Art: SPANISH ROMANESQUE; ERA OF AWE

AFTER the Moslem surge exploded out of Arabia in the 7th century and swept westward until it had engulfed Spain, one of the first areas to be liberated (by Charlemagne in 788) was Catalonia. There, in their outpost of Christianity, the proud, fiercely independent Catalans built their churches on the foothills of the Pyrenees, decorated them with some of the oldest European tempera murals and paintings still in existence. Long considered provincial copies of Byzantine art, less rich than the Moorish splendors of the Moslem mosques to the south, and primitive by comparison to the French Romanesque and Gothic triumphs to the north, these works of art only in this century have come into their own.

Because the Catalan churches lay in a backward area, they remained almost unchanged through the centuries, were not rebuilt in later styles. In recent decades most of the frescoes and painted wood altar fronts have been moved into museums at Vich and Barcelona to stop further deterioration and to permit careful studies by art scholars. The best that is left of this all but forgotten chapter from the past has now been reproduced in oversized format (18 in. by 13 in.) in Spain, Romanesque Paintings, published by the New York Graphic Society ($16.50) as part of the UNESCO World Art Series.

Spanish Romanesque paintings were executed between the 11th and 13th centuries, when Western European man was emerging from the dark ages toward the high noon of Gothic glory. Inspired by itinerant artists who traveled from Italy to Switzerland, the Rhine basin, France and Spain, the Catalan painters in their early Romanesque works depicted intense, embattled faith, open to the ever-present terror of eternal damnation and filled with awe in the presence of a stiff, remote, aloof God.

St. Michael Weighing the Souls (opposite), a side panel on an altar of a small church in the Ribes Valley, was painted (by an unknown artist) with all the suspense of a morality play acted out upon a stage. The good saint is seen in the act of weighing souls with the Devil, before a splendid red background decorated with gold stars. Michael has caught the Devil cheating by tipping the scales, and sadly points a shaming finger. Yet to be discovered is the lesser devil compounding the crime by tugging on the weight devil’s tail. In an age of crusades and pilgrimages, when Christians intensely fought the struggle between the legions of Christ and the forces of evil from the age of reason until the very moment of death, the note of humor in the scene probably was lost on most of the people who knelt by the altar.