No medievalist, architectural historian or not, will want to miss Charles McClendon's fine, new, compendious study of early medieval architecture in Latin-speaking Europe. In some 209 text-pages and 200 plus illustrations (45 in color), McClendon selects a revealing series of major monuments from the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, explains how we may see each of them in political and religious context, and assesses the latest archaeological discoveries. McClendon designed his book to do double duty: not only to provide an introductory survey for a broad audience, but to spread before specialists an up-to-date synthesis of what we know about the topic, one that culminates with the argument that "the origins of medieval architecture" lie in the late Carolingian achievement. Specialists will appreciate the 44 densely printed pages he devotes to the endnotes and bibliography, which provide a masterful overview of the literature on early medieval architecture. [1] Indeed, those willing to flip conscientiously from McClendon's text to the endnotes, and back, will find the latest reports and interpretations set off smartly against those of the past. Old problems, long discussed, come to life again and take on new urgency. McClendon's pages on the Carolingian St.-Denis, the gate house at the monastery of Lorsch, the palace at Aachen, St.-Riquier at Centula, or the famous plan of St. Gall, inter alia, summarize complex issues in a nuanced way and spark new hypotheses. [2] One cannot help but admire the sweep of this study; McClendon presents so much so cogently in so few pages. But one admires even more his willingness to risk it. Most of the recent work in early medieval architecture today zeros in on individual monuments, archaeological digs, and strictly defined problems. [3] To be sure, none of this work can proceed unless the specialist brings some provisional, overarching, historical narrative to bear. But what many imply gingerly, McClendon sets out explicitly. In recent years (in English) only Roger Stalley has attempted anything similar--in his Early Medieval Architecture of 1999 for the Oxford History of Art series (see further below).
McClendon proceeds chronologically, framing his history politically by tracing the changing fortunes of the Latin European elites in the rise and fall of the various Germanic or Barbarian kingdoms. Two overarching religious developments play throughout, namely, the startling rise of the cult of relics everywhere in Latin Europe from the seventh century onward, which brought the altar-grave into sharp focus architecturally, and the equally striking rise of the monastery as a focus for early medieval civilization. Against this background, McClendon's art history unfolds in a quasi-anthropological way, as the play of distinct ethnic identities, Roman and Germanic, and as "a fusion of disparate elements" or "the integration of classical and 'barbarian' taste." In a first phase of early medieval architecture, which he treats in Part One entitled, "The 'Dark Ages'", he explains how Latin Europe's Germanic emigrants--the Visigoths in Spain, the Lombards in Italy, the Anglo-Saxons in England, and the Merovingian Franks in Gaul--slowly adapted the architectural legacy of Antique and Late Antique Rome and blended with it non-Antique, "nonclassical" aesthetic elements from their own Germanic traditions, mainly their taste for rich surface decor. McClendon sees this process continue in his second phase treated in Part Two (some 60% of the text) devoted to Carolingian Frankish building between 750 and 900. If these Franks referred much more specifically to Antique, and especially Late Antique, Roman models, they nevertheless interpreted them according to their own Germanic sensibility. "The so-called Carolingian Renaissance," McClendon sums up, "marked a shift in degree rather than kind" from that first phase (195). McClendon savors one deep irony, that as the Carolingian political order unraveled in the last half of the ninth century, Carolingian architecture flourished. He argues compellingly that the great abbey churches in question (from the last half of the ninth), the ones featuring huge, towered westworks and multi-storied exterior crypts, "provided the basic vocabulary of forms for all subsequent church building throughout the Middle Ages and beyond..." (209).
As I say, the book will serve a generation of advanced undergraduates and graduate students as an introduction. But McClendon's study will not so much replace Roger Stalley's Early Medieval Architecture (Oxford History of Art, 1999) in this role as supplement, broaden, and deepen that earlier study. Where Stalley footnotes perfunctorily, opting instead for a "bibliographic essay" and a chronological timeline of monuments, McClendon meticulously documents his argument step by step. Both Stalley and McClendon give the same prominence to late Carolingian architecture: both treat it as innovative, as forecasting much of the variety and interest that tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-century architecture in Latin-speaking Europe has for us. But if Stalley starts where McClendon does, with the Early Christian basilicas in Rome and Ravenna, he moves much more quickly, touching only glancingly on issues and monuments that McClendon takes up at length, in order to extend his survey to the full-blown Romanesque in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. McClendon treats the Carolingian aftermath cursorily in an epilogue, only hinting at the Romanesque developments to come. If McClendon tells a single story that coordinates formal issues of taste, style, and architectural iconography with patronage (more about this just below), Stalley keeps telling his story over and over again in each of his chapters, each treating a distinct topic--iconography, patronage, structural engineering, pilgrimage, monasticism, and so forth. McClendon treats secular architecture cogently (mainly royal Frankish palaces); Stalley has a fine chapter on the feudal castle in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
But if both historians see a "single development" in which an Antique, and a Late Antique Roman architectural tradition (a classic architecture) was transformed, they provide radically different accounts of the change. Stalley speaks of the "sub-Antique" aspects that come into play after the fall of the Western Empire at the end of the fifth century, something he ascribes to the early medieval builders' limited technical expertise, their lack of means (since building on large scale with vaulting and fancy orders was expensive), their struggle to make a classic architecture suit new liturgical needs, and so forth; he sees early medieval builders raiding, and then liberally playing upon motifs they drew from the classical tradition. McClendon, however, describes another process altogether: a merging of "artistic traditions," classic and non-classic, that is, Antique and Germanic (see especially McClendon's summary at the end of his Chapter 3 on "Romanitas and the Barbarian West," pp. 57-58).
I find this a core issue that all readers of McClendon's survey will wish to ponder. For instance, in Chapter 4, devoted to Anglo-Saxon architecture in the seventh and eighth centuries (mostly in Northumbria), McClendon tells of several ways in which Anglo-Saxon builders followed Antique and Late Antique Roman tradition-by focusing worship spaces on icons and stained-glass windows, and by building in stone with arches, piers, and columns more Romano. At the same time, McClendon insists, they also "subtly combined" that tradition with ideas, motifs, and approaches from their own non-Antique, Germanic practice. Thus the plans of the abbey churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow follow that of the typical royal Anglo-Saxon long hall, built of wood. A stained-glass window (he illustrates a reconstructed example from Jarrow) or a columnar portal (the famous one from the façade of St. Peter's at Wearmouth) incorporate forms or motifs from Germanic Style II Animal ornament in Anglo-Saxon metalwork (see McClendon's summary on pp. 82-83).
But do we really deal in these cases with the fusing, blending, or mixing of traditions? Or do we encounter something more like pastiche, the kind of bricolage that energizes virtually all visual/architectural composition, and that takes effect from stark, even violent juxtapositions? The plans of the late seventh-century Northumbrian abbey churches may well play off that of the chieftain's hall, borrowing the latter's prestige to make a political point, but we need not present that as the result of any merging of Germanic and Christian (Mediterranean, classic) taste or sensibility in aesthetic terms. I would see rather one tradition (or practice or visual habit) interrupting the other. The male saint depicted in the stained-glass window from Jarrow functions like any Mediterranean icon; those aspects of the portrait that echo motifs familiar from, say, the jewels decorating the Sutton Hoo purse lid, overlie and clash, rather than fuse with the Late Antique icon. The portal from Wearmouth (pp. 73-79) conforms closely (if brutally) to norms established centuries previously in ancient Roman Imperial Corinthian scenic design: the builders merely substitute some Germanic interlaced birds for the typical acanthus vine scrolls we expect to see. Pastiche perhaps, but not, I submit, any blending of practices, much less of any Antique architectural one with a barbarian art of small-scale bodily adornment.
McClendon's discussion of the contemporary, late seventh-century/early eighth-century east facade of the Baptistery of St.-Jean at Poitiers, a Merovingian Frankish project, takes much the same form, but adds a new note (pp. 43-46). Here he talks of a scenic Corinthian classic confection as having "integrated" a nonclassic barbarian element, that is, mainly, two, large, ornamental rosettes with "colorful and abstract patterns" made of terra-cotta tiles that come close to those drawn with the aid of a compass in Frankish manuscript illumination from the late seventh and early eighth centuries. "Such a lively display of surface pattern," he says, "has nothing to do with structural logic . . ." (46) meaning that the nonclassical rosettes interrupt (have nothing to do with) the design (or the logic) of the classical aediculae. For a moment, it seems, McClendon contemplates a clash of visual practices. But not really, or not for long. The author's impulse throughout is to search for an early medieval architectural style in a formal way, a style that "combines" the Germanic and the Roman. At St.-Jean in Poitiers he concludes not by talking about the juxtaposition of forms, or styles, or habits of seeing, but about their blending-about "the fusion of disparate elements".
Consider in this light McClendon's assessment of the Corinthian column screen in the main west front of the Tempietto del Clitunno near Spoleto, deemed here a Lombard project of the early eighth century. "One would never find such a decorative applique of classical orders in a pagan temple," he writes, underlining the screen's inherently non-classical, that is, "Christian" design (53). By the end of the chapter in question on "Romanitas and the Barbarian West," McClendon concludes that, around 700, Visigoths, Franks, and Lombards "enthusiastically appropriated...many elements from the late antique past," among them the classical orders, and in the process introduced new approaches to them by synthesizing classical and barbarian forms (58). Throughout McClendon seeks to key stylistic development to the passage of time: the Tempietto del Clitunno's main front, then, has an early medieval style. But does the form of the screen really depart so sharply from the past? What I would argue McClendon misses here is something fundamental about classical architecture: in a sentence, Roman imperial builders used Corinthian column screens as appliques (as decorative screens for walls) right from the start under Augustus and everywhere-in triumphal arches, city gates, scenae frontes, bath halls, temple cellae, palace aulae and facades, nymphaea, and on and on. [4] Being an applique is precisely how, most of the time, a classical order functioned in Roman imperial architecture (for example, in the orders stacked up in two stories inside Emperor Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome). There is not one formal aspect of the screen at the Clitunno that does not conform strictly to the Roman imperial canon. In appropriating that canon the Tempietto's early medieval builders did not adjust it in any way.
If one grants this, then McClendon's formal assessment of the famous late-eighth century Torhalle (gate house) at the abbey of Lorsch can seem less compelling. He declares the design of the gate house facade "remarkable in its studied classicism," but concludes anyway that "this careful rendering of ancient forms serves only to create a decorative veneer without any structural logic...a valiant attempt to incorporate elements of ancient architecture into a more decorative medieval mode" (94). Such an analysis gives shape to McClendon's story--he can explain how in any given instance two "aesthetics," classical and the nonclassical, blended--but will such formal analysis bear scrutiny?
Historians of medieval art typically invoke the fusing of traditions classical and nonclassical to animate their histories--to energize a historical dialectic in the style of Romantic philosophy and thus reify in the styles of objects something conceived as a process of consciousness. We deal here with our discipline's insistence that things fashioned by human-hands-to-be-beautiful reveal the minds of their fashioners, and that the minds in question reflect human experience as it is conditioned by race, by place of origin, and by ethnicity. But can we any longer take such history- making for granted as McClendon seems to do?
McClendon's history of early medieval architecture puts "artistic traditions" in play in two ways: (1) abstractly when the author tells how the "taste" of whole groups of people, the various Germanic emigrants to Western Europe, transformed an indigenous and long established Roman tradition they encountered there, and (2) concretely (so to speak) when he traces how individual taste, that of actual patrons of architectural projects, came to bear on that tradition. This is featured in Chapter 7, "Private Patronage and Personal Taste," which deals with Theodulf's Germigny-des-Pres, Einhard's projects at Steinbach and Seligenstadt, and Pope Paschal I's in Rome, mainly at Santa Prassede, but the urge to explain early medieval buildings as products of the choices made by individual patrons appears throughout. McClendon deals with the iconography of architecture in this way, talking about how specific builders exchanged ideas and motifs in networks of friendship and alliance, especially monastic ones. This is a history in an entirely different key from the grand dialectic of the classical-versus-the-nonclassical just described, and for me a far more alluring and interesting aspect of the book. Thus, for example, McClendon explains the development of the elaborate exterior crypts and the towered westworks that late Carolingian builders experimented with, and featured, mainly, in great abbey churches. It is exciting to read about the invention (the introduction) of the outer crypt in the late years of the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious by Abbot Hilduin of St.-Denis, to hear how that iconographic motif symbolized a Frankish image of empire, and how it early spread to the abbey of Corvey on the basis of Hilduin's personal connections with Corvey's own abbot. Outer crypts multiplied, says McClendon, in the later ninth with ever renewed ideological significance in abbey churches at Werden, St.-Philibert- de-Grandlieu, St.-Germain at Auxerre, Flavigny's St.-Pierre, and in at least one cathedral, at Hildesheim, on the same basis, that of "human experience and personal contact" in elaborate overlapping networks of monastic friendship (pp. 174-183).
Treating patrons as agents, as the minds behind the forms that invest the forms with meaning, allows the historian to avoid some of the banalities (the abstraction) of style analysis--as McClendon quite frankly observes on p. 183 despite his having provided quite a bit of such history-making in his new book. But taking such a view of patronage can also hide the ways that patronage itself is constructed in a building--constructed there in much the same ways as any other aspect. McClendon seems to acknowledge this when he observes that the abbatial builders of exterior crypts in the ninth century often used them as personal mausolea and thus as a means to stage their own elite status in Frankish society--this happens quite clearly, he says, at St.-Germain, Auxerre (182). But he does not explain fully enough, I would judge, how such tombs served communities of monks in general (not just the megalomania of their putative patrons who had themselves buried next to the relics of venerated founders). What was at stake politically? Why did the monastery loom ever more importantly in late Carolingian society as an image of civilization, and how did architecture help produce that image?
I reiterate: this is a most stimulating, compendious, and carefully documented history of early medieval architecture in the Latin West. While it foregrounds the architectural historian's traditional preoccupation with form, it also pushes toward new understandings. McClendon's book will be very widely--and deservedly--read.
NOTES
[1] But the book's list of abbreviations, p. 210, was missing.
[2] Allow me to add here this late-breaking bit of news: earlier this year (2007), UCLA's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies announced that it would mount a project to study the St. Gall Plan and develop a digitized version of it for the WWW. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, its directors are UCLA's Patrick Geary and U.VA.'s Bernhard Frischer; Barbara Schedl at UCLA collaborates.
[3] Carol Heitz's L'architecture religieuse carolingienne, Les formes et leurs fonctions (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1980) may look at first to be a notable exception (may look to be a survey); but it is as focused as the rest (on liturgy mainly). See McClendon's review in the JSAH 41, 1982, 58-59.
[4] J. J. Emerick, The Tempietto del Clitunno near Spoleto (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1998), ch. 7 for Corinthian column screens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.