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University of Chicago Press International Center of Medieval Art

Rethinking "Romanesque;" Re-Engaging Roman[z] Author(s): Linda Seidel Source: Gesta, Vol. 45, No. 2, 50th Anniversary of the International Center of Medieval Art (

2006), pp. 109-123 Published by: on behalf of the University of Chicago Press International Center of Medieval Art

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Rethinking "Romanesque;99 Re-engaging Roman[z]

LINDA SEIDEL The University of Chicago, em?rita

Abstract

This paper takes as its topic the term Romanesque as it has

been used by English-speaking scholars to identify European art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries for nearly two hundred

years, at first tentatively, as one of several alternate terms

(Byzantine, Norman, Saxon), but for much of the time without

reflection as the primary designation. Rather than argue that

we should abandon it because of the diachronic and inherently

negative image it delineates of descent and decline from Roman

antiquity, I shall enthusiastically embrace it, suggesting ways in which it can function as a more productive name than we

realize. Rethinking the term, in light of a richer etymological

history than has heretofore been presented, and in the context

of recently recovered remnants of Roman construction in Gaul, moves us beyond characterization of structural and stylistic

features in art and architecture, and reorients us toward

thematic aspects and points of view, akin to the manner in

which the terms Baroque or Rococo are recognized as de

fining key visual components of the pictorial art of the seven

teenth and eighteenth centuries.

Introduction

Names have the power to fix our sights and fashion our

intellectual frontiers. Traditional understanding of the meaning of Romanesque focuses attention on architecture with its faded reflection of antique forms, setting up expectations for the ways in which inquiries into monuments and materials proceed. As a term, Romanesque has always been tied at its proximate end to the emergence of Gothic art, a circumstance that affects

appreciation of its production in implicitly negative ways. As is well known, the appellation first came into fashion as a way of setting off the variety of eleventh- and early twelfth-century buildings that dot France and England from the more uniformly rib-vaulted structures that appeared in the Ile-de-France in the second half of the twelfth century. Anglo-Norman arche

ologists on both sides of the Channel in the early nineteenth

century (ca. 1810/1820), adopted cognate terms in response to their virtually simultaneous observations that round-arched,

vaulted construction was the common characteristic of a large number of early churches in their territories; this feature, they argued, set the structures off from their streamlined successors.

The term the English chose to identify these buildings was

Romanesque', they employed the word because of the relation

ship to continental architectural remnants of a distant past that it suggested.1

The English were right. An intimate physical association links Roman and Romanesque monuments, particularly in southern Europe, where antique remains riddle the landscape in the immediate vicinity of medieval churches. Yet scholars have been reluctant to examine this convergence of building activity; avoidance of the issue on the part of the French ar

ticulates disdain for provincial Roman work while reinforcing patriotic desires to identify a unique and indigenous material

heritage for their country's art.2

Although relief carving did not originally figure into the definition of Romanesque, scholarship on sculpture has long labored under strictures comparable to those that broadly frame architectural inquiry. Preconceptions about its emergence from the vestiges of earlier work after years of decline and disuse coexist .alongside expectations regarding what follows Roman

esque?the gracefully articulated bodies of Gothic statuary toward which its figures are thought to advance. Over a hundred years ago, Wilhelm V?ge suggested that sculpture in

Provence, where the prominence of Roman monuments in

Aries, Orange, and N?mes is impossible to ignore, was the direct antecedent of the jamb carvings on the west facade at Chartres. His observation implicitly reinforced the notion that Romanesque art formed the transition from ancient art to

Gothic without explicitly addressing the relationship between Roman and Romanesque work in the Midi.3

Meanwhile, in France, the presence of antique motifs in the ornamentation of French Romanesque architecture

was attributed to unspecified Roman and Byzantine sources.

De Lasteyrie explained them as the result either of pilgrimage travel to holy sites or commercial exchange; for the Midi, he

proposed interaction with northern Italy as an explanation. The relationship between Roman and Romanesque in Provence did not elicit scholarly attention in France until after the Second

World War, and then the connections were presented in terms of local stylistic influence.4 Although divergent accounts have since been given for the reemergence of monumental relief

carving as a significant mode of expression around the year 1000, these explanations all exist within a paradigm that posits an experiential as well as aesthetic gap between the new work and monumental remnants of provincial Rome.5

In past studies, I have examined Romanesque sculpture in France from different perspectives and at different places, following the monographic pattern of inquiry that was estab lished in the nineteenth century by local amateurs working

GESTA XLV/2 ? The International Center of Medieval Art 2006 109

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for departmental societies. Territorial identity determined the

way in which these early archeologists surveyed and cate

gorized medieval monuments under their purview; location

provided them with a structure within which scholarship could

proceed in a systematic fashion. Not surprisingly, the devel

opmental narrative about architecture that emerged from their work reinforced illusions of regional homogeneity as well as

departmental diversity; it constructed Romanesque work, for the most part, as an aggregation of different local traditions and regional interests.6

In contrast, wherever I turned my attention I found that

inquiry into the sculptural program disclosed evidence of intense interest in themes and forms of Antiquity irrespective of regional traditions and differences.7 A productive relation

ship with Roman visual material, whether near to hand or far away, seemed to characterize Romanesque sculpture to a

greater extent than I had been taught to appreciate in Aqui taine, at Moissac, and in Burgundy. My findings also indicated

willful choice rather than passive circulation of ancient forms,

challenging prevailing assumptions of Romanesque sculpture as being rooted primarily in forward-looking local traditions and of medieval artists as lacking either decisiveness or in tellectual independence. While my own research encouraged

me to embrace the apparent root of the word Romanesque in a positive fashion, traditional understanding of the period term resisted that suggestion.

This situation has led me to reexamine the term Roman

esque and to rethink the meaning its usage conveys. A return to early nineteenth-century writings in which the vocabulary for differentiating Romanesque from Gothic was established

brings to light an unsuspected degree of divergence between

English and French notions about the origins of the architecture

(and allied arts) they were naming. The English burdened the term Romanesque with intimations of inauthenticity behind which lurked hints of excess. The French opted for a word that submitted the art to ideas about language formation and structure. Both terms were the products of intellectual and aesthetic debates of the early nineteenth century and depended upon a common root word and certain shared traditions. At

the point at which they converge, they open up possibilities for a revised understanding of, and approach to, the art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Etymology

The original designator of the word Romanesque was an

Englishman, William Gunn, who articulated the specific sense in which he wanted the word to be understood in a book pub lished in 1819 but written several years before.8 Gunn drew attention to the way in which a native-born inhabitant of Rome differentiated himself from those who took up residence in the city at a later point in their lives: The first, he noted, called himself a Romano', the second, Romanesco. Gunn

observed that the suffix stigmatized the person by conveying

a notion of dubious origin or foreign extraction, and he re marked that the architecture he was designating as Romanesque should be regarded "in the same point of view"; it constituted to his mind a "vitious (= vicious?i.e., faulty) deviation" from

Roman work. The fact that the term Gunn employed to identify round-arched pre-Gothic buildings was a French word implied continental origins for the emergence of Romanesque construc

tion, an assertion that had been made by G. D. Whittington just a few years before.9 That the word Gunn chose enjoyed negative connotations at the time he chose it is examined further in what follows.

In her book on the early architectural usage of the word that Anglophone scholars still employ, Bizzarro reviewed the scarcely rigorous terminology that was current in France and England before 1800 to describe monuments of the later medieval centuries. As her summary indicates, terminology was always a subjective matter of taste and was determined

by local political, aesthetic, and religious realities. Bizzarro

points to a single usage in 1750 of the word romanesque by a well-placed bilingual French woman living in London who

employed it in reference to Windsor Chapel, a building we would surely define as Gothic. Anne-Marie du Boccage, an author who mixed in elevated literary circles that included the antiquarian Horace Walpole and the philologist Jean Bap tiste la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, used the word in a letter written, in French, to her sister. Bizzarro suggests that du Boccage employed the word not to characterize visual hallmarks of the structure but rather to convey a sense of its chivalric function, a matter in which du Boccage had been influenced by then current notions regarding medieval literature.10

Some sixty to seventy years later, at the moment that the

English were choosing a word of French origin to designate eleventh- and twelfth-century architecture, French archeolo

gists opted for a different one, roman/ane, to identify the same structures. Bizzaro argues that the French, feeling frustrated

and challenged by the "terminological priority" of the English who had beaten them in the naming game, sought to establish their own nomenclature for structures that were acknowledged to have proliferated on their soil. She suggests that Charles de Gerville's invention of the word romane in 1818 "was prob ably a translation of the English 'Romanesque'

" without

considering why the French did not take back their own term;

certainly, as she notes in passing, romanesque had a "well

established French meaning" at the time.11 I am intrigued by the possibilities of the path deliberately not taken.

In French, the word romanesque comes with considerable

baggage. One of its earliest appearances dates to the middle of the seventeenth century, when Moli?re employed it in his

play L'Etourdi (The Blunderer) to characterize one of his char acters: "vous ?tes romanesque avec vos chim?res," he has a

player say. Mme de Sevign? likewise employed the term a few decades later to mean chimeric, in the sense of extravagant or

marvelous. The word recurs with increased frequency toward the end of the century alongside pittoresque?especially but

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not exclusively in regard to features of landscape?to signify qualities that are fabulous or sentimental. Things romanesque are said to be unnatural, existing only in make-believe; they captivate the imagination while those that are pittoresque are

said to fix the eye.12 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Rousseau

used the word romanesque interchangeably with romantique, a word that had been introduced into France in the 1770s and was derived from the English romantic. The words were both related to the noun roman, which was defined in a contem

porary dictionary as a prose work of fiction involving uncom mon adventures and the development of human passions. Whereas the French word romanesque had come to be associ ated with extremes of human feeling, the English one enjoyed connotations of more rational and complex emotions and sen

sibilities. Thus, by the turn of the century, romantique over

took romanesque in discussions of contemporary poetry and art in France. It continued to advance at the expense of the native word, in part through a developing intimacy with qual ities defined as pittoresque. Since these were said to be con

spicuously on display in Gothic architecture, the widening breach between romantique and romanesque positioned Gothic on the positive side of the divide.13 Appropriation of the term

Romanesque into architectural vocabulary by the English dis tanced the word from its continental usage but did not obliter ate its prior history. Connotations of exaggeration and excess, because of which the word fell out of favor with the French,

persisted, as did awareness of the word's surrender to an

English word, romanticfque] in another area of contemporary aesthetic debate.

In place of romanesque, French archeologists adopted the word roman/ane. This word endeavored to characterize the same buildings that the English were defining but was scarcely a translation of the word the English had chosen to employ. The word the French chose allied architecture with the forma tion of Romance languages because of similarities between the emergence of Old French from a mixture of atrophied, indigenous tongues and the appearance of churches that

employed a degraded form of opus romanum. The analogy between the development of these forms provided the French with the grounds for an account of the indigenous origin of / 'architecture roman and was explicitly used in this fashion in the 1820s by Charles de Gerville to portray architecture and

language as parallel, indigenous phenomena. The word did not cast aspersion on the "dubious origins" of the buildings as Gunn's appropriated "Romanesque" explicitly did.

The French choice of a basically backward-looking lin

guistic designation to identify a collection of pre-Gothic build

ings brought with it a number of subtle claims. Above all, it contributed to the developmental paradigm in which Roman

esque is experienced and understood as being en route, or in the process of development. Attention to where it has come from fundamentally implies the direction toward which it is

headed; Gothic's position as Romanesque art's triumphant off

spring is thereby further secured. If la langue romane came into its own in literary writing of northern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, then it follows that / 'art roman came into maturity in the same years. This would

have occurred in a Gothic idiom, something that scholarship on both sculpture and architecture does not deny and indeed often asserts; the resultant time line effectively submerges the antecedent art under the imprint of its successor. Additionally, the chosen term roman/ane focuses investigation on indigenous

material and terrain instead of engagement with the fanciful, mercurial, and distant, which, according to its traditional def

inition, the term romanesque implies.14 This shift in naming conventions took place in a volatile

atmosphere of literary conversations and lively political and intellectual debates regarding the monumental testimony of France's pre-Revolutionary history. Archeological societies, established on a national as well as regional basis in these years, had as their explicit mission the conservation and character ization of venerable local, mainly medieval, structures. At the outset, these organizations were composed of untrained

amateurs, many of whom also belonged to literary circles, who borrowed strategies from what they regarded as estab

lished scientific practices in order to confer a degree of rigor on their own procedures. By adopting methods of classifica tion and systematization employed by philologists to identify historic lines of linguistic affiliation, they created a study of medieval architecture modeled on a particular kind of philo logical method. What started out as a verbal analogy between the development of architecture and language was transformed into an unexamined equivalency between systems of construc tion and communication in terms of both their origins and their

organization.

Linguistic affiliations with the term Romanesque have

enjoyed considerable traction in scholarly practice, primarily as metaphor rather than method. Henri Focillon explicitly separated the two ways of proceeding in his widely read over view of medieval art. In the opening pages of the volume on

Romanesque art, he provides an elegant, seemingly innocent characterization of his subject that depends upon, but does not refer to, de Gerville's analogy: "Medieval architecture and the arts which derive from it constitute a common language of

Western Christianity, a language spoken with various accents ... in an idiom intelligible to all." Further on, however, in a

footnote regarding the nineteenth-century origin of the word he warns the reader that "the term is more valuable than the doctrine."15

Roberto Salvini took the linguistic analogy more seriously in a book published in 1956 that examines the relationship of

Romanesque relief carvings to inherited tradition. He argues for the recognition of sculpture as a system of communication that parallels verbal expression and is independent of archi tecture. According to his perspective, figurative and verbal ex

pression both move from an inherited bilingualism of the late Roman world?in which high and low, aristocratic and vulgar

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forms of art and language were firmly opposed?toward in

dependent flowerings around 1100 as unified vehicles of fig urative and verbal expression.16

Whether because of implicit hierarchies in intellectual

inquiry that resist inter-disciplinary investigation, or simply because of the inadequate circulation of untranslated schol

arship particularly in the post-war years, Salvini's argument fell on fallow ground. In the late eighties, Wayne Dynes drew attention to the link between the formal naming of Roman

esque art by Gunn and de Gerville and the burgeoning of lin

guistic studies throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. But he argued in an essay that associations between art and

language could not be generative of new approaches; they were, at best, no more than "strategies for coming to grips with the

origin and status of our conceptual tools."17 While scholars in literature undertook significant r??valuation of their material with the aide of revised notions of the boundaries of their

discipline, art historians remained protected by an enshrined definition of the proper archeological nature of their pursuit.18

Recently Willibald Sauerl?nder reflected on an invitation to write a general survey of French Romanesque sculpture that he had received in 1969, just after having completed his book on Gothic carving. He notes that he immediately "resisted the

temptation. ... I was convinced that the time had not yet come for a serious survey of the sculpture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in France . . . [because] the foundations for a survey were not laid.

... It would have been premature to

try to resolve so many unsettled archaeological, iconographie, and stylistic problems."19 More than a decade after Salvini had

attempted to transform the approach to Romanesque carving by turning to linguistics, not to mention Meyer Schapiro's use of semiotic analysis in papers of earlier decades, Sauerl?nder's attention was still drawn to issues of chronology and material definition.

Thirty-five years later he expresses regret for that decision; the archeological quest no longer seems so urgent and he now finds the art quite compelling. "It is so much more fun, so much more amusing to play with the colourful Romanesque sculp tures in Western France or around Toulouse than to study the solemn statues of Chartres or Amiens," he writes, contrast

ing the variety, inventiveness, and humor of what he calls the

" 'fabulous' Romanesque sculptures in the Latin part of

medieval Europe," with the "stainless beauty" of Gothic jamb figures.

Sauerl?nder's brief characterization of Romanesque carv

ing recovers associations that the word romanesque brought to mind in the eighteenth century, before it lost out to roman

tique as the preferred designation for complex forms of emotional expression in poetry and painting. But Sauerl?nder does not draw our attention to that, nor does he argue for the

study of such features on those grounds. Instead, he cele brates the anomalous figures in French Romanesque sculpture because they appeal to him, without in any way challenging the investigatory paradigm that maintains the primacy of dia

chronic inquiry: archeological study, architectural analysis, search for iconographie precedent.

In French to this day, the word romanesque retains connotations that were lost in its English adaptation. Use of the word in the recent publication of a series of lectures given by Roland Barthes thirty years ago alerts the reader to the author's literary subject, and to a random rather than sys tematic development of its theme. Instead of chasing an

analytic scheme toward certain solution, Barthes pursues fanciful?even unresolved?possibilities that he finds in a wide range of books, engaging the sense that romanesque enjoyed in the eighteenth century when it evoked the marvels and meanderings of medieval romance for someone like

Madame du Boccage. The adjective romanesque in the title of Barthes' lectures explicitly associates his project with works of fiction or fantasy, proclaiming for the reader its lit

erary basis in the roman, or novel.20

Language, writing, and romanesque are venerable and

intimate partners according to the root of the word in Old French. Romanz, along with romance in Spain and romanzo

in Italy, were words coined by the Latin-educated classes of southern Europe to differentiate their own emerging vernacular

tongues and the works they produced from learned Latin and its written tradition. In his etymological study of French first

published in the 1920s, Walther von Wartburg situated the first

appearances of the word romanz (as meaning the vulgar lan

guage of the northern parts of France), in the years around 1135 in secular works of history and fable. Shortly thereafter the word was used to designate narrative texts that resulted from the translation or adaptation of Latin forms. According to Ernst Curtius, romanz literally means "popular book"; he notes further that Romance literature from the Song of Roland on was "riddled with Latinisms" consciously employed as "rhetorical ornament."21 What at first glance may appear to

be modest historical testimony provides us with significant insights into the emergence of new art forms in the twelfth

century.

First, there is the close connection in date between the

naming of romanz as a discrete linguistic entity and the

emergence of Romanesque art as we know it. Second, intro

duction of the word appears to be free of hierarchical assump tions regarding the priority of Latin over local forms of

communication; and third, the new word emerges within modes of verbal expression (secular history, fable) that differ from traditional, elevated literary categories. Within the first half of the twelfth century, then, a permutation of an older word, romanus, heralded a new form of indigenous expression that

enjoyed its own tradition, one that saw itself as distinctive from, and not inferior to, Latin.

Jean-Claude Schmitt, in a recent essay on time in the Middle Ages, unremarkably recommended that we examine that word's usage within the period in question in order to

gain a sense of its own understanding of the concept.22 This is something we often neglect to do even though three decades

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ago Edward Said urged the same, pointing to Vico's axiom that "Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the

matters of which they treat."23 Accordingly, I suggest putting the romanz back into romanesque and reclaiming the rich sig nification and associations the word enjoyed before it entered

English architectural terminology, where, as von Wartburg noted, it became beschr?nkt in its usage. In this way we re

invigorate the period name as a positive term associated with new forms of production and pronounced self-awareness of its distinction from Latin modes of expression. What emerges is liberty to engage Romanesque art, monumental construc tion included, in a way that celebrates its fanciful themes and unorthodox forms without attempting to define them pri marily in terms either of architectural structure or Latin

syntax. It becomes possible as well to view the appropriation of antique motifs and materials as acts of self-conscious choice rather than as instances of passive acceptance, challenging us to pursue them as significant activities instead of ignoring them

or, alternatively, rationalizing them as barometers of some

degree of renaissance or rebirth.24

Archaeology

Such rethinking of the period term Romanesque is re inforced by important recent findings. The archeological ex cavation that has accompanied accelerated urbanization

throughout the French provinces, in particular over the course of the past several decades, has brought to light more remnants of the vibrant Roman civilization that survived

throughout the Middle Ages in Gaul than scholars formerly imagined. This is especially true in Toulouse, where new finds

present an unexpected picture of the way in which Roman

esque structures engaged the ancient monuments. In the face of newly uncovered material evidence, and a revised way of

regarding it, the likelihood of substantive interaction between Roman ruins and Romanesque monuments can no longer be

either overlooked or denied. The issue should not be posed in terms of a renaissance

as Haskins suggested, or a renascence as Panofsky argued, for

it does not merely involve the degree of resemblance between ancient and medieval carving. Yet heightened naturalism in

figure style has often been the benchmark by means of which

Romanesque art's relationship to ancient work is measured.

Sauerl?nder remarked a generation ago that there had been in creased borrowing from Antiquity in architecture and in the

figurative arts in the twelfth century, and that instances of this in southern France essentially provided a tool "to broaden the

means and technique of sculptural representation." For him, "imitation of Antiquity was part of a general striving for a more

natural, a more effective?physically and psychologically? method of representation."25

Until recently, it has been difficult to find significant traces of Roman Toulouse. Infrequent references to it in Latin texts have given the impression that the city was not an important

one in the ancient world even though five Roman roads spread out from it. Archaeological excavations of the last few decades, together with the sporadic evidence provided by prior digs, indicate that this was not true. Extensive monumental remains

provide important sources for new knowledge about the ancient

city, demonstrating that it was large, enjoyed extended pros perity into the fifth and sixth centuries?long after other Roman foundations (including Rome) had begun their decline?and

employed stone and marble along with brick for its major buildings and ramparts. In Antiquity, Toulouse was not known as the poetic ville rose ("pink [i.e., brick] city") as it became in more recent times, a designation that has perpetuated a sense of provinciality and lack of notable Roman construction.26

The evidence of ancient remains indicates that Toulouse had been as grand a Roman city as either Autun or Orange and that, in the twelfth century, more remnants of its former

glory likely remained extant than was the case in either of the other places. The familiar map of Toulouse with its medieval churches should be imaginatively superimposed on a plan of the city that plots the ancient contours as these were formed

by roads, aqueducts, walls, and gates, entities that provided a sub-structure that survived long after buildings fell into disuse.27 Each of the projects under way at ecclesiastical sites around 1100 impinged in one way or another on ancient remains and actively employed materials from these sites and structures in their own rebuilding. Construction of the church and cloister of the cathedral of Saint-Etienne occurred between the wall and an abandoned bath; a new basilica for the relics of the city's patron St. Sernin blocked the major Roman road; another cloister at the Late Antique monastic church of La Daurade was erected in the shadow of the ancient theater; and work at Saint-Pierre-des-Cuisines systematically reused old material from both the adjacent necropolis and the nearby wall. Texts of the sixteenth century that describe then surviving Roman monuments in Toulouse can now be appreciated as

reasonably accurate in view of the recovery of foundations and building fragments that had, in intervening years, been en

gulfed in construction and lost from view. Yet much material from construction during the early Empire still remains hidden in the expanded wall that was built in late Imperial times and

was itself subsumed in subsequent construction rather than

destroyed. The notion that antique "influence" appeared here and there, in one or another relief or capital carving, or is a

generalized feature of local style, does not sufficiently illumi nate what we encounter in this place.28

Excavations indicate that the Roman wall, built on a grand scale in the middle or second half of the second century, com

pletely surrounded the city on three sides. The mighty Garonne

River, which served as the route along which building materials such as limestone and marble were transported from quarries in the south, initially offered protection on the west until re inforcement along this section was added in the early fourth

century; re-used fragments of mausolea, probably taken from

nearby necropolises, have been found in its foundations.29

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Cette figure fut tir?e doux*

Ans 0f* t?utron auant ladite demolition, par

plufieurs peintres de ce temps y de m?mes que fe demontro'itaux Ttoias, Lx

yuelle du?i tai y eu ?tant U chofi enticrtft pmnt (Lecteur) tenirfirare

antiquit? en bonne partie.

FIGURE 1. Triumphal Arch of the Ch?teau Narbonnais after drawing by Servais Coronadle (A. Noguier, Histoire tolosaine [Toulouse, 1556], 26).

The wall was constructed of small stonework in its lower

parts with coursings of brick at the top, and remained in place throughout the Middle Ages, enabling residents to repulse the advances of Charles the Bold in 844. In the early twelfth cen

tury, a new wall was erected to enclose the bourg, or neigh

borhood, around Saint-Sernin to the north. This fortification intersected the Roman wall just to the east of the north-south axis of the city, the original Roman cardo. Despite areas of

destruction, the entire rampart, which measured over fifteen feet in height, subsisted into the nineteenth century. In 1808,

Napoleon ordered the wall's dismantling, yet nowhere was

the wall completely destroyed; long sections of it have been

recovered within later buildings, particularly in the vicinity of the cathedral, Saint-Etienne.30

The wall had rectangular as well as round towers, perhaps as many as 54, but only three gates; these were positioned, as was customary in Roman cities, at the extremities of the cardo,

the major north-south streeet, and at the ends of the decumanus,

the primary cross route, where the road intersected the wall.

The medieval name for the gate at the southern entry to Tou

louse, La Porte Narbonnaise, indicated the direction toward which its road, the Via Domitia, led. The strategic and semiotic

importance of this entry was indicated by the medieval con

struction of a castle for the count a short distance outside of the gate, an image of which appeared on a seal of Raymond VII in 1228. The king acquired the castle in a treaty the following year, and Henri II ordered it destroyed in 1549. Description of this Ch?teau Narbonnais by Antoine Noguier at the time it was being pulled down includes commentary on a richly decorated portal incorporated into it. Noguier's description of its masonry construction and his sketch of its figurai carvings leave little doubt about the Roman origins of many of its ele

ments; these must have been taken from both the fortified Roman gate and the immediately adjacent freestanding arch that stood outside the entry to the city even before the gate was built (Fig. 1). Archaeological finds of highly ornamental Corinthian cornices confirm the judgment that the decoration of the Ch?teau Narbonnais originally belonged to a triumphal arch.31

This ancient monument likely had three openings like the arch at Orange and was similarly decorated with Corinthian

columns, a cornice and frieze as well as reliefs representing

military trophies accompanied by seated captives. Fragments of fluted columns, cornices, and capitals found in the area of this southern gate conform to details of Noguier's drawing. The richly ornamented arch, which identified the city as an im

portant destination along the great road leading through Nar bonne to the Mediterranean and Rome, was probably erected in

Augustan times before the wall was in place. Although details of its configuration are lacking, the absorption of elements of this ancient arch into a medieval castle identified with the

powerful counts of Toulouse demonstrates an association of

antique marble carving with local medieval political power. Like the writers of romanz, patrons, architects, or builders

(whomever we wish to credit with the construction of the

castle) displayed awareness of the effect that the selective use of Latin forms made in the context of vernacular or secular

(architectural) composition. Along the northern portion of the Roman wall, projecting

half-round towers, like those familiar at Autun, flanked the

gate that provided entry and exit to Toulouse; they announced and served a defensive purpose. The gate, known as La Por terie in the Middle Ages, guarded the roads leading out of the

city in the direction of Cahors and Albi. It stood where the

Capitole, the immense place that has marked the center of the modern city since 1729, now stands, but likely dis

appeared in the twelfth century, at the time the medieval wall was erected around the bourg; this construction eliminated the need for a fortified gate at that point. Details of this gate's configuration, as revealed in excavations for

an enormous park

ing garage in the early 1970s, indicate a structure of immense

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size constructed in the same material as the wall. It was com

posed of five units: a domed central structure more than twelve meters in diameter, accompanied on either side by narrow pedestrian passages with wide carriageways framing the walkways. Highly original in arrangement, as far as we can tell, it would have had the monumental force of a fortified

entry like the one that survives from Roman times in Trier or, closer at hand, the Porte d'Auguste in N?mes.32 Beyond the

gate, necropolises sprouted in the Late Antique period, particu larly in the vicinity of the martyrium that was constructed in the fifth century by the bishop of Toulouse to house the remains of the city's patron saint, Saturninus or Sernin.33

Excavations in 1995 in the basement of the Coll?ge (now Mus?e) Saint-Raymond immediately in front of the western

entry to the late eleventh-century church of Saint-Sernin un

covered a lime furnace, dated to the late fourth century on the basis of brick stamps and located on the site of one of the ancient necropolises. There it took advantage of limestone and marble recuperated from the demolition of older monuments,

converting it into material for construction, perhaps for St. Sernin's shrine across the road.34 In 1970, an apse with an in terior diameter of 6 meters was found within the ambulatory wall at Saint-Sernin that had been constructed in the late eleventh century during the rebuilding of the Late Antique shrine. Archaeologists suggest this niche was part of the structure built by the bishop, Exup?ry, on the site of Saturni nus' original burial, rejecting later legends that his bones had been transferred here from a place closer to the Roman wall. An antique, fluted marble pillar that supports the ribs for the vaulted lower crypt in the church of Saint-Sernin, cited re

cently as "a symbolic re-use of an antique element," testifies

to the attraction of Roman remains in Romanesque Toulouse; it was scarcely unique in this regard.35

The numerous necropolises that lined the road along which the shrine was situated housed sarcophagi, lids of which were used for paving stones around the apse of Saint-Sernin in the

eleventh-century rebuilding. At the same time, the basins of ancient coffins were employed for the burial of the count and his family; these were placed in a niche attached to the southern transept entry into the church on its western side. One sarcophagus, with a depiction of Christ and the apostles, received the remains of the recently deceased Guillaume

Taillefer; other less ornate coffins housed the bones of his sons. The reuses indicate more than mere availability; they demonstrate the value that ancient carvings had for eleventh

century builders in defining material properties of the expanded church and provided allusive points of reference for it.36

The road along which St. Sernin's shrine was originally built represented a northward continuation of the cardo. When the church holding the saint's relics was enlarged in the latter

part of the eleventh century, brick and stone in alternating courses were used in a manner similar to that employed in the Roman wall that surrounded Toulouse and through which the cardo passed at two points?the Porterie and the Porte

Narbonnaise. Westward extension of the new church's nave

blocked the road, forcing a deviation in its trajectory. The

point at which the road would have met the church's nave wall was marked by the construction of a monumental entry

way, the Porte Mi?geville (Fig. 2). Along with the Porte des

Comtes, which opened into the transept further east with twin vaulted doorways, and alongside of which the count's remains were placed, these openings extended and enhanced the fictive allusion to an ancient compound (Fig. 3).

Both entries employed sculpture to dramatize their sig nificance, using, on the transept wall, a format in which the

patron saint is protected by heraldic lions, while, on the entry into the fifth bay of the nave, narrative reliefs of Christ's Ascension are framed to either side by human guardians, SS. Peter and James. The positioning of these thematically trium

phant carvings on the Romanesque entries replicated, in at least one way, those on the Porte Narbonnaise at the other end of the cardo: all three entries greeted those approaching from the south with victorious imagery. Furthermore, the entries astride the cardo presented figurative marble plaques as the

centerpiece of an embellishment that was seen against the

backdrop of a brick and limestone wall. Such a staged reference to a Roman city in the years

around 1100 preceded by a generation a similar construction at Autun in Burgundy. There the church built in the 1130s was also fashioned to conform to the design of its local antique gateways, both inside and out. I have argued that the church of Saint-Lazare at Autun was conceived as an architectural

and sculptural narration of that city's patron saint's Vita. It was a "legend in limestone" as the title of my book terms it, a novel material form of vernacular narration at precisely the moment at which romanz language was producing new genres of storytelling. In light of heightened evidence of re-uses and imitation of Roman work in Toulouse in the immediately pre ceding decades, appreciation of that city's relationship to its ancient past shifts dramatically from the calculation of singular episodes of "antique influence" to awareness of a calculated,

self-conscious phenomenon. Elizabeth del Alamo has argued, with good reason I

believe, that the celebrated, robustly carved marble plaque in the Mus?e des Augustins, on which two cross-legged women are seated with animals on their laps, depicts the Saintes Puelles, or holy women, who, according to an old tradition, buried St. Sernin's body, not two virgins, as a later tradition maintains.37 Her observation suggests that the relief may have constituted part of a figurative narration of the saint's

legend, as can be seen at Autun. There, a monumental marble mausoleum in the choir of the church housing St. Lazarus'

(purported) relics incorporated a statuary group that en acted the central event in his Vita, Christ with Mary and Mar tha at the moment of Lazarus' resurrection.

A piece of recycled Roman material in the Porte Mi?ge ville activates the iconography of the Romanesque door in

ways that indicate substantial self-consciousness on the part

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FIGURE 2. Porte Mi?geville, Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, 1115 (Charles Nodier and Isidore Justin Taylor, Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l'anci enne France [Paris, 1820], PL 10).

of the sculptors in the choice and handling of antique frag ments.38 Pradelier points out that an old sarcophagus, sliced in half and then re?ut with representations of ten of the apostles, serves as the central portion of the lintel; the lunette is carved with a depiction of Christ's Ascension (Fig. 4).39 Material limitations of the reused fragment may explain the addition of small side pieces with the remaining apostles, as well as the eccentric positioning of the heads on the main lintel figures as

they gaze up into the tympanum. But the way in which this

posture enhances the sense of immediacy as the little figures observe the scene of Christ supported by two angels suggests that reuse here was not merely a matter of the availability of material. The reemployed remnant of the past charges the

subject matter of the tympanum with associations that trans form its statically rendered theme. The lintel, through the

abrupt intrusion of its materiality, participates in a significant recasting of the doorway's subject matter.40

In this location, the sarcophagus fragment, which is

awkwardly adjusted to fit into its position beneath the lunette,

FIGURE 3. Porte des Comtes, Saint-Sernin, Toulouse, ca. 1100 (photo: author).

brings to mind without imitating the familiar subject on Late

Antique sarcophagi of Christ amidst the apostles, a depiction of which decorated the coffin containing the remains of one of the eleventh-century counts of Toulouse not far away. This

sarcophagus was readily visible within the large open niche located along the south wall of Saint-Sernin immediately adjacent to the Porte des Comtes on its western side. More

dramatically, the lintel, as a sarcophagus remnant positioned beneath the feet of a standing Christ, evokes?without illus

trating?the theologically critical event of Christ rising from his tomb, a scene unknown in monumental sculpture up to this

date.

Until the early 1100s, scenes of the Resurrection ordi

narily showed the three Marys visiting the empty tomb; the

pivotal moment in the Passion story was represented through an image of absence. One such depiction appears on the lunette in the south transept portal at San Isidoro in Le?n, where, along

with a scene of Christ ascending, it flanks a central plaque with the Deposition (Fig. 5). Two angels support the figure of Christ in the scene of the Ascension on the left of the tym panum, much as they do at Saint-Sernin, while, on the right, the three Marys stand at the empty tomb watching an angel display the displaced sarcophagus lid. In Le?n, we have the traditional visualization of the Resurrection in which Christ has already vanished; at Saint-Sernin, the lintel effects a con flation of the two side events that are depicted at San Isidoro,

presenting the visitor with an image of Christ both rising from a tomb and ascending to heaven.41

What is thought to be the first visualization in monu mental art of Christ rising from his tomb appears not far away from Saint-Sernin, and not long after. Around 1125, Christ is

depicted stepping out of a diminutive Late Antique sarcoph agus on one face of a capital carved for the cloister at the church of La Daurade; the other side of the capital presents the conven tional rendering of the same event with the three Marys at

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FIGURE 4. Ascension, lunette of the Porte Mi?geville, Saint-Sernin, Tou

louse, 1115 (photo: author).

the empty tomb (Fig. 6).42 Emile M?le marveled at the "ex

traordinary audacity" of this scene of Christ pushing aside the lid of his coffin and thrusting one leg over the lip of the

sarcophagus while an angel touches or supports his arm, noting that even developments in liturgical drama could not explain it: "We must therefore admit that we know nothing of the causes for so surprising an innovation," he confessed.43

The series of Passion capitals from La Daurade present sufficient instances of unprecedented narrative invention to

suggest that the sculptors did not need Saint-Sernin for in

spiration in regard to the representation of the Resurrection.44 What is more important is the way in which utilization of both antique motifs and ancient material participated in a re

casting and reinvention of subject matter at the two churches; Roman carving was employed in Romanesque work in Tou louse as both artifact and allusion.

On the La Daurade capital, Christ's coffin is decorated with strigils, a motif characteristic of tombs carved in south western Gaul in Antiquity. The design is seen on sarcophagi found in the numerous necropolises bordering Saint-Sernin's tomb, many of which are now on display in the Mus?e Saint

Raymond.45 Workers selectively utilized this material in the late eleventh century for pavements, building stones, and wall decoration. At Saint-Sernin, as we have seen, four sarcophagi were used for members of the count's family in the eleventh

century; others were built into the southern wall of the basilica at the same time. Labrousse remarked that the reuse of the sar

cophagi indicated their value as luxury tombs by local nobility, even centuries later; the number of reuses suggested to him local finds.46

Another capital from La Daurade depicts Jesus washing Peter's feet under a canopy supported by spiral shafts. The diminutive columns on the sarcophagus in which Guillaume Taillefer is interred at Saint-Sernin are similarly decorated, as are some of the marble colonettes that ornamented the apse

FIGURE 5. Three Marys visiting the tomb, Deposition, Ascension, south

transept, San Isidoro, Le?n, 1125 (photo: Courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard).

within the Late Antique church of La Daurade which was still

standing in the twelfth century.47 Thus, within the capital carvings at La Daurade we find reference to ancient material that would have been a familiar and distinctive part of the

medieval ambience of Toulouse. These allusions contribute in a dramatic fashion to the effect of immediacy that is so pal pable in the presentation of Jesus' last days on the cloister

capitals; they also participate in another way in the retelling of the Passion story.

Explicit reference to antique architectural decoration of a luxurious nature situates the Foot Washing in an imposing ancient setting and marks the Resurrection as an elevated event. Other details such as the fortifications over vaulted structures on the capitals showing the Last Supper and the

Apostles Rushing to the Tomb, introduce into the representa tions prosaic elements of contemporary construction (Figs. 7 and 8). In the latter carving, where Peter embraces one of the architectural supports in front of Jesus' tomb, the two di

vergent elements?antique and vernacular?abruptly come

together. The juxtaposition replicates the literary gesture in which Latin elements are knowingly employed in vernacular texts to signal the importance of events, or in other ways

make forceful distinctions. In the Song of Roland, the entomb ment of Roland, Olivier and Turpin in "un blanc sarcou de marbre" evokes the image of a reused white marble sarcoph agus of antique date, like the one out of which Jesus steps, re

inforcing the stature of these martyrs of Roncevaux above that of their compatriots who are buried with fanfare, but in a single trench in the earth.48

The fortified towers, vaulted chambers and twisted columns that provide settings for the depiction of Jesus' final days on the La Daurade cloister capitals were authentic elements of buildings in Jerusalem (as I have argued else

where), and also of Toulouse, making the events of the Passion appear to be occurring simultaneously there and here,

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FIGURE 6. Resurrection, cloister capital, Church of La Daurade, Toulouse, ca. 1125 (photo: author).

both then and now, in an exceptional engagement with issues of space and time.49 The fact that the church of Notre Dame de la Daurade had been built in the fifth century at the western end of the decumanus, just north of the imposing Roman

theater, suggests that another ancient architectural project in Toulouse likely informed the sculptors' handling of pictorial elements on the capitals. Vestiges of the theater, which was

equivalent in size to the theaters in Aries and Orange (ca. 100 m) and the glory of the ancient city, were recuperated from the Garonne River in the nineteenth century and again during excavations of the sixties and seventies; these included frag ments of decoration and wall paneling.50

Conclusion

The Romanesque sculpture of Toulouse, like that else where in France, did not submit to the influence of ancient art either incidentally or passively; neither did it attempt a

thoroughgoing imitation of antique form. Instead, as I have

indicated, material familiar from a distinctively different venue was selectively reused and achieved remarkable rhetorical

FIGURE 1. Last Supper, cloister capital, Church of La Daurade, Toulouse, ca. 1125 (photo: author).

effects. Incorporation and/or citation of varied elements and motifs well known in Roman Imperial and provincial art pro vided important distinctions regarding time, place, and stature on individual capitals, in sculptural programs, and in archi tectural construction. The instances I have discussed here, and other examples I have treated elsewhere, indicate deliberate

usage and demonstrate a heightened self-consciousness on the

part of the sculptors and builders. They reveal as well acute ap titude for the allusive implications of discrete appropriations, especially when these are employed within narrative composi tions that interweave events in the present with deeds of the past.

Narrative activity in which ancient and contemporary ma terial combines with learned and imaginative subject matter characterizes much of the relief carving in Romanesque art. These elements of knowing adaptation from, and elaboration

of, ancient sources in the context of complex temporalities are the hallmarks of the novel fictional work that was known in the twelfth century as romanz. Early writing in French retold stories about ancient heroes in which respect for the structure of their lives was combined with fanciful accounts of their

doings that would be understandable to contemporary aristo

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FIGURE 8. Peter at Christ's tomb, cloister capital, Church of La Daurade,

Toulouse, ca. 1125 (photo: author).

crats: poetic license jostled received tradition. Per Nykrog suggested that the choice of elevated subject matter in these novel vernacular compositions served to identify the audience for such work as the "discriminating and culturally adventur

ous," not the vulgar people who are cited in the prologue to the Roman de Thebes as no better able to appreciate the roman's reference to the story of "Edyppus" "than a donkey appreciates harp music."51

The great early twelfth-century portal that provides the main entry into the Benedictine abbey at Moissac along the southern flank of the church of Saint-Pierre provides both a

summary and a conclusion for my argument (Fig. 9). A well studied monument that lies some thirty miles north of Toulouse

along one of the routes leading out of the city, it displays the fundamental characteristics of a rethought Romanesque that I have been delineating.52 The portico that leads directly into the western tower displays a self-conscious use of ancient forms and themes; these participate in a complex architectural and narrative composition that imaginatively commingles past and

present. This occurs, not as the unique marking of an excep

tional church portal, but as a particularly cogent articulation

FIGURE 9. South portal, Saint-Pierre, Moissac, ca. 1115-1130 (photo: author).

of elements that appear on monuments throughout southern and western France in different degrees and divergent manners; these constitute as well the characteristics of mid-twelfth-cen

tury vernacular writing. At Moissac, the conspicuous appropriation of the form

of a triumphal arch defines the outer and inner contours of the porch. In shape and decoration, this portico would have resembled the victory arch that was built in Imperial times at the southern entry to Toulouse and which, in the Middle

Ages, stood outside the Porte Narbonnaise, the southern entry through the Roman wall into the city. Victorious imagery ex tended from this gate through the Porterie in the northern part of Toulouse's wall, on into the Porte Mi?geville at Saint-Sernin, where incorporation of a recarved ancient sarcophagus frag ment transforms the depiction of the Ascension in the tym panum into a dramatic, simultaneous evocation of Jesus'

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Resurrection. Thirty or so miles to the north, the exterior

form of the Moissac portico provides an additional visual re inforcement of the triumphant theme along the Via Domitia.

At Moissac, as in Toulouse, distinct events are dramati

cally conflated, this time into a merging of distant Imperial activity with proximate knightly combat. Specific correspon dences between the portal structure and a particularly storied Roman arch, the one built to celebrate Titus' destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70, imaginatively relocates a first-century victory to the threshold of an eleventh-century church, one that played an important role in the Christian

reconquest of the holy city from the Muslims in 1099. The

triumphant imagery of the Roman arch aligns and intertwines these victorious campaigns that occurred nearly a thousand

years apart. In a similar way, contemporary texts, including some written at Moissac, hail the deeds of the Crusaders as

equivalent to those of the Roman armies. Crenellations atop the portico assert a defensive function

for the porch, extending these lofty and distant associations into the secular, present-day sphere. On the portico's inner

walls, an original and complex narrative is constructed across the stage-like space through strategies of contrast and re iteration. Wretched dogs lick the leper's sores on one of the side-wall reliefs under the watchful eyes of the heraldically criss-crossed lions on the trumeau, while the incongruous presence of a humble bed in the scene of the infancy of Jesus

reappears in a representation of the death of the miser on the other side of the porch. Markers of status such as the crowns that Christ and the Elders wear in the tympanum align them with lesser figures of the Magi in a vivid visual narrative which

overlays the biblical account of the Infancy. The pre-scripted

Latin tale of Christian drama that is re-enacted on the right wall of the porch fulfills the prophecy Isaiah is shown announc

ing on the adjacent doorjamb. While one set of relationships in these reliefs aligns what has happened with what is to be, another simultaneously engages distinct moments in a distant and more proximate past. In this juxtaposition of different tem

poralities, we become aware of additional stories; another, more colloquial one comes into view as we move, physically and visually, through the space of the portico. In a setting red olent of ancient architecture, amidst the charged scenes of sacred history, a tale brimming with references to royalty and worldliness is played out in the lowest registers of the portico by near-life-sized figures.

By any account, the Moissac portico is one of the land marks of early twelfth-century French art. llene Forsyth's masterful recent study in these pages of the reliefs on the side walls of the Moissac porch, in which she describes their formal schemes, open-ended visual play, and intertwining of the sacred and sexual, complements what I have said here even as we approach the subject from different perspectives.53 Her reading of the porch reliefs in light of an early eleventh

century Latin poem concentrates on their dense subject matter and the compositional strategies that connect diverse elements within them. My engagement of the sculptures within their architectural enclosure draws attention to an imaginative inter

play among antique forms, elevated themes, vernacular sub

jects, and novel modes of narration. In this light, they can be seen to resonate with the characteristics of romanz, which I have argued is the source, and should be understood as the

signification, of the word Romanesque.

NOTES

1. Initially Gothic served as a blanket term for medieval art, setting it off from Renaissance production. For its origins and uses, see the masterful

documentation by P. Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Inter

pretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, 1960). Tina Waldeier

Bizzarro provides precise dating for the appearance of the term Roman

esque in conjunction with Anglo-Norman architecture in Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory (Cambridge, 1992), 132-149.

2. I first addressed problematic aspects of France's recovery of its medieval

past in my 1964 dissertation for Harvard University, Romanesque Sculp ture from the Cathedral of Saint-Etienne, Toulouse (New York, 1977), 64-67 and 76-85; these observations were subsequently developed in

a paper published as "A Romantic Forgery: The Romanesque 'Portal' of

Saint-Etienne in Toulouse," AB, L (1968), 33-42. Some of these issues were further explored in connection with Burgundian art in my book

Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus and the Cathedral of Autun

(Chicago, 1999), 18-32. Two general archeological studies of the re

lationship between antique and medieval art in France appeared before

the Second World War: J. Adh?mar, Influences antiques dans I 'art du

moyen ?ge fran?ais, Studies of the Warburg Institute, VII (London, 1939), and M. Durand-Lefebvre, Art gallo-romain et sculpture romane

(Paris, 1937).

3. W. V?ge, Die Anf?nge des monumentalen Stiles im Mittelalter: eine

Untersuchung ?ber die erste Bl?tezeit der franz?sischen Plastik (Stras

bourg, 1894). For a discussion of V?ge's work, see K. Brush, The

Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm V?ge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the

Study of Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1996), 57-87. There is always the

issue of if and when work in a foreign language penetrated French-, or, for that matter, English-language scholarship.

4. R. de Lasteyrie, L'architecture religieuse en France ? l'?poque romane,

(Paris, 1929), 570-571 (de Lasteyrie's book, which was not the only one to put forth such associations, first appeared in 1911); V. Lassalle, / 'influence antique dans I 'art roman proven?al, Revue arch?ologique de narbonnaise (Paris, 1970), suppl. 2, with earlier bibliography. Alan

Borg limited his discussion of the significance of antique art for Roman

esque work in Provence to a remark on the probable impact of the Roman scaenae frons on the facade at Saint-Gilles: Architectural Sculpture in

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Romanesque Provence (London, 1972), 128-129. This observation was

significantly developed by Carra Ferguson in her 1975 dissertation,

although she restricted her discussion of the importance of Roman

theater design to its usage in this one place: See C. Ferguson O'Meara, The Iconography of the Fa?ade of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard (New York,

1977), 63-84.

5. Emile Male's contribution to the paradigm of the re-birth of Roman

esque art in the late eleventh century is well known: see Religious Art

in France: The Twelfth Century, A Study of the Origins of Medieval

Iconography, ed. H. Bober, trans. M. Mathews, Bollingen Series, XC/1 (Princeton, 1978); the book was originally published in 1922.

Sixty years later, M. F. Hearn opened his overview of the development of

Romanesque sculpture with a discussion of the demise of the antique tradition, concluding it with commentary on the early Gothic portal of

Senlis: Romanesque Sculpture: The Revival of Monumental Stone Sculp ture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Ithaca, 1981).

6. For an extreme presentation of regionally compartmentalized Roman

esque, as well as an underestimation of Roman work in Gaul, see K. J.

Conant, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture: 800 to 1200 (Har mondsworth, Middlesex, 1959). Janet T Marquardt provides critical in

sight into Conant's activities linking him to nineteenth-century visions

of Romanesque in "Un romantique ? la recherche du pass?: K. J.

Conant ? Cluny," CCM, XLVIII (2005), 327-340.

7. L. Seidel, Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Fa?ades of Aquitaine

(Chicago, 1981), and eadem, "Images of the Crusades in Western Art:

Models as Metaphors," The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange between East and West during the Period of the Crusades, ed. V. P.

Goss, Studies in Medieval Culture, XXI (Kalamazoo, 1986), 377-391, in addition to eadem, Legends in Limestone.

8. My summary of the matter here and below is based largely but not ex

clusively on Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, 132-149.

9. Ibid. See also, Rev. G. D. Whittington, An Historical Survey of the

Ecclesiastical Antiquities of France with a view to illustrate the rise

and progress of Gothic Architecture in Europe (London, 1809; 2nd ed.

1811). For a discussion of Whittington's posthumously published work: see D. Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History (London, 1980), 56-58.

10. Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, 96-98.

11. Ibid., 134, 139, 142.

12. R. Immerwahr, "

'Romantic' and Its Cognates in England, Germany, and France before 1790," in "Romantic" and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. H. Eichner (Toronto: 1972), 17-97.

13. For an introduction to the relationship between Gothic and Romantic, see K. Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste

(New York, 1929), chaps. 3 and 4 (50-111). The controversy between Romanticism and Classicism, another aspect of intellectual debate that

further marginalized Romanesque, is discussed by H. Eichner, "Ger

many/Romantisch-Romantik-Romantiker," in "Romantic " and Its Cog

nates, 98-156, esp. 104-140, and by M. Z. Shroder, in "France/Roman

Romanesque-Romantique-Romantisme," ibid., 263-292, esp. 274-283. In addition, see now the remarks of Conrad Rudolph ("Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art," in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. C. Rudolph [Maiden, MA, 2006], 1-43,

esp. 16-21).

14. These remarks aptly characterize the exhibition of French Romanesque art held at the Louvre in the spring of 2005 which included in its open

ing segment archaeological finds such as a bone ice skate, moved sys

tematically through various regions toward the display of work from

Saint-Denis, and culminated with a display of freestanding monumen

tal statuary from the late twelfth century that announced the arrival of Gothic style. See the recent review in these pages by Kathleen Nolan

and Susan Leibacher Ward, "La France romane au temps des premiers

Cap?tiens (987-1152), Mus?e du Louvre, 10 March-6 June 2005," Gesta

XLIV/2 (2005): 149-156.

15. H. Focillon, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, I, Romanesque, ed. J. Bony, trans. D. King (London, 1963), 5-6, 29; first published in

French in 1938 as Art d'Occident: le moyen ?ge, roman et gothique.

16. R. Salvini, Medieval Sculpture, trans. P. Murray and L. Murray (London,

1969), 20-21 (originally published as La scultura rom?nica in Europa). Salvini's argument is more complex; he develops it in connection with

particular social and political phenomena.

17. W. Dynes, "Art, Language and Romanesque," Gesta, XXVIII/1 (1989), 3-10.

18. S. G. Nichols, Jr., "The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture," in The New Medievalism, ed. M. S. Brownlee,

K. Brownlee, and S. G. Nichols (Baltimore, 1991), 1-28; R. H. Bloch,

Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983). A relatively recent art historical essay noted that the English adopted

" 'Romanesque' (meaning 'to do with

Romance languages')" from the vocabulary of linguistics, but did not

pursue this relationship further, presenting Romanesque sculpture instead in terms of pilgrimage and monastic reform: The Grove Dictionary of

Art (London, 1996), XXVI, 568.

19. W. Sauerl?nder, Romanesque Art: Problems and Monuments (London, 2004), I, ii.

20. R. Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: simulations romanesques de

quelques espaces quotidiens, notes de cours et de seminaries au Coll?ge de France, 1976-1977, ed. C. Coste (Paris, 2002). Elizabeth del Alamo

kindly pointed out an earlier twentieth-century use of the word that

preserved some of its earlier meaning, noting in conversation that the

long-running contemporary play The Fantasticks is based on Edmond Rostand's verse play Les Romanesques, published in 1903.

21. W. von Wartburg, Franz?sisches etymologisches W?rterbuch: eine Dar

stellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (Bonn, 1928; repr. Basel,

1962), X, 452-457. See also P Robert, Dictionnaire alphab?tique et

analogique de la langue fran?aise (Paris, 1983) VI, 57-59 and E. R.

Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R.

Trask, Bollingen Series, XXXVI (Princeton, 1953), 30-32. For distinc tions French scholars make between the roman, with its fabulous themes and imaginative adventures, and epic poems, which share those quali ties but usually situate them around a historical personage, see W. T. H. Jackson, The Literature of the Middle Ages (New York, 1960), 68-69. Attention to issues of literacy and textuality over the course of the past two decades has focused interest on the written evidence for literary production, almost all of which involves Latin material in the late elev enth and first half of the twelfth centuries. The absence of comparable documentation makes it difficult to study developments in the (spoken) vernacular at the same time, except in terms of traces of oral discourse; the lyrics of the troubadours are invariably treated separately. For brief comments on this matter, see B. Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and

Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983), 19-30; a hint of the confrontation between them is provided by Stock's demonstration of the way in which written Latin exercised authority over spoken French in an eleventh

century conflict with heretics (120-139).

22. J.-C. Schmitt, "Le temps: impens? de l'histoire ou double objet de l'historien?" CCM, XLVIII (2005), 31-52.

23. E. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore, 1975), 347. Said

succinctly remarks on Vico's "invention" of historicism in his Intro duction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask

(Princeton, 1953, 2003), 12-14 and 20-22.

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24. The notion that "all that was new and vital in the culture of the [twelfth

century]... drew its inspiration, at least in part, from a desire to restore

or return to a lost or buried past" was magisterially examined by several

scholars in a volume published a quarter century ago: R. L. Benson and

G. Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century

(Cambridge, MA, 1982), xxix. This work reconsidered the thesis origi

nally put forth by Charles Homer Haskins in a celebrated work, The Re

naissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge MA, 1927). In between, Erwin Panofsky had argued that, in the figurai arts, the appropriation of

classical form and content did not rise to the level seen in the fifteenth

century because of an absence of historical self-consciousness, and thus

should not be considered on a par with that event; he recommended

instead the use of a less lofty term to designate its achievement. See "Re

naissance and Renascences," The Kenyon Review, VI (1944), 201-236; he subsequently expanded his thesis into a more frequently consulted and

cited work, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm,

1960; 2nd ed. 1965). Papers in the volume dedicated to a re-examination

of Haskins' thesis differed in their response to Panofsky's claim. Sev

eral viewed the arts through it, whether explicitly or implicitly: G. B.

Ladner, "Terms and Ideas of Renewal," in Renaissance and Renewal,

1-33, esp. 22, 31; E. Kitzinger, "The Arts as Aspects of a Renaissance:

Rome and Italy," in ibid., 637-670, and W. Sauerl?nder, "Architecture

and the Figurative Arts: The North," in ibid., 671-710. Herbert Bloch,

dealing exclusively with Italy, observed in the opening remarks in his

paper that a new awareness of ancient Rome in the twelfth century

"provides a compelling vindication of Haskins's title," in "The New Fas

cination with Ancient Rome," in ibid., 615-663.

25. Sauerl?nder, "Architecture and the Figurative Arts," in Renaissance and

Renewal, 680, 710.

26. Ausonius wrote of Toulouse as a city surrounded by a wall of bricks

because of the preponderance of brickwork in the uppermost parts; see

M. Labrousse, Toulouse antique des origins ? l'?tablissement des wisi

goths, Biblioth?que des ?coles fran?aises d'Ath?nes et de Rome, CCXII

(Paris, 1968), 261. In addition to Labrousse's foundational study, the

works I consulted regarding archaeological finds in Toulouse, and to

which the reader is referred, include Toulouse, Mus?e Saint-Raymond, Palladia Tolosa: Toulouse Romaine (Toulouse, 1988), and Tolosa:

nouvelles recherches sur Toulouse et son territoire dans l'Antiquit?, Collection de l'Ecole de Rome, XXVIII (Toulouse, 2002). For infor

mation about the network of Roman roads, see, in addition to La

brousse, Toulouse antique, 344-368, G. Livet, Histoire des routes et

des transports en Europe: des chemins de Saint-Jacques ? l'?ge d'or

des diligences (Strasbourg, 2003), 79-145, and R.-H. Bautier, "Le grand axe routier Est-Ouest du Midi de la France: d'Avignon ? Toulouse," in

Sur l'histoire ?conomique de la France m?di?vale: la route, la fleuve, la foire (Hampshire, 1991), iii. For recent work on the Romanesque city, see the collection of articles in Congr?s arch?ologique, Monuments en

Toulousain et Comminges, CLIV (1996; publ. 2002).

27. Contrast, for example, the map of Toulouse in the thirteenth century that

introduces the plates in Kathryn Horste's recent study, Cloister Design and Monastic Reform in Toulouse: The Romanesque Sculpture of La

Daurade (Oxford, 1992), Fig. 1 (originally published in J. Mundy, Lib

erty and Political Power in Toulouse, 1050-1230 [New York, 1954]) with the map in Labrousse, Toulouse antique, foldout.

28. Nonetheless, I have long admired Thomas Lyman's bold insights into

the relationship between antique carving and work at Saint-Sernin in

Toulouse. See his "Notes on the Porte Mi?geville Capitals and the Con

struction of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse," AB, XLIX (1967), 225-236, and

"Le style comme symbole chez les sculpteurs romans: essai d'interpr? tation de quelques inventions th?matiques ? la Porte Mi?geville de

Saint-Sernin," CSMC, XII (1981), 161-179.

29. M. Greenhalgh, The Survival of Roman Antiquities in the Middle Ages

(London, 1989), 48.

30. Labrousse, Toulouse antique, 237-267; Tolosa, 268-281.

31. Labrousse, Toulouse antique, 269, 281-290; Toulouse, Mus?e Saint

Raymond, Palladia Tolosa, 65-66, 71 and Nos. 55-57.

32. Labrousse, Toulouse antique, 269-271; P. Wolff, Histoire de Toulouse

(Toulouse, 1974), 28.

33. Labrousse, Toulouse antique, 311-320, 470-477; Tolosa, 421-424.

34. Tolosa, 421-424. Coins found at the site date between 362 and 408.

Among the pile of blocks destined for the last firing of the furnace

were fragments of marble columns and pieces of sarcophagi that were

decorated with leaves, vines, strigils, and imbrications, typical of local

production.

35. Ibid., 500-506.

36. On the church of Saint-Sernin, see H. Pradalier, "Saint-Sernin de Tou

louse au moyen-?ge," CA, CLIV (1996), 256-301; Pradalier suggests that construction at the church began around 1060, the Porte des Comtes

was complete by 1070, and the Porte Mi?geville was in place before

1100. This dating places the campaigns earlier than is usually argued

by the French, aligning them with observations made by Thomas

Lyman thirty years ago. See the summary of the long-standing debate

in Horste, Cloister Design, 30-35.

37. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art of Medieval Spain, 500-1200 (New York, 1993), 205-206.

38. For a related argument on different grounds, see P. S. Brown, "As

Excrement to Sacrament: The Dissimulated Pagan Idol of Ste-Marie

d'Oloron," AB, LXXXVII (2005), 571-588.

39. Pradelier, "Saint-Sernin de Toulouse," 279. Pradelier commented that

discovery of the reemployed material for the lintel does not modify

"pour l'instant" the approach to either the iconography or the style of

the work.

40. Salvatore Settis has drawn distinctions among different types of

medieval reengagement with antique models and sources, primarily in

terms of somewhat later Italian work. His discussion of textual cita

tion, in which he refers to its capacity to break apart a text, thereby

transferring authority, provides helpful additional commentary on the

point I am making here, although I prefer to consider the range of ref

erences as a whole without cataloguing them individually. See S. Settis,

"Verbreitung und Wiederverwendung antiker Modelle," in Studien zur

Geschichte der Europ?ischen Skulptur im 12./13. Jahrhundert, ed.

H. Beck and K. Hengevoss-D?rkop (Frankfurt, 1994), I, 351-366, esp. 360-361.

41. I mean to infer no time line by this observation.

42. For the dating of La Daurade's capitals and their relation to painting but

without significant discussion of their iconography, see most recently Horste, Cloister Design, 122-156.

43. M?le, Religious Art, 136.

44. See L. Seidel, "Installation as Inspiration: The Passion Cycle from La

Daurade," Gesta, XXV (1986), 83-92; some of the notions about

locale expressed there are modified in what I say here.

45. On the recent recuperation of the necropolis of Saint-Pierre, see Tolosa, 495-499.

46. Labrousse, Tolouse antique, 473-476. In the same decades, Roman

sarcophagi were significantly reutilized as sepulchres in the circle of

Matilda of Canosa's family in Italy. See C. Verzar, "Legacy and Mem

ory of Matilda: The Semiotics of Power and Reform," Medioevo: im

magini e ideologic Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi Parma, 23-27 setiembre 2002, ed. A. C. Quintavalle (Milan, 2005), 432-445,

esp. 440-443.

47. Toulouse, Mus?e Saint-Raymond, Palladia Tolosa, 141-149. Many of

the columns survived the destruction of the church in the eighteenth

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century; some of them were reemployed in the 1920s in a pseudo cloister in Nice.

48. I have consulted two versions of the poem: La chanson de Roland, trans. J. B?dier, Biblioth?que m?di?vale, ed. P. Zumthor (Paris, 1982), and The Song of Roland, trans. D. L. Sayers (Harmondsworth, Engl.,

1957). Roland's burial in the sarcophagus is described in Laisse 213; the account of his last moments in Laisse 176 ends with a description of three angels, Michael, Gabriel, and a ch?rubin, carrying his soul to

heaven at the instant of his death. For an extended analysis of the orig

inality and importance of the text, see S. G. Nichols, Jr., Romanesque

Signs: Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography (New Haven, 1983), 134-203.

49. Half a century ago, Paul Mespl? remarked on the Roman references of

these very elements, referring to them as a Stereotypie production that

"les imagiers romans ont certainement connue et plus ou moins imit?e."

Dix si?cles d'enluminure et de sculpture en Languedoc: VH-XVIe si?cles

(Toulouse, 1954), 53.

50. Toulouse, Mus?e Saint-Raymond, Palladia Tolosa, 81-83; Tolosa, 233-241.

51. P. Nykrog, "The Rise of Literary Fiction," in Renaissance and Renewal,

593-612, esp. 597-599.

52. The abbot was, for a time in the eleventh century, simultaneously

bishop of Toulouse. I provide more detailed arguments for much of

what follows in separate papers that the reader is urged to consult for

what may otherwise appear to be unfounded assertions. In addition to

the essay L. Seidel, "Images of the Crusades" (note 7), see eadem, "The Moissac Portico and the Rhetoric of Appropriation," Studien zur

Geschichte der Europ?ischen Skulptur, I, 287-302, and eadem, "Scrip tural Story in Romanesque Sculpture: Architectural Space and Narrative

Time," in Erz?hlte Zeit und Ged?chtnis: Narrative Strukturen und das

Problem der Sinnstiftung im Denkmal, eds. G. Poch?t and B. Wagner, Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch Graz, XXIX/XXX (2005), 21-28.

53. I. H. Forsyth, "Narrative at Moissac: Schapiro's Legacy," Gesta, XLI/1

(2002), 71-93.

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