Romanesque Art - Characteristics

Characteristics

Outside Romanesque architecture, the art of the period was characterised by a very vigorous style in both sculpture and painting. The latter continued to follow essentially Byzantine iconographic models for the most common subjects in churches, which remained Christ in Majesty, the Last Judgement and scenes from the Life of Christ. In illuminated manuscripts, where the most lavishly decorated manuscripts of the period were mostly bibles or psalters, more originality is seen, as new scenes needed to be depicted. The same applied to the capitals of columns, never more exciting than in this period, when they were often carved with complete scenes with several figures. The large wooden crucifix was a German innovation right at the start of the period, as were free-standing statues of the enthroned Madonna, but the high relief was above all the sculptural mode of the period.

Colours, now remaining bright only in stained glass and well-preserved manuscripts, tended to be very striking, and mostly primary. It was in this period that stained glass became widely used, although survivals are sadly few. In an invention of the period, the tympanums of important church portals were carved with monumental schemes, often again Christ in Majesty or the Last Judgement, but treated with more freedom than painted versions, as there were no equivalent Byzantine models.

Compositions usually had little depth, and needed to be flexible to squeeze themselves into the shapes of historiated initials, column capitals, and church typanums; the tension between a tightly enclosing frame, from which the composition sometimes escapes, is a recurrent theme in Romanesque art. Figures still often varied in size in relation to their importance, and landscape backgrounds, if attempted at all, were closer to abstract decorations than realism - as in the trees in the "Morgan Leaf". Portraiture hardly existed.