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[Aakirkeby] [Aa church]

Romanesque church in the village of Åkirkeby on the island Bornholm, Denmark. The church, dedicated to St Hans, was constructed in the second half of the 12th century and is the largest church on Bornholm. The oldest parts are the apse, the choir, and the lowest part of the nave. The upper part of the nave and the tower were later additions. The porch dates from the first half of the 13th century and is one of the oldest in Denmark. A greenish sandstone and brownish slate were used for the walls. The nave was constructed with two arcade walls, one running in the middle of the nave from the triumph wall to the tower wall, the other one running from the south entrance to the north entrance. Both were removed during restoration in 1874. In the Middle Ages the church belonged to the chapter at Lund Cathedral and was the seat for one of the canons and was also known as ‘Kapitalskirken’ or the Chapter Church....

Former Benedictine abbey church in Normandy, France. The oldest Romanesque church in Normandy, Bernay was founded by Judith de Bretagne (d 1017) after 1008, the date of her marriage to Richard II, Duke of Normandy. Completed by the mid-11th century, it had an aisled nave of seven bays, projecting transepts with an eastern apsidal chapel on each arm, and three eastern apses; both the choir and the nave were wooden-roofed. The church (originally c. 67 m long) has been much altered: the east end, north transept, and the two westernmost nave bays have been destroyed and the north aisle was rebuilt in the 15th century. The clerestory windows were enlarged and domical vaults were inserted in the south aisle in the 17th century. Restorations were begun in 1963.

Three workshops of sculptors were active at Bernay. The first, in the lower level of the choir and east wall of the transept (...

Ornamental device used extensively in the Romanesque period, particularly in the 12th century. It is formed of small blocks, either flat and square or cylindrical, spaced out in horizontal bands (see fig.). Billets in a single band occur frequently (e.g. the nave string course at Ely Cathedral; early 12th century), but are found less often in double bands (e.g. an impost in the crypt of Worcester Cathedral; from 1084). Their most common arrangement is in three bands: the blocks in the two lower bands are placed under the voids in the band above to give a chequerboard effect (e.g. the interior east windows of Paray-le-Monial Priory, France). Where there are more than three bands (e.g. the north portal of Charlieu Priory, France) the billets are tiny. Occasionally, as in the north portal of Fontgombault Abbey, billets are placed without voids, side by side.

Examples of billet ornament survive from the 6th century ...

Gilded copper altar (c. 1150; Stockholm, Stat. Hist. Mus.) from Broddetorp Chuch in Västergötland (Sweden). The Broddetorp Altar is one of the so-called ‘golden altars’ that are characteristic of Romanesque metalwork from the second quarter of the 12th century to the beginning of the 13th in Scandinavia. The altars were likely produced in Jutland, the western province that constituted medieval Denmark, and most are preserved in the Nationalmuseum in Copenhagen (e.g. Lisbjerg, Saksild, Tamdrup, Sindbjerg, Ølst, and Odder) or in churches in Jutland (Sahl, Stadil). Sources as well as fragmentary remains indicate that many other churches in Scandinavia were adorned with golden altars.

The Broddetorp Altar, one of the most complete of the golden altars, consists of a frontal, a retable (reredos), and a crucifix. Thin copper sheets were engraved, stamped, and gilded, and then attached to an oak framework. As is found in other altarpieces, the fire gilding was combined with brown varnish (...

A small case or lidded box for storing various objects. (For reliquary caskets see Reliquary, §I, 1 and Romanesque, §VII.) Among the early types are nuptial caskets, which functioned as courtship gifts or marriage chests, miniature precursors of the Italian Cassone. They were popular from the 4th century ad and were usually made of ivory or wood. An outstanding Early Christian example in silver is Projecta’s Casket (4th century; London, BM), which combines a Christian inscription and secular scenes. In the Byzantine period ivory caskets were produced with rosettes, scrollwork and delicately carved figural reliefs (see Early Christian and Byzantine art, §VII, 5). About 50 complete examples survive, including the 10th- or 11th-century Veroli Casket (London, V&A). Some of the Byzantine caskets (e.g. Troyes, Trésor Cathédrale) appear to have had an ecclesiastical use, as storage boxes for pyxes, incense boats and other small liturgical utensils. Secular ivory caskets were produced in ...

Lighting fixture suspended from the ceiling, equipped with multiple lamps or candles. The massive, crown-shaped, Romanesque chandeliers, for example that made c. 1166 for Frederick I, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, for the Palatine chapel in Aachen Cathedral, were gradually superseded by a form that emerged in the 15th century in the Low Countries. This type comprises a central moulded shaft, from which 6–36 upward-curving branches radiate, embellished with Gothic ornament and sometimes human, bird or animal figures. These bronze chandeliers were used in public buildings, churches and the houses of the wealthy, as depicted in the Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck (1434; London, N.G.). In the later 15th century the solid shaft was replaced by a traceried niche containing a figure, often a Virgin and child (e.g. Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). Expensive silver versions were less common, but designs exist, for example an early 16th-century Florentine silver, rock-crystal and topaz chandelier (priv. col., see ...

Form of three-dimensional zigzag ornament particularly associated with Anglo-Norman Romanesque architecture, where it was used to decorate arches, doorways and windows. An equivalent term is dancette (or dancetty), although this is generally reserved for the zigzags used in heraldry. The stripes and flashes set on to the sleeves of military uniform tunics are also chevrons. Architectural chevron is possibly related to Byzantine brick saw-tooth ornament, transmitted indirectly through the decoration of, for example, canon tables in Carolingian and Ottonian illuminated manuscripts (e.g. the Gospel Book of Bernward of Hildesheim; c. 1000; Hildesheim, Diözmus. & Domschatzkam., MS. 18). The saw-tooth motif appears in Romanesque wall painting until the late 12th century (e.g. Terrassa, Spain, S Maria; c. 1175–1200). Chevron is not common in Western buildings before ad 1000, but it is found in Islamic architecture as early as the 8th century at Qusayr ‛Amra, and although it remains unclear precisely how chevron became so closely associated with Anglo-Norman architecture, Borg has suggested that both manuscript illuminations and knowledge of Islamic buildings brought by returning crusaders after ...

Church near Lecco, in Lombardy, Italy. It is famous for its Romanesque stucco and painted decoration. The first reference to a Benedictine monastery at Civate occurs in a Liber confraternitatum of Pfäfers Abbey of c. 845, which lists the names of 35 monks. According to legend, the monastery was founded by Desiderius, King of the Lombards, in thanksgiving for the miraculous healing of his son from blindness by a local hermit, Durus, who became the first abbot. It is unclear whether this first monastery was situated next to S Pietro, the site of Durus’s hermitage, or in the village of Civate in the valley below, where it was certainly located by the 11th century. The later use of S Pietro and the reason for its expensive restoration by the Benedictines are also uncertain.

S Pietro al Monte has been preserved from the ruin that has overtaken most of the buildings surrounding it. Built of limestone, the church is decorated with pilasters and arch-friezes and consists of a rectangular hall with open timber ceiling and apses at either end. The double apse is reminiscent of great churches north of the Alps (cf. the St Gall monastery plan; ...

Double-sided Latin cross (h. 577 mm, New York, Cloisters, 63.12) that is a masterpiece of Romanesque carving in walrus ivory. Its history is unknown before the 1950s, when it belonged to the art dealer Ante Topic-Mimara of Zagreb, formerly in Yugoslavia, from whom it was acquired for The Cloisters Collection by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1963. It is in excellent condition with the exception of the irregular break at the bottom of the shaft and the complete loss of the bottom terminal. These suggest wear caused from using different holders if it functioned both as a processional and an altar cross. Holes on the lower shaft and cross arm also suggest there was originally a corpus attached, despite the marked projection of the central roundel.

Some 99 figures and 66 biblical inscriptions in Latin enhance the unusually complex iconography of the cross. The obverse, characterized as the Tree of Life by truncated branches on the shaft and cross arms, depicts ...

Cathedral in Co. Galway, Ireland, dedicated to St Brendan. The rubble walls of the pre-Romanesque nave (10th or 11th century) originally formed a simple rectangular church. The rectangular chancel, with its paired east windows, was added in the early 13th century, and in the Late Gothic period the building was enlarged with transept-like chapels and an elegant square belfry, similar to those in Irish friaries, above the west end of the nave. The cathedral is renowned chiefly for the 12th-century sandstone doorway inserted into its west façade (see Romanesque, §III, 1, (v), (e)).

The decoration of the doorway consists of an extraordinary range of motifs, of both foreign and Irish derivation, forming the most idiosyncratic of all Hiberno-Romanesque portals. Jambs, archivolts, and a high-pitched ‘tangent gable’ were exploited as fields for a dense array of pattern-making. Following ancient Irish custom, the decorated jambs are inclined inwards. They support seven orders of deeply cut voussoirs, ornamented with interlace, bosses, scallops, geometrical designs, and beast heads. The beast heads bite a roll moulding and are comparable to those on the west portal of the Nuns’ Church at Clonmacnois (Offaly). The gable contains an arcade and a series of triangular compartments filled alternately with carved human heads and floral motifs. The five heads that peer out from the arcade may have had painted bodies, possibly emulating the enamelled figures with cast bronze heads found on contemporary Limoges plaques. Among the many delightful details are the rows of tiny beast heads on the lower faces of the abaci. Characteristic of the Hiberno-Romanesque is the juxtaposition of shallow carving, as is found here on both the jambs and pilasters, with much deeper cutting, as on the archivolts. Although this eclectic and exotic design was once attributed to the 1160s, most scholars now prefer a date of ...

(fl 1129–60).

German metalworker and enameller. A monk in the monastery of St Pantaleon, Cologne, he was one of the principal masters of its important workshop and among the most outstanding German metalworkers of the Romanesque period. His name is engraved as part of an inscription on a small portable altar (ex-Welf treasure; Berlin, Tiergarten, Kstgewmus.), produced c. 1150–60, which reads: eilbertus coloniensis me fecit. The form of the altar follows that commonly found in portable altars of the 10th and 11th centuries. Eilbertus’s achievement was to replace the silver niello decoration customary on altars up to that date, and perfected by Roger of Helmarshausen, with enamel work; and to do so at about the same time as Mosan masters (see Romanesque §VII). He also prepared the ground for the formal convergence in the 13th century of portable altars with larger shrines. The figures decorating the altar are individually characterized with spare lines, and they show the artist’s distinctive use of champlevé enamel with marked ridges separating areas of shaded colour. On the top of the altar the ...

(b Neenah, WI, June 28, 1894; d Bedford, MA, March 4, 1984).

American architectural historian. Conant was the leading 20th-century American architectural historian specializing in Romanesque architecture, and was the primary archaeologist of the monastic complex at Cluny. He earned his degrees from Harvard, including a BA in Fine Arts in 1915, an MArch. in 1919, and a PhD with a dissertation on the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, supervised by Arthur Kingsley Porter, in 1926. He trained in archaeological practices in 1926 at the excavations of Chichén Itzá and Pueblo Bonito before directing excavations in earnest at Cluny starting in 1928. He was Professor of Architecture Emeritus at Harvard University, retiring from teaching in 1954.

An active member of the Medieval Academy of America (which funded his excavations after initial funding from the Guggenheim Foundation), Conant published frequent field reports documenting the excavations of Cluny as articles in Speculum. Additionally, Conant published a monograph on the sum of the excavations in ...

(CRSBI)

International organization dedicated to the recording and documentation of all known examples of Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland. The organization was the brainchild of George Zarnecki, scholar of Romanesque art and former Deputy Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art. His aim was to develop a photographic and scholarly archive in which every known example of Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland would be recorded for posterity. In 1988 Zarencki and Neil Stratford (Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities, British Museum) submitted a proposal for funding and support to the British Academy which was successful and the project has been under the remit of that organization since.

Under the guidance of scholars, a team of volunteers track down examples of Romanesque sculpture and measure, describe, and photograph the works before they are eventually made available on the internet with a full bibliography. The project has been directed by Peter Lasko...

(b nr St Pölten, 1902; d Vienna, 1990).

Austrian art historian. A highly influential scholar of Byzantine art, he was also concerned with western medieval painting, particularly Romanesque, and with the restoration of Austrian monuments. He studied art history under Josef Strzygowski at the University of Vienna (1921–8). From 1930 to 1936 he worked for the Austrian monuments service as keeper of monuments in Carinthia. In 1939 he emigrated to England where he worked as librarian of the Warburg Institute in London and taught at the Courtauld Institute. In 1946 he returned to Austria as president of the reconstituted monuments service, and from 1963 to 1973 held the chair of art history in the University of Vienna, where he taught medieval and Byzantine art.

Although he often demonstrated an unerring ability to set a medieval monument in the context of its artistic tradition, he appears sometimes to have been inattentive to detail and to historical textual issues. Yet, even in his earliest work (...

Romanesque cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin, located in a market town north of Klagenfurt, Austria. According to tradition, Gräfin Hemma von Zeltschach-Gurk (beatified 1287; can 1938) founded a convent between 1043 and 1045 in the remote valley of Gurk. In 1072, after its dissolution, Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg declared the site the seat of a suffragan bishop. The diocese was tightly controlled from Salzburg. The cathedral was begun under Bishop Roman I (1131–67), and in 1174 the relics of Hemma were translated to the crypt. A violent dispute between the Archbishop of Salzburg and the Bishop of Gurk over Gurk’s independent status resulted in a break in the building campaign from 1179 to 1180; the dedication of the main altar and the subsequent construction of the transept brought the second campaign to an end in 1200. The conversion of the western gallery into a richly decorated ‘Bishop’s Chapel’ was planned by Bishop ...

Cathedral on the north bank of the River Wye in Herefordshire. Although a cathedral church has been here since the 9th century or earlier, the present building is essentially a monumental Romanesque basilica with a ruined Bishop’s Palace and out buildings, with later medieval modifications and additions, notably the north transept, the Lady Chapel, chantry chapels, and the Booth porch. Significant losses to the medieval fabric occurred in 1786 with the fall of the western tower, destroying parts of the nave and the western façade, which were subsequently rebuilt by Wyatt, James. In the 19th century major parts of the building were again restored or rebuilt by the Gothic Revival collector and conservator Lewis Nockalls Cottingham.

The earliest surviving parts date to the Romanesque rebuilding of c. 1107–48. The Romanesque church was a cruciform basilica, which originally included a three-bay eastern arm with groin-vaulted aisles, and a projecting east chapel and twin east towers. From the crossing extended three-bay transepts to the north and south. The nave was heavily remodeled or rebuilt after ...