Romanesque Architecture in Europe

Influences
Geographical
Geological
Climatic
Historical and Social
Religious
Christianity, the chief source of education and culture, was gradually spreading throughout the
Northern Europe, and the erection of the church often resulted in the foundation of a city, for the
Papacy had been rising to a great power of the church which now often dominated public affairs.
The Principal Religious Orders were:
1. Benedictine Order (Black Monks)
- founded early in the 6
th
century at the Montecassino in the Southern Italy by S. Benedict of
Nursia.
- Possessions were held in common, but the absence of particular vows of poverty actually
facilitated charitable works and agrarian enterprise. Benedictine houses were commonly
sited in towns, part of the church being devoted to offices for the laity.
2. Cluniac Order
- Founded by Aboth Odo in 910 at Cluny in Burgundy
3. Carthusian Order
- Founded by S. Bruno at the Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble in 1086, returned to eremitic
and ascetic principles, which had elsewhere been relaxed. The charterhouses, often
remotely sited, provided separate cells for the monks, generally grouped around a cloister
garth, and the community served a simply-planned church; Carthusian architecture is
notably severe and unadorned.
4. Cistercian Order (White Monks)
- Founded in 1098 at Citeaux by S. Stephen Harding and at Clairvaux by S. Bernard.
- The ascetic aims of the Cistercian produced an architecture which was at first simple and
severe.
5. Secular Canons
- Serving principally cathedral and collegiate churches.
The orders of Canons Regular:
6. Augustinian Canons (Black Canons Regular),
- Establishment in about 1050. They undertook both monastic and pastoral duties in houses
often sited in towns, and planned similarly to those of the Benedictine Orders.
7. Premonstratensian Canons (White Canons Regular)
- Founded around 1100 by S. Norbert at Premontre in Picardy.
8. Gilbertine Canons
- An exclusively English Order founded in the 12
th
century by S. Gilbert of Sempringham,
usually combining a house of canons of Augustine rule with another nuns of Cistercian rule,
in conventional Buildings separately planned, attached to a common church divided axially
by a wall.
The Military Orders:
9. The Knights Templar
- Founded in 1119 to protect the Holy Places in Palestine and to safeguard the pilgrim routes
to Jerusalem. Templars churches were modeled upon the Rotunda of the Anastasis in the
Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem.
10. The Knights Hospitallers
- Organized in about 1113 under Augustinian rule. The order eventually held a great deal of
property in Europe, but developed no characteristic architecture of its own.
11. The Mendicant Orders of Friars
- Founded during the 13
th
century and headed by the Franciscans and the Dominicans.
- The functions of the friary churches were sufficiently distinctive to demand planning of a
characteristic kind, but they developed when Gothic architecture was already succeeding
Romanesque throughout most of Europe.
Architectural Character
- The general architectural character of the Romanesque style is sober and dignified, while
the formal massing depends on the grouping of towers and the projections of transepts and
choir.
- All the characters depend on the employment of vaulting, based initially on Roman
methods.
Roman Cross vaults
Rib and panel vaulting
Groin
Quadripartite vault
Sexpartite vaulting


Roman Basilica


Walls
Arcades

Monolithic column fluttings or with spirals, trellis or chevron patterns

Moulding
Ornament