[MUSIC] Welcome back to The Age of Cathedrals. In our last time together, we encountered some of the ideas that led to the extraordinary architectural achievement of the first Gothic cathedral, beginning in the 1140s in what is now a northern suburb of Paris, Saint-Denis. We saw how the Abbot Suger conceived of a new space that would give structural expression to the doctrine of light, contained in a book that had belonged to the abbey since the 9th century, The Celestial Hierarchies of the Pseudo-Dionysius, who equated God with light. And we saw how this ancient and new doctrine of light was incorporated into stained glass windows, which were meant to provoke a spiritual uplifting toward the physical light as well as the light of spiritual understanding. Today we shall look at the Romanesque churches that preceded Gothic building. And we shall go on to layout the basic characteristics of the Gothic style that took root in the cathedrals of the 12th and 13th centuries and that have been around ever since. The Romanesque style of architecture emanated from the great period of defensive retreat into the countryside after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in the 9th Century. And Romanesque churches often seem like defensive fortresses. What is most immediately striking, is the stocky frontality of the building, the illusion of a massive defensive impenetrability. The church is a projection of the military castle, like the castle of Loches from the first quarter of the 11th century. Here we see an example of the fortress church in Notre Dame of Toulouse or Saint Sernin, also in the southern city of Toulouse. Or Poitiers Cathedral in the central region of France, along the pilgrimage route from Paris to Saint Jacques of Compostella in Spain. Though the Romanesque is primarily a southern phenomenon, it is not limited to the south, as we see in this prime example of Norman church building, the Abbey Church of Jumièges, begun around 20 years before Duke William of Normandy's conquest of England in 1066. We have spoken of the massively thick walls of Romanesque churches, whose opaque inner surfaces are covered with paint. On the outside, Romanesque churches tend to be decorated with low-relief carvings which are part of the structure of the building and which were, at the outset, highly naturalistic. That is to say, they contained vegetable designs. Here we see the west portal of Saintes, or the Trumeau, which is the post of the central portal of the west facade of Souillac. Often alongside the plants of the naturalistic Romanesque scroll and vine work, we find an intense mixture of sacred and profane elements in Romanesque sculpture, such as in these Chauvigny capital friezes with demons. The massive Romanesque wall is thick for a reason, which has to do with its function. The walls support whole weight of the vaulting roof, with slight reinforcement of pillars set along the wall, but no external system of buttressing to resist the lateral thrust of the upper arches. Lateral thrust is the force that moves vertically at the top of an arch or horizontally a the place where the vault meets the vertical walls. We observe the lack of external buttressing in this image of the Abbey Church of Saint-Benoit sur Loire or the church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe in Vienne. In Romanesque churches, the problem of lateral thrust is dealt with from the inside, as we see in this cross-section of the church of Conques. What we see from the outside is a series of radiating chapels in the eastern part, or cheve, which will become the choir of Gothic cathedrals. There are no external buttresses in Romanesque churches to carry the weight of high walls to the ground. The church reaches the height that it does through an internal system of vaults posed on top of each other, as in the outside of Conques. The vaults used in Romanesque cathedrals are sometimes referred to as tunnel or barrel vaults, as we see at the top of the Abby church of Vézelay. Or they're sometimes called groin vaults, a style which survives in the arches of some of the Yale buildings, as in this example of an arch in the Hall of Graduate Studies. As its name implies, Romanesque churches are oriented towards Rome. But they are also local, and their particular shape reflects regional styles. There's a Norman and Burgundian Romanesque and Romanesque from the region of the Loire. And it is a rural phenomenon as well. Romanesque architecture was nurtured in monasteries among those wishing protection from the savage world, or to escape what the early church fathers termed the noise of the cities, social, commercial and secular life. And Romanesque churches grew also along the pilgrimage routes between northern Europe and Saint Jacques of Compostella in Spain, at Vezelay, at Conques, at Toulouse, and Pary-le-Monial. The radiating chapels of Romanesque churches fulfill the dual function of supporting the upper arches and providing a space in which regular parish members might pray in the central nave or around the altar. While pilgrims could circulate and worship in the chapels around the central portion of the cathedral.
