the artist is a learned, experienced valuation of the end of the period the church of the Middle Ages retrieves Greek motifs symbolic themes for Christians. Atlas is used to include God, the pattern remains the same but its meaning changes.
It is for the greater glory of God that the artists work, and nothing is too good to celebrate it. The colors explode in the pages of manuscripts (the admirable Apocalypse of Saint-Sever), on windows, or tissue, which often come from Byzantium or the Islamic world. The capitals and statues are painted. Gold, ivory and precious stones adorn the reliquaries, sacred vessels or the bindings of the Gospels.
"Do not look in the Romanesque style unit said Danielle Gaborit-Chopin. Each artist seems to find a new expression. Each offers different solutions, which can lead to a masterpiece as a dead end. "
Is it possible to distinguish "local schools" "It would be pointless to release any strength of regional styles, since, within the same geographical area, different styles co-exist, says Ms Gaborit. There individualization of regional centers, but we can not really talk about regional schools. "It is certain, however, that this emerging company, being completely remodeled, broke with the previous period, that of the Carolingians, obsessed with maintaining their links with the late Roman Empire.
REFINED AND ALMOST BARBARIAN
Artists novels - which are far from being anonymous as is the tradition - yet have some common features. They ignore the reality and remain indifferent to the proportions. The size of the characters (or parts of the body such as hands) is a reflection of their symbolic importance. Because they do not try to translate the tangible reality and ignore the abstraction, the artists draw their inspiration from natural forms which they interpret, purify, to coincide with their feelings of religious mystery. In addition, they work freely from elements "reported", Byzantine, Islamic and ancient, sometimes pushing up the art of collage, combining all the findings, without complex, with strong momentum.
It appears from the Louvre with the idea of an art at once refined and almost barbarous. Some parts, such as reliquaries who complete the course of the show, reminiscent of "idols" of Africa. We find the same rejection of realism, the same symbolism, the same hieratic, the same salience of the sacred. In the Romanesque period, Georges Duby wrote in The Age of Cathedrals (Gallimard), art has "no other function than to offer to God the riches of the visible world, that allow the man to such gifts to appease the wrath of the Almighty and to win his favor. All great art was then sacrifice. It is less aesthetic than the magic. " And he adds: "How Christianity, one thousand, prostrate in front of shrines, have dared to focus on what Christ was human? "
Finally, the Romanesque, says the historian, is a way of initiation. It is responsible for translating into simple shapes the harmonic structure of the world. It is a revealing: "Art is a discourse on God, as the liturgy and music. "That's why it proceeds by symbols. That the objects are monument, painting or piece of jewelry, carved or painted, all "present the world a gloss, a clarification." Their forms were not addressed to the crowds, insists Duby, but close elite. If the novel sometimes plays art pedagogy, "for education remained marginal in the artistic creations of that time: it is an aesthetic closed, inward-looking, made for the" pure men ". "
Ms. Gaborit unique challenges this bias. "While it is true that at that time, the art comes out of the whole Church, which is the only force grown, large ears of the religious buildings are real lessons given to the faithful. The lives of saints painted on the walls of shrines play the same role. There is a real education. Furthermore, reliquaries were out in processions, for the holidays, they run the emulation of the faithful. It is certain, however, that there are two levels of reading in Roman art: immediate access to the largest number, and a hidden message which is addressed to the elite. But this need to reach the faithful is more noticeable than the Gothic period, when art will emanate from the royal court. "
Emmanuel de Roux: Article published in World of 3/17/05 on "Romanesque art, or the flowering of a new world," March-June 2005 Louvre Museum
French art in the Gothic (Ernest Renan)
"The Gothic style thus appears as a purely French art. He was born with France, at the very center of French nationality in this country prosperous and rich that emerged the first Germanic fertility, was the cradle of the Capetian dynasty, and collected before any other benefits. It was, as stated by M. Viollet-le-Duc, the architecture of the royal domain. Mainly under the influence of French royalty and the Abbey of Saint-Denis, this country, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was the scene of a great awakening of the human spirit, a kind of rebirth, which resulted in poetry by the epics, philosophy, the emergence of scholasticism, in politics by the movement of Commons and the administration of Suger in Saint Bernard and religion by the crusades. Gothic architecture, or rather, the movement of construction when it came out was the product of the same causes. As for municipalities, it was probably not a fortuitous circumstance that made their school to coincide with the architectural renovation. The church at that time, had inherited the forum and basilica old, was the venue of the meetings calendar, and, indeed, they are common to towns, Noyon, Laon, Soissons, raising the first cathedrals Gothic.
That nothing, neither Italian nor German, not to meddle in this first revival all French of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, so sadly stopped in the fourteenth, which is, for architecture, is a certainty. Hundred years at least the pointed style remains the exclusive property of France. The Rhine is still covered in Romanesque buildings, when the masterpieces of the Gothic style were already high in northern France. England was the Gothic churches built in the twelfth century, but by the French. In 1174, the rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral has been decided, they opened a competition: it was William of Sens, famous for great work, which was chosen, and the choir began in the new system that already existed exclusively in France . In the thirteenth century, countless master masons who wore this style to the borders of Latin Europe were French. The first non-French Gothic architect whose name is known is Erwin of Steinbach (1277). In Germany, until the fourteenth century, this style is called "French style", Op francigenum, and that's the name he should have kept. Unfortunately fate which deprived France of the glory of his epics can be found here. The narrow mind which dominates from St. Louis, the violence of the Inquisition, the miseries of the Hundred Years War, put out in our engineering. Strasbourg and Cologne schools become the style that we had created. France sees in turn to her foreign artists. The French style is said to German Italy called Teutonic, then, by a misunderstanding of the most bizarre claim is absurd to designate the name of Gothic. Remember that the barbarians were mainly known in Italy by the Goths. Gotico became synonymous with Barbaro, and a legend represented the Goths as fantastic beings bent on the destruction of Roman monuments, they were hammered overnight. In their disdain for this architecture, which did not conform to Greek orders, and was deeply repugnant to them, the Italians of the sixteenth century called it gotica, and this name was more easily accepted by the seventeenth-century France , the word Gothic was taken into French, as a result of Italian influence, like a shade (Gothic script, the Gothic period, etc.).. From there to say that the Goths had invented this style, there was only one step: the Vasari crosses, and now this nonsense is not yet uprooted history of Italy.
How extraordinary that style was formed, which, for nearly four hundred years covered Latin Europe building footprints so deep originality? The learned and judicious research that I remembered just now solved the issue. The old assumptions, and an Eastern influence, and a Germanic origin, and a so-called type Xyloid (wooden architecture) must be totally abandoned. The Gothic style emerged from a novel by natural growth, or if we prefer, by the work of men of genius firing an inflexible logic consequences of the art of their time: it was the continuation of an earlier style, founded around 1000 and deducted himself of the laws that previously had chaired in the West for the construction of Christian temples. "
By- Fadi Karnaby
