Art: The White Mantle

The term Romanesque lacks neatness and precision: it has been applied to almost everything that happened in art between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Gothic cathedral. Scholars disagree about the exact origins of the style: its roots go variously to ancient Rome, to the art of the barbarians, to Byzantium, and to the palaces of the Moors. But for all its diversity, it had one central inspiration. Over 900 years ago, commenting on the surge of building that had swept over Europe, a monk named Glabro said: “It is as if the world, shaking itself from its ancient garb, had redressed itself in the white mantle of the new churches.”

Last week Spain was playing host to the largest exhibition of Romanesque art ever held. Sponsored by the Council of Europe, an organization dedicated to the cause of European unity, the exhibition includes works from nearly every European country this side of the Iron Curtain. The treasures were so many that Spain divided them between the Palace of Montjuich in Barcelona and its own proudest Romanesque monument, the great Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

At its height, the Romanesque style was at once contemplative and violent; it coincided with feudalism, the most static of societies, and with the fever of the first Crusaders. It rose out of the ruins of the Roman and Carolingian empires—a fragmented world that wanted unity and found it in the church. From all over Christendom, pilgrims traveled the road to Santiago, where legend has it that the body of St. James—the saint whose spirit 37 times helped the Spaniards ward off the Moors—lies buried. There, about 1080,along “pilgrimage road,” a church was begun.

The portico (see color), which was designed later by the master Mateo, is part of the current exhibition, but other works in the show range from paintings to illuminated manuscripts, from ivories and capitals to frescoes from Catalonia, mosaics from Italy, enamels from Belgium, wood carvings from Norway. “The difficulty.” wrote one Spanish critic, “is to know where to stop and look.” In one display was a polished bronze reliquary containing a portrait of the Emperor Barbarossa. In another was a praying Madonna done in mosaics by an artist who might have received his training in Byzantium. There was a robe that originally belonged to a Moorish king but was used by Thomas a Becket as a chasuble. Thus had the crosscurrents of civilization met to be harmonized in a single style, as if the artists involved had all beheld the same vision.