Early Medieval Architecture Research Articles

The reuse of ancient tuff blocks in early medieval construction in Rome

AbstractThis paper analyzes the reuse of ancient tuff blocks in early medieval architecture in Rome, in both papal and private structures. The blocks are a well-known phenomenon, but they have not yet received any focused study. Short discussions in earlier scholarship have typically described them in utilitarian terms. I first identify a pattern of targeted reuse in papal building projects. I then argue that they would also have had symbolic value for an independent papacy wanting to display power. For later private builders, I propose that the blocks became prestige materials displayed on the houses of an ever-tightening aristocracy eager to be seen within some of the city's most important monumental spaces. I consider how the city's ancient monuments and their pieces were viewed in the early medieval period and how the blocks’ ancient contexts contributed to the symbolic value that I identify in them.

A hut on the hill: A multi-proxy microbotanical and micro-algae approach to a Pictish roundhouse floor at Cairnmore, Aberdeenshire

Early medieval architecture is notably difficult to trace in northern Britain. The fortuitous survival of an intact floor of a building located just outside a ringfort at Cairnmore, a high-status early medieval ringfort enclosure in Aberdeenshire, Northeast Scotland, allowed the targeted deployment of a paleoethnobotanical approach that utilized microbotanical (i.e., phytoliths) and micro-algae residues (e.g., diatom frustules) to illuminate the character of the unusual survival of an early medieval building in Scotland. This research revealed novel data on the architecture of the early medieval roundhouse floor in this poorly documented region and era for settlement remains, securely identifying the use of turf for walling in an early medieval lowland building. Evidence for roofing material was also preserved in the phytolith signature. Moreover, the microbotanical assemblage from Cairnmore was found to represent a use of a variety of ecological niches providing important evidence for landscape use. The presence (and absence) of particular microbotanical indicators also allowed interpretation of the possible uses of the structure. The results from this research demonstrate that microbotanical approaches can be critical in understanding architecture in regions where settlement survival is poor, highlighting the merits of microbotanical and micro-algae analyses in northern environments. The article concludes by advocating for the in-tandem assessment of these proxies in archaeological investigations where macrobotanical and other organic residues are poorly preserved.

Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space

Tres arquitecturas altomedievales orensanas: Santa Eufemia de Ambía, San Xés de Francelos y San Martiño de Pazó

Este artículo tiene como objetivo profundizar en el conocimiento arqueológico de las técnicas constructivas altomedievales del noroeste peninsular, y la dimensión social en las que éstas se enmarcan, a través del estudio comparativo de tres iglesias de la actual provincia de Ourense: Santa Eufemia de Ambía, San Xés de Francelos y San Martiño de Pazó. Para ello, partimos de un trabajo extensivo previo en el que se realizó una prospección arqueológica para documentar posibles restos de iglesias altomedievales. Se seleccionaron, entre otras, estas tres iglesias y se hizo una lectura veloz de sus paramentos combinada con la datación absoluta de los morteros de tierra de las fases altomedievales mediante Luminiscencia Ópticamente Estimulada y radiocarbono. Esta metodología, completada con una revisión historiográfica de cada edificio, nos permitirá observar de cerca las transformaciones en las técnicas constructivas que tienen lugar en esta zona entre los siglos IX y X y contextualizarlas en el marco más amplio de los estudios sobre arquitectura altomedieval en la península ibérica.

The church of Santa Comba de Bande and early medieval Iberian architecture: new chronological results

Abstract

Situation report of the CARE for the Czech and Slovak Republics

The centre of Europe, the territory of the today’s Czech and Slovak Republics, was Christianized sometime at the end of the 8thor at the beginning of the 9thcent. From this time stem solitary finds of churches. The main assemblage of architecture dates to the time span between 1sthalf of the 9thand the middle of the 11thcent. We know of about 30 such buildings, mostly of banal building types and scales. The only exceptions are three basilicas, one building with three apses, and one with transept. A scientific interest in early medieval architecture is to be traced back to the end of the 19thcent. in Bohemia, from the beginning of the 20thin Moravia, and since the 1920s/1930s in Slovakia. The excavation methods have undergone changes from a heritage conservation survey, through the methods of Prehistoric excavation to the current approach that makes use of modern geodetic and geophysical methods, building technology, and natural sciences.

An application of luminiscence dating to building archaeology: The study of ceramic building materials in early medieval churches in north-western France and south-eastern England

The research reported in this thesis concerns the re-evaluation of an archaeological assumption surrounding the origin of Ceramic Building Materials (CBM) used from the 9th to the 11th century in religious buildings of north-western France and south-eastern England. Are the bricks used in the masonry structures Roman spolia or a novo productions? Amongst the dating methods that can contribute to building archaeology, it is the technique of stimulated luminescence applied to CBM that is the focus of this study. Results from thermoluminescence (TL) and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating performed on 52 CBM samples from 11 churches showed that the practice of reusing Roman brick was commonplace in small parish churches, but also that brick-making was not a totally unknown skill of the early medieval craftsmen as it has long been supposed. Most importantly, by identifying that the building material is contemporary to the church, a defined chronology emerges resulting in a new and extremely useful reference point in the history of early medieval architecture.

Appropriating the Past: Romanesque Spolia in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

Although a relatively young subject, the historiography of Irish architecture has had a remarkably significant impact on the manner in which particular styles have been interpreted and valued. Since the genesis of the topic in the mid-eighteenth century, specific styles of architecture have been inextricably connected with the political history of the country, and each has been associated with the political and religious affiliations of its patrons. From the mid-nineteenth century, the focus on identifying an Irish ‘national’ architecture became particularly strong, with Early Christian and Romanesque architecture firmly believed to imbue ‘the spirit of native genius’, while Gothic, viewed as the introduction of the Anglo-Norman invader, was seen as marking the end of ‘Irish’ art. Inevitably, with such a strong motivation behind them, early texts were keen to find structures that were untouched by the hand of the colonizer as exemplars of the ‘national architecture’. Scholars, including the pioneering George Petrie (1790–1866) in works such as his 1845 study of the round towers of Ireland, believed that through historical research he and others were the first to understand the ‘true value’ of these buildings and that any former interest in them had been purely in their destruction, rather than in their restoration or reconstruction. It was believed that such examples of early medieval architecture and sculpture as had survived had done so despite, rather than because of, the efforts of former ages, and, although often in ruins, the remains could be interpreted purely in terms of the date of their original, medieval, creation.Informed by such studies, from the mid-nineteenth century a movement grew to preserve and consolidate a number of threatened Romanesque buildings with the guiding philosophy of preserving the monuments as close to their original ‘pre-colonial’ form as possible. Consolidation of the ruins of the Nuns’ Church at Clonmacnoise (Co. Offaly) is traditionally amongst the earliest and most celebrated of these endeavours, undertaken by the Kilkenny and Southeast Ireland Archaeological Society in the 1860s, setting a precedent for both the type of monument and method of preservation that was to become the focus of activity from the 1870s, and thus for the first State initiatives in architectural conservation.

Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning by Günter Bandmann (review)

REVIEWS 216 order of acquisition as the organizing principle for this volume, which results (she speculates) “in a pleasingly random mixture of dates and places of origin, while at the same time providing an unusual overview of the way in which one particular part of the manuscript collection has evolved” (9). The distribution of images is, as it happens, very pleasantly random and diverse, and their subtle framing within a more modern than historical context lends currency to their interest. CHRISTINE THUAU, French & Francophone Studies, UCLA Günter Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning, trans. Kendall Wallis (New York: Columbia University Press 2005) 368 pp. Kendall Wallis’s recent translation of Günter Bandmann’s Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeuntungsträger (1951) marks the first time the Englishspeaking world can enjoy direct access to this seminal work of medieval architectural scholarship. Due to the half-century lapse between publication and translation, younger historians and art historians may be less familiar with the late Bandmann, and his work may not appear particularly groundbreaking for the early twentieth century. Art historical and related fields, however, are indebted to him and his contemporaries (such as Richard Krautheimer), who all emerged in the years surrounding the Second World War and opened up medieval architectural research to new methodologies and approaches, most prominently the philosophy and iconography of architecture. Bandmann broke relatively new ground in arguing for historical and symbolic forms—not, for example , artistic originality or aesthetic quality—as the principle ways through which medieval people understood architecture. For these reasons, any reader not acquainted with Bandmann would be well served to begin his or her first encounter with the book by reading Hans Josef Böker’s “Afterward,” itself a veritable if unassuming gem (249–255). Here Böker places the book into a broader context, not only historically, but also historiographically and even politically, and provides a fuller portrait of Bandmann. Günter Bandmann (1917–1975), a German who began studying during the Nazi era, produced Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeutunsträger—described by Böker as “an important turning point in the history of art and architecture in postwar Germany at a time when the discipline was undergoing an important and necessary reorientation” (251)—as his habilitationsschrift. Unlike many of his contemporaries, including Krautheimer, Erwin Panofsky, and Otto von Simson, Bandmann had not fled Germany. Remaining in the country through the war, he wrote a dissertation on the abbey church of Essen-Werden, developing his “growing interest in the question of meaning” (252). In further pursuing these ideas with his habilitationsschrift, Bandmann moved beyond the predominant formalistic and stylistic approaches, and confronted heavy resistance , entering into a debate about agency, influence, and motivation in architecture. Yet, his work became foundational in the field, constantly in print in Germany ever since, though never translated into any other language—that is, until now with Wallis’s translation. While the once considered to be provocative nature of Bandmann’s work barely causes the present reader to bat an eye, nevertheless it is clear that this is a revolutionary and unusual work of architectural history. On many levels, this REVIEWS 217 book states what is obvious to present-day medievalists. For example, one point that Bandmann drives home in his first chapter, “The Problem of Meaning in Architecture,” is the fundamental role of symbolic meaning to medieval art and architecture in contrast to the importance of aesthetic quality in Renaissance and post-Renaissance art. In doing so, he crafts an elegant, if implicit, argument for the importance of contextualization, analyzing a piece of art or architecture according to the standards of its period. Furthermore, the second chapter, “The Symbolic Meaning of Buildings according to Written and Visual Sources,” focuses on points often articulated since this work’s original publication. Topics emerging from his discussion of written sources include the role of the medieval Bauherr as a figure as, or even more, important than the artist himself, the medieval meaning of a copy (namely, a replication of content or meaning rather than of formal aesthetics), and the peculiar notion of historical consciousness in the Middle Ages. Both visual and written sources underline the influence of the...

Illuminations from Books of Hours by Janet Backhouse (review)

REVIEWS 215 distinction between essence and existence; page after page of argumentation cement the work’s place in the highest tier of philosophical achievement. The sheer complexity of the Metaphysics engenders in the reader a compulsion to reduce the entire narrative to propositions, but this is a most worthwhile endeavor , and one of which Avicenna would surely have approved. DAVID BENNETT, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA Janet Backhouse, Illuminations from Books of Hours (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004) 160 pp., ill. Janet Backhouse’s Illumination from Books of Hours is a lovely selection of 140 or so plates from Books of Hours in the collections of the British Library. Despite her own long-standing authority as a scholar of Books of Hours in particular—and illuminated manuscripts in general—Backhouse focuses the reader’s attention here on the stunning visual testimony of the illuminations themselves, rather than on scholarship concerning them. The plates appear alone, without commentary, following a short introduction. The most immediately striking feature of this volume is its diminutive size. The quality of the reproductions is as luxurious as that of many a hefty coffee table book, but the dimensions are more on the scale of a slim paperback novel. This welcome measure allows us to experience the illuminations (which are shown in their actual size when possible) in a format approximating their original incarnation in Books of Hours. Though few modern readers will likely find occasion to carry this collection around as an accessory the way the original owners might have, it is a pleasure to be able to hold this book easily up to the best light and plunge one’s nose into it in order to appreciate the finest details of the images. Backhouse’s introduction offers a straightforward explanation of what Books of Hours are—their content and use, how details concerning their production and ownership may be deduced, their history as a valuable social and economic commodity. More captivating is Backhouse’s discussion of the British Library collections the plates are drawn from. Where a manuscript languishes at present generally has little bearing on what most scholars and collectors hope to access through it—namely, a glimpse of the world that produced and consumed it in its first blush. Backhouse’s brief history of the British Library collections reminds us of several things: that these manuscripts have a long and legitimate history extending beyond their time and place of origin; that the institutions which hold many of them today have, as well, their own interesting histories; that the phenomenon of collecting (by institutions as well as individuals) lends a rejuvenated vitality to Books of Hours which rivals—in its own way—the interest they aroused when they were new. Backhouse reflects that the “status [of Books of Hours] as objects of desire has continued into modern times, with examples of particular interest or quality exciting rivalry among collectors and attracting sale room prices at least equal in contemporary terms to the value put upon them by their original owners” (8). Setting scholarly theories aside, Backhouse reminds us that these manuscripts possess a sort of magnetism which assures that they will always be more timeless than antiquated. In a further nod to the British Library, Backhouse borrows the manuscripts’ REVIEWS 216 order of acquisition as the organizing principle for this volume, which results (she speculates) “in a pleasingly random mixture of dates and places of origin, while at the same time providing an unusual overview of the way in which one particular part of the manuscript collection has evolved” (9). The distribution of images is, as it happens, very pleasantly random and diverse, and their subtle framing within a more modern than historical context lends currency to their interest. CHRISTINE THUAU, French & Francophone Studies, UCLA Günter Bandmann, Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning, trans. Kendall Wallis (New York: Columbia University Press 2005) 368 pp. Kendall Wallis’s recent translation of Günter Bandmann’s Mittelalterliche Architektur als Bedeuntungsträger (1951) marks the first time the Englishspeaking world can enjoy direct access to this seminal work of medieval architectural scholarship. Due to the half-century lapse between publication and translation...

Alfred Waterhouse’s Romanesque ‘Temple of Nature’: The Natural History Museum, London

The Natural History Museum in London is a spectacular building in many senses (Fig. 1). As one of the outstanding landmarks of high Victorian architecture, it was designed to draw attention both to itself and to its contents. No other museum building in Britain adopted a Romanesque style on this scale; no other building had used terracotta in such a rich and decorative manner, and no other building (other than, perhaps, the University Museum, Oxford) so curiously employed external decoration to illustrate its internal function. It was calculated to appeal to a wide public and its animal sculpture was selfconsciously didactic in the way in which a number of contemporary museum buildings were created to a programme. Planned as a showcase for the nation’s imperial scientific achievements, its appearance was strongly ecclesiastical. When it opened in 1881, The Times leader called it a ‘true Temple of Nature’, which, the writer said, demonstrated ‘the Beauty of Holiness’. But for many visitors in 1881 Nature had abandoned the temple for wilder places; she had bloodied her claws, and the beauty of holiness had been replaced by the more severe, mechanistic principles formulated by Charles Darwin.The concept of a large museum of natural history was the inspiration of the great naturalist Richard Owen. It was also the crowning achievement of his lifetime in science. The ‘Temple of Nature’ that Alfred Waterhouse built for him embodied Owen’s belief that the history of the natural world was not a matter of randomness and chance but the creation of a transcendent presence. In other words, the Natural History Museum is the expression of an ideology, and its shape, size, position, style and decoration are charged with legible meanings. Some of those meanings are readily interpreted, others less so, and although the building history of the museum has been well documented, many questions remain. Why, for example, was Waterhouse chosen as its architect? What spurred him on to use terracotta in such an original way? And above all why did he risk the unusual Romanesque style? The choice of Romanesque for such a building, although it was later imitated elsewhere, was highly original. But that choice was conditioned by a substantial web of aesthetic, social, and political factors. The Natural History Museum was not just Waterhouse’s creation; it was very much the product of its time. It was born of national and local politics; it was shaped by Owen’s unusual position in the scientific world, and it was an expression of Waterhouse’s passion for early medieval architecture.

Una aproximación a las técnicas constructivas de la Alta Edad Media en la Península Ibérica. Entre visigodos y omeyas

El estudio de la cultura arquitectónica alto medieval de la Península Ibérica se encuentra en un momento de renovación y contrastación caracterizado por la aplicación del método arqueológico. Especialmente, la estratigrafía permite abordar el estudio de las técnicas constructivas y otorgarlas un nuevo valor como potencial elemento diferenciador entre las distintas series arquitectónicas. Así se convierte en una de las claves para comprender las singularidades y las diferencias de las arquitecturas tardo antigua y alto medieval.

Early medieval architecture as bearer of meaning

Early medieval architecture as bearer of meaning

La iglesia de San Torcuato de Santa Comba de Bande (Orense): arqueología de la arquitectura

With this article a main objective is intended, to present the results of the archaeology of architecture study of Santa Comba de Bande building. Also some chronological elements of the church are discussed related to data obtained and the state of our knowledge on Early Medieval Architecture.

Early medieval architecture

Introduction 1. The Christian basilica 2. The Carolingian renaissance 3. Symbolic buildings 4. Architecture and pilgrimage 5. Architecture and monasticism 6. Diversity in the Romanesque era 7. The language of architecture 8. Secular architecture in the age of feudalism 9. Art and engineering 10. Patron and Builder Epilogue: the shadow of Rome Notes List of Illustrations Bibliographic Essay Timeline Index

A history of Russian architecture

Introduction Part I. Early Medieval Architecture: 1. Kiev and Chernigov 2. Novgorod and Pskov: eleventh to thirteenth centuries 3. Vladimir and Suzdal before the Mongol invasion 4. The revival of architecture in Novgorod and Pskov Part II. The Muscovite Period: 5. Moscow: architectural beginnings 6. The ascent of architecture in Muscovy 7. The seventeenth century: from ornamentalism to the new age 8. The foundations of the Baroque in Saint Petersburg 9. The late baroque in Russia: the age of Rastrelli 10. Neoclassicism in Petersburg: the age of Catherine the Great 11. Eighteenth-century neoclassicism in Moscow and the provinces 12. The early nineteenth century: Alexandrine neoclassicism Part IV. The Formation of Modern Russian Architecture: 13. Nineteenth-century historicism and eclecticism 14. Modernism during the early twentieth century 15. Revolution and reaction in Soviet architecture Appendices Notes Bibliography Index.