Architecture to Painting in the Middle Ages

Abstract

MEDIEVAL church building developed as a result of a specific combination of technical knowledge, ritual requirements, and sociological conditions. The consecutive changes involved in this development seem to have transformed the prevalent habits of perceiving space in a specifically patterned form, consequently influencing the development of painting in a most profound manner. The early Romanesque church is predominantly an abbey church in a rural area. It was built mainly for the performance of religious services by the clergy, with little concern for a large congregation. Since an important part of the ritual is of a processional nature, there is a strong emphasis on the longitudinal axis of the nave leading toward the high altar. A correlative axis is introduced by the transept, distinguishing the processional character of the Christian church from that of the Egyptian temple. Whether or not the idea of the nave-transept configuration is derived from the early desire to give the plan of the church the symbolic shape of the cross, the lines of the Roman cross have become a basic means of organizing space in Western civilization. In modified and extended form it is even present in Descartes' system of co-ordinates. In Romanesque church building, the quality of movement present in these directional axes of the cross-a quality often termed dynamic-is in conflict with the static qualities of general structure and concept. The shell of the Romanesque architectural structure is conceived in terms of a plane-wall-and-roof construction; the void is conceived as a series of box-shaped finite volumes, interdependent with the shell. The box-shaped parts of the interior necessitate a plane-wall-and-roof construction for their definition; that is, such a structure can hardly define anything other than a box-shaped void. The resulting structural and spatial articulation therefore combines finite space blocks in a more or less additive fashion. However, the immanent dynamism of the movement to be found in the two main axes, together with an increasing compulsion to stretch in height and depth, conflicted with the static elements of the Romanesque building. It was this conflict which compelled the builders of the period to develop new structural concepts. The first step in this development is a more dynamic interpretation of the plane wall, as instanced by the slight protrusions in common use by at least the eleventh century. These blind arcades-scarcely engaged columns, actually -may not have seemed, at first, to be more than a decorative elaboration of the plane wall. But they articulated the wall and gave rhythmic unity to the sequence of windows which were originally cut into the wall with little consideration for structure. It is only in the light of later developments that one recognizes the structural potentialities of this innovation, for the later dissolution of the plane wall into structural elements, as well as its strengthened vertical articulation, would have been impossible without it. The spiritual heritage of the North is one of movement and structure, while that of the South is of a static and geometric character. The friction resulting from the opposition of these essentially differing attitudes is possibly the most important single factor in producing the subsequent great architectural ideas of the Western world. From it springs the general dynamization of space in the Gothic, manifest in the dissolution of the carrying plane wall, as well as its transformation into a number of new elements-the buttresses, piers, ogival vaults and ribs. The coordination of relatively isolated and independent spatial constituents was achieved in the Romanesque by simply adding the elements one to another, but in the Gothic this gives way to a structurally unified space. Windows cut from the plane wall give way to glazed screens stretched between structural parts of the building. The fundamentally post-and-lintel approach of carrying members with the load put on top of them (as practiced in the Romanesque) gives way to the new structural unity. An interdependence of vertical thrust and horizontal cover is achieved by both the pointed arch and the rib vault construction of the Gothic. In the late medieval city-state, the rural and feudal abbey church was replaced by the urban and proto-democratic cathedral which must serve a large congregation with a strong sense of being a unified community. The unity of PAUL M. LAPORTE Of the fine arts faculty of Macalester College is concerned with aesthetics and with the interdependence of the