-known examples of early date, and a little later the cathedrals of Parma, Modena, and Piacenza (Fig. [167]), and San Zenone at Verona. These churches are all distinguished by the free use of small ornamental arches and narrow pilaster-strips externally, and the employment of piers with half-shafts attached to them, rather than columns, in the arcades; they have fine bell-towers; circular windows often occupy the gables, and very frequently the walls have been built of, or ornamented with, coloured materials. The sculpture—grotesque, vigorous, and full of rich variety—which distinguishes many of these buildings, and which is to be found specially enriching the doorways, is of great interest, and began early to develop a character that is quite distinctive.
Fig. 167.—Cathedral at Piacenza.
Turning to Germany, we find that a very strong resemblance existed between the Romanesque churches of that country and those of North Italy. At Aix-la-Chapelle a polygonal church exists, built by Charlemagne, and which tradition asserts was designed on the model of San Vitale at Ravenna. The resemblance is undoubted, but the German church is by no means an exact copy of Justinian’s building. Early examples of German Romanesque exist in the cathedrals of Mayence, Worms, and Spires, and a steady advance was made till a point was reached (in the twelfth century) at which the style may be said to have attained the highest development which Romanesque architecture received in any country of Europe.
The arcaded ornament (the arches being very frequently open so as to form a real arcade) which was noticed as occurring in Lombard churches, belongs also to German ones, though the secondary internal arcade (triforium) is absent from some of the early examples. Piers are used more frequently than columns in the interiors, and are often very plain. From an early date the use of a western as well as an eastern apse seems to have been common in Germany, and high western façades extending between two towers were features specially met with in that country. For a notice and some illustrations of the latest and best phase of German Romanesque, which may with propriety be termed “round-arched Gothic,” the reader is referred to the companion volume of this series.[34]
France exhibits more than one variety of Romanesque; for not only, as remarked in the [chapter] on Byzantine Art, is the influence of Greek or Venetian artists traceable in the buildings of certain districts, especially Périgueux, but it is clear that in others the existence of fine examples of Roman architecture (Fig. [168]) affected the design of buildings down to and during the eleventh century. This influence may, for example, be detected in the use, in the churches at Autun, Valence, and Avignon, of capitals, pilasters, and other features closely resembling classic originals, and in the employment through a great part of Central and Northern France of vaulted roofs.