Romantic Identity, Nationalism, and the Understanding of the Advent of Romanesque Art in Christian Spain

Abstract

During the 1920s two well known scholars, Emile Male and Arthur Kingsley Porter, sparred over the advent of Romanesque sculpture on the Iberian peninsula in a quarrel that is familiar to historians of Romanesque art. Borrowing their approach from Joseph Bedier's theories about the formation of the chansons de geste, both scholars proposed that the pilgrimage to Santiago stimulated the creation of Romanesque style by carrying a free flow of artists, architects, and artistic ideas from one region to the next. The date and national origin of the artists who created the Romanesque style were the main points of contention. Both men created the impression of a homogeneous art and architecture formed by an artistic crosspollination, which occurred without regard for indigenous cultural forms, ethnic identity, regional boundaries, or geographic obstacles. Once hypothesized, however, this politically neutral international Romanesque style was deployed in line with the various agendas of the authors. This paper explores the personal, methodological, and ideological convictions that shaped Porter's and Male's scholarly views of the pilgrimage roads as a site of exceptional creativity. Their scholarship, I contend, reveals as much about them and their ethos as it does about the middle ages. During the 1920s two eminent art historians, Emile Male (1862-1954) (Fig. 1) and Arthur Kingsley Porter (18831933) (Fig. 2), both embarked upon a scholarly quest to find the origin of Romanesque sculpture in the Christian kingdoms of medieval Spain, producing a series of arguments now well known to scholars of Romanesque art.' In different ways, both scholars linked the advent of Romanesque art in Spain with the pilgrimage to St. James's shrine at Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Modeling their approach on Joseph B6dier's theories about the formation of the chansons de geste, they proposed that the pilgrimage to Santiago stimulated artistic creation by carrying a free flow of artists, architects, and artistic ideas from one region to the next. Their work established the standard approach which dominated the investigation of Spain's Romanesque art for most of this century.2 Contemporary art historians have virtually abandoned the debate waged by Porter and Male over the chronology of style, but numerous recent publications addressing Spanish Romanesque churches, cloisters, and luxury arts in light of the pilgrimage to Santiago indicate the continued vitality of their general conceptual framework.3 Art historical scholarship, like pilgrimage, is born of belief and desire, and these are always shaped by the interaction of our personal volition and the context in which we live. What the pilgrim and the scholar see depends on what they believe, as much as what they believe depends on what they see. This paper will explore the personal, methodological, and ideological convictions that shaped Porter's and Male's scholarly views of the pilgrimage roads as a site of extraordinary artistic creation. Although their scholarship claimed a neutral objectivity, a close reading reveals its complex personal and ideological underpinnings. The scholarly combat between Porter and Male over the origins of Romanesque sculpture, which would become so entwined with the way of St. James, began just as World War I was ending in 1918. Male attacked Porter's early dating of Italian Romanesque monuments in a hostile review of the American's Lombard Architecture.4 This criticism must have stung Porter particularly, because he had modeled the section of his book treating iconography on Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum Majus, in admiration of Male's use of this work to structure L'Art religieux du Xllle siecle en France. Porter's assertions that monumental sculpture was reborn in Modena with the work of Guglielmo and that Emilian sculpture exerted some influence on artistic developments in France were two of the main points of contention.6 Male denounced Porter for accepting an inscription of 1099 as the date for Guglielmo's carvings, saying,