Romanesque Art
Year of lecture: Unknown
Abstract:
"If Carolingian art does represent the dawn of western art it is none the less a pale and fitful light. It is not until the beginning of the eleventh century that western European art begins to develop a power and momentum of its own. Charlemagne’s Empire was divided among his sons, and a century after his Coronation in 800 it had entirely collapsed. The later ninth and tenth centuries see Europe once again exposed to attack: Moslems from the south; Slavs and Magyars from the East, Vikings from the North. Yet it was the Normans among the Vikings who reinvigorated Western Christendom after Charlemagne’s death, settling in the north of France they adopted Christianity and Feudalism and injected new vigour into both.
"Meanwhile, during the tenth century the centre of political power in Europe had moved to Germany where the Saxon kings had stabilized government; and Otto 1, reviving Charlemagne’s dream of a Western Roman Empire in 962. In England, somewhat earlier, King Alfred (who reigned from 871-99) also stabilized government. Both Alfred and Otto and their immediate successors patronized the arts in England and Saxony respectively, and this late ninth and tenth century Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon cultivation of the arts may be regarded as late-Carolingian in inspiration, bit also as proto-Romanesque, because it foreshadows particularly in Germany the international Romanesque style which begins in the eleventh century."
