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(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...

Architectural style, predominantly used for castles and churches built in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, which was based on English Romanesque. The Norman Revival is usually treated as a minor strand of the Gothic Revival—part of that interest in medieval styles of building that ran parallel with, but counter to, classical architecture; yet the earliest buildings in a round-arched medieval style pre-date by a decade accepted pioneers of the Gothic Revival, such as Clearwell Castle (c. 1728), Glos. Later, between 1820 and 1850, the use of Norman forms and details seriously rivalled Gothic ones in civil, domestic and ecclesiastical architecture, a phase that has its continental parallel in the German Rundbogenstil. The Norman Revival was a more self-conscious movement than the Gothic Revival, for while the use of Gothic forms had never quite died out in Britain, the round-arched medievalism of the Norman style had been extinct as a building tradition since ...

Style of architecture used chiefly in western Europe and North America from the 1820s until the end of the 19th century. In Europe it was related to the Rundbogenstil and the Byzantine Revival, and in England it was an extension of the Norman Revival. It derived ultimately from Romanesque church architecture of the 11th and 12th centuries. Its principal characteristics were the semicircular arch and the barrel or groin vault. In Bavaria, for example, Leo von Klenze based the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche (1826–37; destr. 1944; rebuilt from 1986) in Munich on the Romanesque Palatine Chapel (begun 1131) in Palermo, Sicily. It was an architecture of stone and brick, sometimes laid in different colours for contrast. Ornament was generally spare, in geometric or foliate patterns and confined to arches, tympana or the ribs of vaulting. The increased use of the style from the 1860s formed part of the general move away from international classicism and the Gothic Revival and towards eclecticism in architecture. The style was, however, most commonly used first for churches and ultimately for prisons....

Term referring to an architectural style popular in mid- to late 19th-century America inspired by the 11th- and 12th-century Romanesque architecture of Spain, France, and Italy. Admired for its overall picturesque qualities, the signature features of the style were a multitude of round-topped ‘Romanesque’ arches (often springing from clusters of short columns), recessed entrances, cylindrical towers with conical roofs, heavy masonry walls, ornamental corbelling, and asymmetrical massing.

The castle-like Romanesque Revival was initially used for churches and large public buildings, such as courthouses. For a brief period, in the late 1880s and 1890s, a number of houses were built in the style primarily in urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest. Its massive stone or brick walls, arched and arcaded entrances, round-arch windows, and the costliness of materials symbolized the prosperity and worldliness of the newly rich in America during the Industrial Revolution. The first two architects to design buildings in this manner were ...