 We're going to talk today about Charlemagne and we're going to talk about Europe and the architecture of Europe in the Middle Ages. Charlemagne descends through Pepin from a line of Frankish kings, and back in 599 AD, Clovis, king of the Franks, adopted Christianity as his religion. Charlemagne was very adamant about enforcing the spread of Christianity throughout the territories that he conquered. On one occasion, it is said that he slaughtered 4,500 pagans who would not convert and agree to be baptized as Christians. And so if you wonder why nobody's worshiping Zeus and Athena anymore, Charlemagne is probably more responsible for that than most historical figures. Charlemagne was a very successful general and in his combats he was able to unite vast swaths of Europe. So you see over here in green and in light green the extent of the Byzantine Empire. This is what Justinian had coming in, the light green is what Justinian had going out, but all around there are barbarian tribes. We have the Vandals in North Africa, we have the Franks in France, we have the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy, you name it, barbarians everywhere. And so Charlemagne is successful in uniting together a lot of these lands, forming a strong centralized empire and he actually goes to Rome and has hope crown him emperor and kind of like a Holy Roman emperor although that term doesn't come into currency at the time. And so Charlemagne's embrace of Christianity, Charlemagne's unification of these vast lands in Europe also had to do with a rebalance of power in Europe at the time. And again if you look over here all of Spain at this period is under Islamic control and all of the area in through here is under Islamic control. So Charlemagne consolidates this new kingdom that more or less is France and Germany as his new kingdom. This is Charlemagne's vision where St. James appears to him and tells him go forth and conquer and this is his magnificent coronation by the Pope in Rome. Insofar as Charlemagne identified himself with the Romans he tried to make manifest symbols of his power in a way that was specifically Roman. We looked very briefly at this equestrian statue of Charlemagne or if not Charlemagne at least some other Carolingian king. And even the idea that he would be portrayed riding a horse is a Roman idea. One of the few large scale statues that comes down to us from antiquity is this one that we see on the left hand side of the screen that's probably Marcus Aurelius on a horse. There were a lot of large scale bronze statues in classical antiquity most of them got melted down to make cannons or cannon balls or munitions or other sorts. But this one was thought to be a statue of Constantine for a very long time and since Constantine was the first Christian emperor the statue received special treatment and was preserved and ha it wasn't it was Marcus Aurelius. We always find it instructive to make these comparisons between figural arts of different periods and if you look at the Marcus Aurelius statue and you look at the Carolingian statue it's a sad little copy kind of. Look at the muscularity of the horse. Look at the gesture of the outstretched hand of the Marcus Aurelius figure. Look at the way the drapery falls on gravity. Look at the flex in the calf. You can feel the kind of engagement of man and horse and here in the Carolingian statue it really is a kind of little wooden puppet on a very stiff almost cartoon version of a horse it's also much smaller the Marcus Aurelius statue is about 11 and a half feet tall and the Carolingian statue is about this tall. Even 50 years before this is a technological marvel the idea that he would have himself cast in bronze riding a horse is just one glimpse into Charlemagne's ambition to reconstitute himself as a Roman emperor as a holy Roman emperor both Christian and emperor because this is a pose that Roman emperors would often favor for their own portraiture. What makes it hard to do is that this task of casting in bronze had more or less been forgotten it might have been possible to make a few pairs of candlesticks or maybe a little you know cup but these task of casting a equestrian statue in bronze is an engineering problem like how do you get these little horse legs to support the weight of everything else above it or even how do you make a mold that will allow you to liberate this statue because if you cast in bronze you basically have to make a wax model first then you make a kind of clay mold around that cut it in half pull that apart melt your bronze see I could have been the guy who made this and then you pour the molten bronze in there but it's not that easy right because they're all of these undercuts they're all of these little things that are gonna get stuck in the mold so you just have to figure out ways to put it together and piece it together so these are some of the artifacts of Charlemagne his crown the pendant his equestrian statue and Charlemagne had a had the person in his court who wrote his biography and the biography of Charlemagne follows the models of say Suetonius's life of Augustus just follows exactly the same formula as though this is just one more emperor whose life is being described according to court formula when it comes time for Charlemagne to build a palace he builds it in Achim which is sort of right around in through here it's present day Germany but in those days national borders were not so well-defined builds a palace in Achim he has an architect called Odo of Metz and a lot of the ideas about the palace of Charlemagne pull from Roman precedent but these Carolingian copies are always slightly off and I think it's really a nice little window into a culture to see what they copy and what they discard for example one of the Carolingian buildings is a little gate house at a monastery in Lorsch in Germany in contemporary Carolingian texts is described as a model of a triumphal arch it's a Roman triumphal arch and you look at the thing and you have to say I don't think so I've seen triumphal arches the Constantine arch that we see on the right hand side of the screen is a good example of a triumphal arch so in what sense could the Lorsch gatehouse be a triumphal arch now and a lot of it has to do with an interest in numerology for example number symbolism which becomes more important than say physical attributes of the building the idea that there is a patterned surface substitutes in for the idea that there is a fully plastic and develop system of articulation on the Constantine arch what really counts as the notion of three that three is the Trinity three is a holy number we have three opening match funny idea though clunky proportion and another possible thing that's being referred to and maybe the gatehouse at Lorsch isn't as clunky and silly as I was suggesting maybe it's folding in two different references at the same time maybe on one hand through number symbolism it's alluding to the Roman precedent of a triumphal arch but in another way it's alluding to the little propoleum the entryway to the courtyard of Old St. Peter's Church so we have this little gate piece here that this also begins to look like and so in its clumsiness it manages to adhere to two precedents or two models here we have a drawing and this is one of the oldest architectural drawings that comes down to us Carolingian drawing from 820 of a monastery in Switzerland St. Gall and if you look at this plan of the monastery it really is kind of modeled on the Roman camp kind of using as its precedent and here we have Diocletian's Palace which is a kind of Roman camp a gridded organization with a thick bar of program a thick bar of program and and so forth with fora in the middle with fora or let's say courtyards in the middle so at every moment if there's a Roman precedent available the Carolingians use it and then transform it in some horribly inappropriate way or let's say in a way deeply and richly loaded with meaning so now let's go back to the palace in Aachen so here's the palace in Aachen and it's a kind of odd thing in that there is a courtyard over here and a round building over here with a couple of little buildings clipping on to it a long connecting piece and a little basilica over there it's a kind of hodgepodge of buildings on one sense or in another sense it models itself again on Roman precedent and we see here one of the Roman fora where a temple the forum of Augustus where a temple piece slips in to a courtyard and becomes the object in that courtyard and that's kind of what's going on over here this round chapel slips into a courtyard as a Roman temple would slip into a courtyard because after all Charlemagne is Roman he was a Roman emperor as far as he's concerned but it's not simply a temple because remember when we were discussing church typology Christian church typology earlier in this class we mentioned that there was no interest in appropriating the formal language of pagan temples for Christian churches that would be crazy right why would you put a temple on a Christian church temple fronts like the one we have here at the forum of Augustus belong to pagan ritual so there's a different typology that comes into play over here we see San Vitale in Revena that we looked at earlier in this class and you could also even say the mausoleum the martyrdom of Santa Costanza in Rome which is even earlier comes into play both our centralized churches both our churches ring with an ambulatory both our churches that suppress the notion of procession in favor of the tall centralized space a single center there are other precedents that could also be considered for example the church of the holy sepulchre in Jerusalem and maybe this is even the closest model and this is again very very early 345 this is meant to be constructed on the place of Christ's tomb here there's a really strong figural centralized building preceded by a courtyard so the clunky awkward caroling in copy gains richness by folding together all of these just different precedents the church of the holy sepulchre the Roman forum San Vitale in Revena and and Revena when San Vitale was constructed was the capital of the Western Roman Empire so as a successor to the Roman Empire he's simply making up kind of broad sweep through the precedents available to him so let's look at the chapel the palace chapel in Aachen it's also called the Palatine Chapel and it's sometimes called X La Chapelle as a point of comparison this is X La Chapelle and this is San Vitale and this is X La Chapelle they're really very very similar they're both round churches with this very very tall space and a permeable ambulatory and ambulatory is the space ringing the perimeter the language of the palace chapel is a kind of hybrid almost between Roman plasticity let's say and the flatness of a Byzantine wall for example we see the stonework there's a kind of pattern making a kind of articulating the arch showing you how the structure works and so forth as opposed to the simple flatness of mosaic ornament that we saw in the earlier examples when Charlemagne dies his kingdom is divided into three parts there Louis the German is Charlemagne's son and he gets what is more or less Germany Charles the Bald gets what is more or less France and Lothar gets stuff in the middle but what's important is that the consolidation of all these lands into one unified power was brief but fairly effective civil governments become much much less important in organizing the orderly exchange of everyday life than monastic orders which become stronger and stronger and stronger and it's a period of incredible difficulty from a lot of fronts everybody bad is coming in for example the red arrows that you see coming down from the north are Viking raiders and the Viking raiders find that these monasteries these centers of culture the centers of learning are incredibly rich and so they're good targets to pilfer if you want to get some gold if you want to get some nice jeweled candelabra go no farther than a magnificent monastery the Magyars are coming in from the east and likewise they're threatening the stability of all these countries and the Islamic forces are coming in from the south so Europe is very very unstable there's an attempt to band together in little alliances to get get a stronger position of stability during this period the Crusades to the holy lands begin they begin in like about 1100 and they go on for a while but particularly and what we want to talk about is monasticism becomes a really really strong institution already in the 5th century st. Benedict began to organize monasteries in a way that were much much more centric and much much more let's say bureaucratic and about developing an extensive structure of trade and commerce and the exchange of ideas and the exchange of technologies so that you began to get developments like mills water wheels or great presses and because they were so successful at the inventive almost proto industrialization of agriculture they got richer and richer and richer so this is just a little map of monasteries Trier by the way up here was a Roman town Cologne was a Roman town these were all Roman towns and and now everything is fully Christian the strongest of all the monasteries was Clooney in the southeastern part of France and what made Clooney so successful is that it wasn't organized by affiliations with regional dukes and princes and so forth but it had responsibilities only to Rome so it had an incredibly elaborate structure and it it lent land and donations to other monasteries following the Clooney act rituals and and trade routes became widely established most of Clooney was destroyed this is a little piece of it that exists and it's worth looking at this fragment of the third construction of the Clooney church because it begins to show us certain things that are typical of architecture of this period and let's call this period Romanesque and why would we call it Romanesque and an answer would be kind of Roman Romanesque that sounds kind of stupid and flippant but but what I mean by that is is sort of serious it's an architecture that deals with the wall as a heavy object and it borrows a lot of formal ideas from Roman architecture like the round-headed arch that we saw or the barrel vault or the groin vault so there are lots of technological and structural developments that are conserved or let's say rediscovered in Romanesque architecture and widely applied in terms of the general massing of the building and by massing I mean the disposition of geometrical volumes that make up the form that this fragment of Clooney is is a good example of what we characterize as Romanesque typically you get these really simple severe geometric solids it's not an architecture that tends to dissolve into highly elaborated surfaces but rather it conserves the volumetrics so here we see this kind of conical hat and this octagonal tower base or this rectilinear prism of a tower base it's almost like you could build Romanesque buildings with children's blocks because everything is so blocky and so clear and so so strongly defined Clooney is a model of Jerusalem in its articulation and it's in its symbolism and it's huge just to give you a sense of how Clooney grew and prospered this is Clooney 1 the first Clooney church Clooney is the town it's the church of St. Peter and Paul but everybody would refer to it as Clooney really quite modest in scale by the time the next Clooney church is built only about 30 years later it is you know quadrupled in size and notice the structure of this church this is a kind of church that you begin to see the type of church you begin to see again and again as a pilgrimage church your pilgrims coming in and you need to have lots of circulation at the perimeter because they're visiting different altars they're visiting different shrines so we have a double aisle system here and we have lots of little radial chapels here in the apps that begin to accommodate multiple shrines even here in the transeps and we have a double transep because we have so much to venerate in a powerful abbey like Clooney in here we have a little little little chapels coming off of of the transep also and the chapels for the most part want to face east so they don't unfold symmetrically off the transeps they go up in the direction that the apps and the radiating chapels of the apps are moving this is a little map of medieval sites and Clooney is right in here and there's a strong density of these Romanesque buildings right around the Clooney region this network of monasteries makes travel safer particularly travel for pilgrims and there's this big exchange of ideas along pilgrimage routes too this is a fragment let's say of the network of pilgrimage routes to the Church of Santiago de Compostelo the Church of St. James in Spain as people make these pilgrimages they make offerings they bring with them local cultures there's a there's a consolidation of the culture of Europe through the pilgrimage churches and the kinds of things they're going to see are important relics because you can bring benefit to the everlasting life of your soul or the soul of loved ones by making pilgrimages this is for example a reliquary and a reliquary is something that you put a relic in and a relic is something that was once part of a very holy person like a saint so what do you suppose was in this reliquary any ideas could it be a foot this is somebody's hand and here you have a couple more reliquaries this is one of my favorite reliquaries this is in the Church of San Domenico in Siena and it's just a little shrunken head of Saint Catherine she was a very holy woman and there you have it if you go to Santiago de Compostelo today the roads and by the roads I mean like the interstate highways will be full of people like this man right over here with a shell around their neck and a walking stick making the pilgrims people still make the pilgrimage today and the shell is for eating and drinking and begging because you're having this kind of completely aesthetic life you're denying yourself pleasures of the flesh and you're just relying on the mercy of strangers as you make this pilgrimage this is the church of Santiago de Compostelo the destination of the great pilgrimage routes and you look at the facade and this is not an accurate representation of the facade this is all baroked up in a way that is not recognizable but the plan typology we still see as a Romanesque pilgrimage church plan typology and we know that because we have this continuous ambulatory around the edge you could walk the entire perimeter of the church and venerate all the different altars while other activities are going on in the nave and the transept and if you look at this massing model of how Santiago de Compostelo would have looked in its original form you begin to see that it too adheres to these basic rules about you know what constitutes a Romanesque church really simple massing really strong geometries small punched windows a real emphasis on the solidity of the wall in terms of the structure of the church the super structure of the church there'll be lots of round headed arches and probably lots of barrel vaults and cross vaults going in here so these are just a number of pilgrimage churches as a point of comparison Santiago de Compostelo the first one that we see over here and some some minor churches along the route to Santiago tour Toulouse and conch and typologically they're all pretty darn similar they all permit the circulation at the perimeter they all have these radial chapels and they all also have another feature which is this thickened edge that we see over here and this thickened edge is called a west work this is the thickened edge often flanked by two towers this is a baroque up version of a west work where we have two towers and a facade and this is quite different from what we had with our early Christian churches that we looked at before where the outward expression of the church facade was more or less hidden behind a courtyard where the church was not ostentatious where the church was not projecting its status and wealth but rather was emphasizing its humility by the time we get here it's all about this this new almost billboard like expression of the power of the church through these these big facades let's look at this little church in France little monastic church called Saint foie which means holy faith if you saw this plan you would know immediately just by looking at the plan that it was probably a pilgrimage church and you would probably know it's Romanesque why would you know those things what qualities would tell you that about this building who's got an idea yes okay we have chapels radiating off the transept good and you had plaid shirt guy you had a comment we have the ambulatories along the edges great and another thing that you can see is the windows are pretty small right this is a building that has a lot to do with a heavy massive wall and not so much to do with the dematerialization of that wall although this type of plan that is to say a Latin cross plan with radiating chapels at the apps could also be the kind of plan you find for a gothic church but in the case of a gothic church there would be a lot a lot less wall here would be a lot more dematerialized this aerial view of the church of Saint foie shows you a west work a kind of classic Romanesque west work two towers the idea of a surface that gets punched in very specific ways specific ways are round headed windows and now we have a new feature which is this round circular window which is called a rose window and the rose window represents the Virgin Mary and it's a feature that becomes increasingly part of what every Romanesque and and gothic church has and the rose window represents the Virgin Mary and the cult of the Virgin Mary becomes very very popular if you think about the whole inscription of this army of saints into the simple early Christian religion by the time by the time we're here in the Romanesque period we have a saint that can do almost everything you know a saint that can help you find things is that st. Jude a saint that can help you study hard I don't know who that is you were to find that one by two weeks from now part of that has to do with incorporating local pagan cults into Christianity so Mary becomes incredibly important because you need to have a really strong maternal figure within the kind of pantheon of people associated with the church so the rose window represents the Virgin Mary she is meant to be like a rose which is to say beautiful but untouchable because of the thorns she is of course the Virgin Mother of Christ so beautiful but untouchable and we have the rose window to remind us of that there are a couple of interesting things going on in this facade also notice these vertical buttresses that support the wall and are beginning to suggest a certain kind of verticality and a different kind of articulation than the articulation we had in classical buildings because one thing that the classical orders always did is bring down any building no matter how big that building was to human scale so you see something like the Colosseum which is colossal Colosseum but it breaks itself into multiple stories all of which are articulated by a columnar order and you you can kind of measure the dimensions of your own body against the dimensions of the columns the orders have that property here the vertical is beginning to be exaggerated in such a way as to take your eye away from bodies on earth and up toward heaven this is just the little church of Saint-Foy in its densely packed little town and this is an important reliquary in Saint-Foy and in fact this is considered to be one of the most precious reliquaries and pieces of figural statuary from the period it's gold it's encrusted with gems sort of like that little equestrian statue the carolingian equestrian statue we looked at in its rigidity and its hieratic posture not a posture involving a human being engaged in natural activity but striking a ritual pose here's another monastic complex the Fontaine Abbey also Romanesque and it's worth looking at this because it has all the component parts that you need for this new type which is monastery it has a cloister which is a courtyard over here it has a church it has a refectory which is a dining hall it has various chapter houses for meetings to take place and so forth the idea of the monastery has to do with an attitude that monastic communities had and that was pulling themselves out of the world and having this inward community so much so that although the monastic complex proper represents one level of engagement with the world the cloister pulls even further inward and here's the facade of the Fontaine Abbey church it really is severe in its planarity we see these vertical buttresses we see the round punched windows but we really see a dominant architecture of wall and just to remind you about these arches and these barrel halls that we're seeing increasingly in the Romanesque churches as we mentioned before there are limits to what post and beam structures can do and a lot of that has to do with failure at the points points of connection where the lintel will snap and break the arch by contrast transfers loads horizontally or let's say diagonally through the system and becomes a kind of self-supporting stable element the barrel vault translates the arch through space and begins to make the superstructure the interior roof form of a lot of these Romanesque churches and sometimes you have aisles clipped on and this is more or less what we got at the Fontaine church a barrel vault with little barrel vaults on the side of it and then all these systems work in tandem the lateral thrust here gets deflected over here and you have an intact system I want to show you one more monastery because this one is late but it's a really good one and when I say late it's 1396 by the time we get to 1396 we could already be talking about Renaissance buildings in a certain context and this is a building from Italy so that's where the Renaissance hits it's the church of Pavia and Pavia is just outside of Milan I like this one because I think it's the clearest example of all of these hierarchical divisions that get brought to you by the monastic compound so here's the church and notice the church is strange it's almost as though there's like a little baby church a little baby cruciform church stuck at the apps of the church and that's because it's a monastic church and these monks hold themselves out of society and do not occupy the same space as the laity so if there are people from the town of Pavia that want to worship at the service they would come in here and the monks who live in this community would go into the little baby church over here the monks choir it would be called likewise there are all these different spaces this is a kind of farmyard for all the agricultural crops being grown by the monk and this is a forecourt and in this forecourt called a parvi this is a place that the laity and the habit the leader of the monastery could get together and and exchange goods for example the laity might bring chickens in exchange for the honey that the monks have made and things like that and that could happen in this space but the spaces in through here the cloisters are only for the monks and in the case of the church of Pavia this big cloister is a place where all the monks can come in but if you notice along the edge here each monk has his own little garden so you get this kind of nesting of different scales of elements the kind of overall monastic compound the big cloister the little cloister and so forth and the same happens with the church and it kind of reminds me and not in a very serious way but it kind of reminds me of the geometry of the fractal and when I say it kind of reminds me of the geometry of the fractal a fractal is a recursive self-similar system where one organization at one scale begins to sponsor a another iteration of that organization at another scale I think the church of Pavia exemplify some of those qualities this is probably one of the most famous of the Romanesque churches and it looks a little bit different than some this is the Campo dei Miracoli the field of miracles is what that translates to if you look at something like this photograph or if you look at this plan I think this photograph is pretty great because it really does show you this notion of Romanesque massing that the Romanesque really has to do with these platonic forms in space and it's a collection of a number of buildings here we have a baptistery and a baptistery is a new type that we should become familiar with a baptistery will have a baptismal font in the middle and it's pretty much circular centralized building here's the church proper and notice that there is this monks choir attached to it and over here we have a tower but not a very good tower because look what happens to this tower it's a mess it's leaning but even though this surface is highly articulated with all of these little columns it's still a severe plane it still doesn't give you habitable space it just becomes a kind of three dimensionalized surface so I think that's enough for now we've got to get back and do recitations and we will continue next time