One of the bittersweet realities for lovers of Romanesque art is that the majority of it exists in a state of decay and dislocation. Eight hundred or so years can diminish almost anything made by human hands, and human hands contribute more to medieval art's destruction than its preservation.
What you can see of Romanesque art is fragmentary, and/or worn to near-oblivion. That can be part of the art's appeal: its tantalizing, fragile connection to the people who made it, or used it. It can be an invitation to nostalgia, because we can pick and choose how to interpret what knowledge of it points to, and fill in the rest from our own imaginations.
The upshot is that none of us will ever see a pristine, intact example of such things in their original context. When one removes things from their context, one loses clues to understanding them.
That said, the fragments allow us to focus on individual elements as works of art-in-themselves, appreciate the skill at a particular level of detail, and ponder one instance of meaning from one piece. It's what we have of the past, and it's pleasurable to experience historic art this way.
England holds forth some unicorns of Victorian architecture: buildings which quote from medieval styles (with admitted romantic embellishments) and assemble medieval elements as they would have related to and harmonized with each other. There are many surviving Romanesque Revival buildings, but few take on the form as a near-replica of the medieval building. Victorian architects also did this with Ancient Greek and Roman architecture, especially in designing institutional buildings (for government, or for education). These pseudo-Classical buildings are usually a bid to claim the modern structure as the product of a similarly august culture--asserting that the British Empire is the heir to the Roman Empire. By contrast, Victorian re-creations of medieval-style buildings seem to secularize the mysticism of faith, not invoking the Empire of the Church (a more direct heir of the Roman Empire), but instead, conjuring a general romantic spirituality.
Without seeing the irony (I think), urban planners could tear down older buildings and replace them with new buildings that use historic styles, but tailored to the symbolic needs of the modern age. Baudrillard described this as "hyper-reality," where something real would be discarded in favor of something "better than real." For my purposes here, that approach to building recreates an admired physical component of the past, but improves upon it by discarding parts that are no longer useful, or are poorly understood, or are unwanted. In the case of Romanesque Revival buildings, the medieval aesthetic is invoked, but the new construction sheds the fact of their antiquity, and divorces the original style from the purposes and symbolism of its creators.
Not that that's always a bad thing. The late nineteenth century in Britain produced artists and architects who wanted to push back against the brutalities of urban industrial life. The Arts & Crafts, Romanesque Revival, and new-Celtic arts movements were often led by progressive artists who wanted to give working-class people access to art-creation, with lives that were more than work. The revivals were chosen with the idea that the medieval building forms (mostly the floral and animal ornaments) emphasized the value of nature, of artisanal work (as opposed to patron-based elite art), and of communal spaces over workspaces. That idea shoves a lot of brutal realities of nineteenth-century agrarian culture firmly under the mat, but that's where the hyper-reality comes in: cherry-pick the style, and re-tool it with more idealism than history.
I love the Romanesque Revival for its aesthetics, and for its flawed idealism. I'm no fan of Bauhaus austerity. I love the Romanesque Revival unicorns which adhere fairly faithfully to medieval church art, in part because I get to see in them a simulacrum of the ruins reborn intact.
So, as a lover of Romanesque art, I made the pilgrimage to the Watts Cemetery Chapel, near Guildford, in Surrey. It's not easy to get to, even by car, and I feared as we drew nearer to it that it wouldn't have much atmosphere, given the roar of the motorway just by it, and the bustling university town that dominates the region.
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