Spain or Toulouse? And other Questions

Abstract

FM. Mâle's eagerly awaited book on Romanesque art portions have been known for some time from essays published in various periodicals—some as early as 1892—and evidently advance chapters of a larger whole. The result of his labors in the pre-Gothic field is now available in a single convenient volume, and it is no longer necessary to hunt through the interminable files of the Revue de Paris and other journals to find his articles, the precise references for which one had always inevitably forgotten. The new book is however not merely a reprint of various and desultory studies; it contains large and important parts which are entirely new, and it forms a unified whole. While not a systematic study of the iconography of the twelfth century, as the same author's work on the thirteenth century had been (it would obviously have been impossible to write such without the repetition of a vast amount of matter already disposed of in the previous volume), it forms a collection of essays upon Romanesque art in France, centering on iconography, but treating incidentally other related and even more absorbing topics.