DU1713c Seminář: od Konstantina po Giotta
Spring Semester
Questioning the 12th
Century: Historiography,
Visual Cultures, and
Global Middle Ages
[The 12th century in Europe] was in many respects an
age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the
Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest
bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of
Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the
emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of
the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law;
the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions,
and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the
first European universities. The 12th century left its
signature on higher education, on the scholastic
philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture
and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and
vernacular poetry.
Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth
Century, Cambridge 1927, p. VIII
Renaissance?
(Theodosian Renaissance) (379–395)
Carolingian Renaissance (800–900)
(Macedonian Renaissance) (867–1056)
Ottonian Renaissance (936–1002)
Twelfth-Century Renaissance (1100–1200)
“Humanist Renaissance” etc… (1400….)
RENAISSANCE AND
RENASCENCES
By ERWIN PANOFSKY
F OR many centuries the history of Europe has been divided into
three periods: Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern
Era, the latter ushered in by the Italian Renaissance. This scheme
determines the curricula of our colleges and universities; it underlies
the organization of our museums and Learned Societies; it
plays a part in our everyday speech and thought. No matter
where the main incisions are made (as a rule Antiquity ends approximately
with the 5th Century A. D. while the Modern Era
begins somewhere around 1400 in Italy and somewhere around
1500 in the countries north of the Alps): we generally conceive
of history in terms of those three periods and thereby accept the
Italian Renaissance as a, quite literally, epoch-making event.
This system of periodization was, characteristically, evolved
by the Renaissance itself, and it was summed up, about the middle
of the 19th Century, by two great scholars, Jules Michelet of
Paris and Jacob Burckhardt of Basle. However, their all-too-impressive
characterization of the Renaissance as "the discovery of
the world and of man" - apparently implying that the Middle
Ages had not been aware of either - was bound to arouse opposition.
Generations of scholars set out to prove what Michelet
and Burckhardt had never seriously questioned: that the Italian
Renaissance, howsoever defined, did not emerge like Athene from
the head of Zeus. It was shown that innumerable tendencies,
ideas, inventions and discoveries credited to the Modern Era had
announced themselves in the Middle Ages; that, conversely, the
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Saint-Gilles-du-Gard
Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe
The Invention of the “Romanesque”
Saint-Sernin, Toulouse Saint-Etienne, Sens
Charles Duhérissier de Gerville (1769-1853)
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“I have applied the term ‘Romanesque’ to the
oldest monuments, where the sculptural
ornamentation is not perceptible, and which are
distinguished by the simplicity of their plans and
the heaviness of their ornaments. By ‘RomanoByzantine’
style, I mean buildings where the
architecture of Byzantium penetrated with force
and blended with the style that had originated in
the wake of the Roman domination. Finally, I
qualify as ‘Byzantine’ the buildings where the rules
of Greek architecture predominate, and hide,
under the multiplicity of ornaments and sculpture,
the simplicity of the Roman conceptions.”
Aymon-Gilbert Mallay, Essai sur les églises romanes et
romano-byzantines, Moulins 1841, p. XXIV
1. Saint-Martin de Tours
2. Saint-Martial de Limoges
3. Sainte-Foy de Conque
4. Saint-Sernin de Toulouse
5. Santiago de Compostela
from Kenneth John Conant, Carolingian and
Romanesque Architecture, 800 to 1200,
Harmondsworth 1959
Conques, 1100?
Jean-Camille Formigé (1845–1926)
“RESTORATION, s. f. The word and the act are
modern. To restore a building is not to maintain,
repair, or remake it; it is to restore it to a completed
state that may never have existed at any given time”.
“Restauration”, in Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française
du XIe au XVIe siècle, Paris 1854
The idea of “style 1200”
“This exhibition is the first to concentrate on the art of
the late twelfth and early thirteenth century. In the
earlier development of medieval art one would hardly
find another phase of such short duration that could
boast of a similarly concentrated, many-sided, and
international character of its artistic production. […]
According to conventional periodization, the arts around
1200 had to be called both ‘early Gothic’ and ‘late
Romanesque’. However […] the labels Romanesque and
Gothic are not sufficiently precise to encompass the
concrete art-historical situation prevailing toward the
end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth
century”
Konrad Hoffmann, Introduction to the catalogue The Year
1200, Metropolitan Museum, NYC, 1970
Seminar essays
- ca. 4 pages (7200 signs) + bibliography at the end
- Pick one twelfth-century object/monument and, after
consultation with me (in person or email) read the most recent
bibliography
- Recontextualize the object and its bibliography within the
question of the 12th-century. Is is part of global Middle Ages?
Is it going against the idea of the 12th-century as a moment of
transformation or is it fully part of this discourse? Are there
historiographical problems linked with this object? Etc.
- Do not hesitate to write me if you have questions or doubts
•Possible subjects include:
•Palermo: “exporting” Norman Romanesque in the 12th century?
•Cloister of Monreale: a meeting of workshops and traditions
•Rotunda of St. Catherine in Znojmo: cult of the Premyslids or cultural
crossroads
•The liturgical space and images of the church of San Clemente in
Rome and the Gregorian Reformation
•Late Antique Revival, St. Trophime in Arles or Saint-Gilles-du-Gard
•St. Nicholas of Verdun and the ambo of Klosterneuburg, the Style
1200
• The Cloister’s Cross: Religious exclusion through images
CENOBIUM digitalisation project:
http://cenobium.isti.cnr.it/monreale/capitals