Authors: Jack Hitt
Despite the grandeur of the
Gothic, Baroque, and other styles, I find myself drawn to the secure comfort of
the Romanesque— the heavy walls, dark interior, thick columns, and simple
sculpture. If I could conduct a poll among pilgrims, I’m certain the Romanesque
would win. The style flourished in the 1000s and
1100
s
,
and the
churches were built largely because of pilgrim traffic. Some critics even call
this style of building “pilgrim architecture.”
Romanesque appeals to
pilgrims because it is built to a scale that is especially fitting for someone
on foot. These churches are small and cozy; even the Romanesque cathedrals are
manageable spaces. They are humble, comprehensible buildings. The columns are
low. The sculptures are visible at eye level or just above. From town to town
they play out the same themes and tell the same story. The repetition is
soothing. After a while, they feel like home.
A pilgrim can’t say this
about the Gothic cathedrals. They are spacious, overwhelming, and impressive,
and they mean to be. I came to Europe fully schooled in the architectural
propaganda in favor of Gothic and expected to be transported by the sights. The
critic Ernest Short writes that Gothic is the “master synthesis of religious
architecture.” Sartell Prentice alleges that “the role of the Romanesque church
was that of a prophet and forerunner, a John the Baptist in stone, preparing
the way for one still mightier that was to come.”
The pilgrim gets a bit
defensive about Romanesque after reading such remarks. We even resent the name,
a nineteenth-century coinage. That “esque” makes the style sound derivative and
second-rate, a rip-off of the Romans. It may be (some of the early Romanesque
churches did plunder Roman ruins for their stonework). But, in defense, we
pilgrims remind ourselves that the word
Gothic
comes from the Goths,
famous for bullying, overbearing, loud behavior.
Romanesque is denigrated for
its heavy walls, thick columns, and simple round arches. It is described as
leaden and earth-bound, crude and dense. The essential building block of
Romanesque is called the “arch that never sleeps,” as if it were some squat,
dim-witted peasant, always at work, with no time for appreciation of beauty.
The Gothic can claim the elegant pointed arch that relieved the stresses and
pressures of the building and opened up the space until the flying buttress
thinned the walls to the point that they could be fitted with mere stained
glass. These inventions literally blew the roof off the Romanesque church,
creating an enclosed canyon.
A Romanesque church asks a
visitor to step back and make sense of what can be seen, which is everything.
Gothic can only be seen in part. It is literally and figuratively beyond
comprehension. Gothic doesn’t serve the grandeur of creation; it competes with
it. Gothic is architectural braggadocio—bullying, overbearing, loud. The stones
of the Romanesque don’t threaten, they whisper. They want to tell you
something. Romanesque has been called the “church that speaks.” The Gothic
cathedral was nicknamed “an encyclopedia in stone.” One has a simple story to tell;
the other one can’t shut up.
But there’s something else
about the Romanesque style. It radiates an optimism amid chaos, continually
upbeat against all odds. Romanesque flourished not long after the passing of
the last millennium. The year 1000 was widely perceived to be Judgment Day, the
end of time. Sometime soon, the people thought, the dead would shake the dirt
from their bones and literally rise up from their graves. In the meantime, the
sun would go black and the moon would dissolve into a pool of blood. A common
statement in the wills of that period begin, “Seeing that the end of the world
is at hand...” The gloom hung in the back of everyone’s mind the way the threat
of atomic destruction has more recently tortured us.
When the moment passed by
and nothing happened, there was an intense sense of liberation, of pardon, of
new hope. This wave of medieval glasnost was boosted by the sense that the
barbarian invasions of centuries past were in fact over. As a result, building
exploded. Suddenly the enclosed security of the medieval monastery could be
turned inside out. Instead of having populations of laymen living within the
walls, one could build a kind of embassy in the middle of town, right out in
the open—a church.
There had been churches, of
course. The early ones, called basilicas, were modeled on old Roman meeting
halls, which the first Christians rented to hold their services. Basilicas were
built of wood with flat timbered roofs. When the Goths or Longo-bards arrived
in the old days, these buildings were the first to get the torch.
The idea was to replace them
with buildings that were not only fireproof, but worthy of the new mood that
inspired them. Instead of dark wooden beams, they would be built of rich blond
stone. They would raise high those roof beams by adapting the Roman arch. The
rebuilding of medieval infrastructure was so widespread and fast that one
contemporary observer, Rodulphus Glaber, wrote in 1003 that “the world seemed
to be doffing its old attire and putting on a new white robe of churches.”
The church was to become a
way of disseminating the essential idea of Christianity: although the chaos of
the world was frightening, the scriptural word granted access to the harmony
and transcendence of the divine. But how does one educate a continent of
peasants about the power of the word when none of them can read? There were
ideas. In 1025, the Council of Arras concluded: “Certainly there are simpletons
and illiterates in the church who cannot contemplate the scriptures.... And
although one does not worship a chunk of wood, the interior mind of man is
excited by the visible image... which can be written on the tissue of one’s
heart.” Even then, the seductive power of the image over the word was apparent.
A narrative carved in stone—this was the Romanesque church.
Tens of thousands of
Romanesque churches with the same basic story to tell were built in the century
and a half after the year 1000. Even today, after another millennium, there
survive more than ten thousand Romanesque churches—from Bohemia and Poland in the east, to the Italian islands in the south, to Ireland and Scandinavia in the north, to
Spain and Portugal in the west. The Romanesque church repeated these same
coherent images to widespread audiences—a single story rerun over and over
again. It was a form of mass communication, of broadcasting. Crude though it
was, the Romanesque church was the first successful attempt at a medium we
would later call television.
The most famous Romanesque
church on the road, except for the church in Santiago, is San Martín in
Frómista. The first stone was laid in 1066, when William the Conqueror was
setting sail for England. Frómista is merely thirty kilometers beyond Hontanas,
and for two days I slog through heavily worked wheat fields to get there. That
figure in the black hooded robe swinging an outsize scythe has gathered into
gangs. At times the plains of Castille seem host to a Mr. Death convention. At
last, from the tedious wheat fields that surround everything, the amber hulk of
San Martín of Frómista appears. It is bolted and locked when I arrive.
On the outside of a
Romanesque church, the eaves of the roof are held up by small sculptures called
corbels, triangles of stone fitted against the wall and beneath the roof with
elaborate carvings along the hypotenuse. Here at Fromista’s San Martin, they
are surprising—no biblical imagery or faces of Apostles, but pagan depictions
of animals and people and vegetation.
Walking around the outside
of the church is a tour of the surreal. Here is a laughing wolf, a hysterical
dog, a bird of prey, a man with his head in the mouth of a lion, a toothsome
maniacally grinning beast, a pineapple, a naked seated child, a hideously
contorted man with a child, another animal head flashing his molars, a man with
a finger in his ear, a monster inserting his hands in his mouth, a woman with
the floppy ear of a ruminant whose hands point to her distinctive feature, a
human head with a long neck, an animal holding the head of a naked man between
his knees, an animal with human hands stuffed in its mouth.
Perhaps they are images
drawn from the common bestiary, the second biggest seller in the Middle Ages
after the Bible. Elsewhere on the road, I have seen corbels carved with
panthers, dragons, wolves, elephants, and hyenas; mythological beasts—
griffins, sirens, basilisks, centaurs, chimeras; and others whose names are
still mysterious after translation—manticores, skiapods, hippopods, cenephali.
A local woman instructs me
to walk a few blocks to the town’s information booth to find out when the
church will open. At the booth, a young man who speaks educated Spanish tells
me the church is open.
“I have just been there,” I
tell him. “It is closed.”
“No, it is Wednesday. It is
open. If you go there, it will be open.”
So I naively return, and it
is closed. Another local advises that I visit the town mayor.
The mayor is not in, but his
wife is. She stamps my passport with the insignia of Frómista.
“Do you know if the church of San Martín will open today?”
“Oh, no,” she explains. “It
is Wednesday. It is closed.”
“Yes, but—”
“It will open tomorrow.”
“The man in the information
booth says it is open today.”
“Yes,” she says. It is not a
question or a confirmation or a statement. This is Spain, in a nutshell. But I
believe her because —the church
is
closed—at least she and I inhabit the
same time-space continuum. I return to the information booth because there were
some books and pamphlets about San Martin for sale. The young man and I chat
about San Martin, and I ask him why the outside is in such better condition
than all the other Romanesque churches.
“It was restored a hundred
years ago.”
“Really?”
“A big controversy.”
“Controversy?”
“Yes. Some say they changed
some of the carvings.”
“Really, why?”
“They were obscene.”
“Really, so where are the
obscene carvings?”
“I believe they are in the Regional Museum in Palencia.”
“How far is that?”
“About a half hour on the
bus. There will be one here soon. But if you go to Palencia today, you won’t be
able to see the church.”
“Why not?”
“Tomorrow is Thursday. The
church is closed.”
I decide to take a day off
and go to Palencia. As I wait for the bus, I flip through some of the brochures
on Frómista. The town’s name is the linguistic collapsing of the Latin word
frumentum.
It means “wheat.”
Palencia
is a large town, and by the time I get
there in the late afternoon, the place is beginning to reawaken from the siesta
nap. My search for the Regional Museum gets me nowhere because it doesn’t
exist. Never has, the lady in the tourist office says. I ask after the corbels
of Frómista, and I am sent to City Flail, which sends me to the Sacred Arts Museum, which wants to direct me to the Archaeological Museum, but, I’m told, it
closed forever. Happened a few weeks ago. The administrators lost their funding.
I walk to the Archaeological Museum anyway, maybe to mortify the spirit a bit more than I have. The front
door is a squat wooden square with thick beat-iron hinges and one of those
colossal locks from centuries ago. Who’s to say who possessed me? Saint James,
perhaps.
I pound on the door.
A Spanish cliché drags open
the heavy scraping door. He is a short man bent over with an enormous hump in
his back. His head seems to nestle in the center of his chest. He explains that
the museum is closed forever. I point to my shell. I pout. I let my eyes water.
I wipe my brow. Pilgrims have their ways.
Presently, a handsome
middle-aged man named Don Mauricio del Amo appears and introduces himself.
We ride up the elevator to
his office and he fixes me a coffee. According to Don Mauricio, whatever
corbels were taken down have been lost or stolen. He doesn’t have any and
doesn’t know where any are. In the Spanish art world, he explains, there is a
touch of scandal regarding Frómista because the restoration was done during the
last century, which Don Mauricio assures me was as Victorian in Spain as it was
in England.
Many of the corbels of the
Romanesque period, he explains, were quite obscene, at least by modern
standards. They can still be seen here and there in Spain and in other
countries. But most of them have been removed. Don Mauricio pulls from his
library some books and photographs. We slowly leaf through the surviving
corbels of the Romanesque. Each photograph is labeled with its location.
At the Colegiata de Santillana
del Mar is a man and woman splayed crotch to face, a primitive 69 position.
At San Martín de Elines is a
man exhibiting his penis while tightening a garrote painfully around his neck.
When I left America, I had read press accounts of teenagers strangling
themselves during masturbation—autoerotic asphyxia—as a novel way to heighten
the pleasures of self-abuse. Yet it wouldn’t be so new to neighbors of Santos
Cosme y Damián de Bárcena de Pie de Concha, where a corbel shows a man
onanistically exercising while squeezing his neck.