Romanesque Art and the Catechesis of Images

Everything starts with a crisis and a letter. At the end of the 6th century, Bishop Serenus of Marseille, scandalised to see the faithful prostrate themselves before images, had them broken and thrown out of his church. Pope Gregory the Great then wrote him two letters that have remained famous, laying down the Western doctrine of the teaching image.

The word of Saint Gregory the Great

Gregory approves the bishop's concern — one must not worship an image — but condemns his brutality: to destroy images is to deprive the people of what instructs them. His formula became the foundation of all Christian art in the West:

"It is one thing to worship a painting, another to learn, through the story told by a painting, what must be worshipped. For what writing offers to those who read, painting offers to the illiterate who look upon it, since in it the ignorant see what they must follow, in it those who do not know letters read." — Saint Gregory the Great, letter to Serenus of Marseille, c. 600^[2]

Three ideas are knotted together here for a thousand years. First a distinction: the image is not made to be worshipped, but to teach. Then an equivalence: painting is to the illiterate exactly what text is to the literate — a means of access to the same truth. Finally a mission: to deprive the people of images is to prevent them from "reading" the one thing necessary.

A Christendom that does not read

To grasp the scope of this doctrine, one must picture the audience of Romanesque art. In the 11th and 12th centuries, reading is the privilege of a tiny minority: clerics, monks, a few scholars. The vast majority of Christians — peasants, artisans, pilgrims — read neither the Latin of the liturgy nor even their own tongue^[3]. The book is a rare and costly object, copied by hand, locked away in monastic libraries.

In such a world, the image is the only mass medium. It demands no prior learning: eyes suffice. That is why the historian Émile Mâle, the great decipherer of medieval art, could write that the Middle Ages conceived art as a sacred script which the whole people had to know how to read:

"The Middle Ages conceived art as teaching. Everything that men needed to know — the history of the world since the creation, the dogmas of religion, the examples of the saints, the hierarchy of virtues, the variety of sciences, arts and crafts — all this was taught to them by the stained glass of the church or by the statues of the porch." — Émile Mâle, Religious Art in Thirteenth-Century France^[4]

"The Bible of the poor"

Hence the traditional expression "Bible of the poor" (in Latin Biblia pauperum). Strictly speaking, the expression would later designate collections of typological images; broadly, it names the whole enterprise of medieval religious art: placing before the eyes of the people, in images, the content of Scripture which they cannot read with their own eyes^[5]. The Romanesque church is, literally, a Bible one visits: one enters it as one would open a book, and each wall is a page of it.

This catechesis is never purely decorative. It is ordered: the scenes have a place, a meaning, a logic. The portal teaches salvation and judgment; the capitals, the battles of the soul; the frescoes, sacred history from Creation to Redemption. Romanesque art is a discourse, not an adornment.

The synod of Arras (1025) and the continuity of the doctrine

Gregory's principle never ceased to be reaffirmed. At the very moment the Romanesque age opens, the synod of Arras (1025), convened to answer heretics who rejected images, restates the same doctrine: the image instructs the illiterate^[6]. Between Gregory the Great (c. 600) and the great flowering of the tympana (c. 1100), it is the same conviction that is handed down: the image instructs the people of God.

Before examining the works, the word must be placed. "Romanesque art" denotes the great Christian style of the West which flourishes from around the year 1000 to the middle of the 12th century, before the Gothic succeeds it.

An art from the year 1000 to the 1150s

The term "Romanesque" was coined in the 19th century, by analogy with the Romance languages born of Latin: just as French descends from Latin, Romanesque architecture descends from ancient Roman forms — the vault, the round arch, the massive pier^[7]. It is the art of abbeys and pilgrimage churches: Cluny, Conques, Vézelay, Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, Santiago de Compostela. An art bound to a great surge of faith, monastic foundations and pilgrimages which, after the fears of the year 1000, covered Europe with "a white mantle of churches", in the words of the chronicler Raoul Glaber^[8].

The art of wall and stone

Romanesque art has an aesthetic of its own, which follows from its technique. To bear heavy stone vaults requires thick walls and few windows: the Romanesque church is dark, massive, closed upon its gloom. Yet these great solid walls are precisely what makes the catechesis possible: they offer immense surfaces to paint, and the portals deep embrasures to sculpt.

Here lies the whole difference with the Gothic that will follow. The Gothic, by inventing rib vaulting, will lighten the walls, pierce them with immense bays and let in light: then stained glass will replace fresco, and the "theology of light" will take over from the theology of the wall — a revolution developed in The Gothic as Theology of Light and The Stained Glass of Chartres. In the Romanesque age, it is not light that teaches: it is sculpted stone and the painted wall.

Three supports for a single catechesis

Concretely, Romanesque art teaches through three complementary means, each with its place, its audience and its function.

These three supports form a coherent programme. The portal seizes the passer-by; the capital accompanies the faithful as they advance; the fresco enfolds the assembly. Each will be examined in turn.

Of all Romanesque catechesis, the centrepiece is the tympanum: the great semicircle of sculpted stone above the entrance door. Here is concentrated the most solemn teaching, for this is the threshold — the passage from the profane world to the holy place.

Why at the entrance?

Placing the decisive image at the door is no accident. Christ said: "I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved" (Jn 10:9). Crossing the portal of a church figures the passage into the Kingdom. The tympanum thus tells the pilgrim, at the very instant he enters, what is at stake: salvation or loss, heaven or hell, the encounter with the Judge. It is a sermon received before even entering, needing no words.

The Last Judgment of Conques

The most famous and best preserved of these sermons in stone is the tympanum of the Last Judgment of Conques, in Aveyron, sculpted for the abbey church of Sainte-Foy between 1107 and 1125 approximately^[9]. The abbey church, begun in 1041, is one of the great stages on the road to Compostela; crowds of pilgrims came to venerate the relics of the young martyr Saint Faith^[10]. It is before them that this masterpiece unfolds.

The tympanum gathers 124 figures sculpted on twenty-four blocks of stone, and retains traces of its original polychromy: these images were painted in vivid colours, not grey as today^[11]. At the centre thrones the Christ-Judge, right hand raised toward the elect, left hand lowered toward the damned. The composition obeys a limpid logic, immediately legible:

"Then the King will say to those on his right: 'Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you.' […] Then he will say to those on his left: 'Depart from me, you cursed.'" — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 25:34–41^[12]

To the right of Christ (the viewer's left), all is order, peace, the procession of the blessed led by the Virgin; to his left, it is the tumult of hell, twisted bodies, grimacing demons, and the maw of Leviathan devouring the damned. Between the two, Saint Michael weighs souls, while a devil cheats on the scales.

The inscription addressed to the sinner

Remarkably, the Conques tympanum is not content with images: it speaks through carved Latin inscriptions. On the lintel, beneath the feet of the Judge, runs a direct warning to the visitor:

"O sinners, unless you change your ways, know that a terrible judgment awaits you." — Inscription on the lintel of the Conques tympanum^[13]

Other inscriptions caption the scenes — above paradise, "the saints exult in glory"; above hell, the warning to the impious. Image and word collaborate exactly as Gregory the Great intended: painting for the gaze, caption for whoever can decipher it. The Conques tympanum is, by itself, a complete preaching on the last things.

The Christ in Majesty of Moissac and the Apocalypse

Not all tympana show the Judgment. At Moissac, in Tarn-et-Garonne, the great southern portal (c. 1115–1130) unfolds another vision: the Christ in Majesty of the Apocalypse, enthroned in his glory, surrounded by the tetramorph — the four Living Creatures become symbols of the evangelists: the man (Matthew), the lion (Mark), the ox (Luke), the eagle (John) — and by the twenty-four elders who adore him, their heads raised toward him^[14].

Its source is limpid: the vision of the heavenly throne from the book of Revelation, translated into stone.

"At once I was caught up in spirit. And behold, a throne was set up in heaven, and upon the throne one sat. […] Round the throne, twenty-four thrones, and upon these thrones twenty-four Elders." — Revelation 4:2–4^[15]

The tympanum thus teaches the faithful toward what they walk: not toward nothingness, but toward the eternal liturgy of heaven, where Christ reigns surrounded by his court. The kinship with the Byzantine Christ Pantocrator is plain — same apocalyptic source, same affirmation of sovereignty — but the genius differs: where the East isolates the bust of the Lord in the dome for contemplation, the Romanesque West sets him within a scene, sculpted at portal height, for the catechesis of those who pass (cf. Christ Pantocrator).

The Pentecost of Vézelay: the Church sent to the nations

At Vézelay, in Burgundy, the great tympanum of the narthex (c. 1120–1140) chooses a theme unique in all Romanesque art: the mission of the apostles^[16]. Christ, immense, extends hands from which rays shoot forth toward the Twelve; all around, on the archivolts and the lintel, parade the peoples of the world — known and fabulous: Cappadocians, Arabs, Phrygians, but also big-eared men and pygmies climbing on horseback with a ladder. It is Pentecost extended into missionary sending:

"Go therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 28:19^[17]

The catechetical message is ample: the Gospel is for all peoples, to the ends of the earth. It is no accident that it is from Vézelay that Saint Bernard will preach the Second Crusade in 1146, and that the sanctuary was a great point of departure toward Compostela and the Holy Land^[18]. The tympanum taught, once again, what the faithful were about to live.

Autun and the hand of Gislebertus

At Saint-Lazare Cathedral in Autun, the tympanum of the Last Judgment (c. 1130–1140) reaches a summit of expressive force: elongated, trembling bodies, the damned seized by oversized hands, a holy terror that needs no commentary. Beneath the feet of Christ, an inscription bears a signature exceptional for the time: "Gislebertus hoc fecit", "Gislebertus made this"^[19]. That the artist dared inscribe his name on the threshold of the cathedral says enough about the new dignity recognised in the one who teaches through stone.

To grasp the scale of this sculpted catechesis, the great Romanesque portals may be compared: each has its subject, but all aim to instruct the one who enters.

Once through the portal, the faithful enter a church where every column teaches. The top of the pillars, the capital, becomes under the Romanesque chisel a tiny sculpted scene — a "historiated capital", that is, one that tells a story.

A page of stone on every column

Where Antiquity placed simple acanthus leaves, Romanesque art sculpts scenes: episodes from the Bible, lives of saints, combats of virtues and vices, monsters and demons. The capital stands at raised eye level, within the field of vision of the faithful advancing down the nave. It is a more intimate catechesis than the tympanum: no longer the great drama of salvation, but the detail of the daily spiritual combat — lust chastised, avarice hanged by its purse, pride struck down, patience rewarded.

Cluny, Vézelay, Autun, Chauvigny

The finest ensembles of Romanesque capitals count among the treasures of Western art. The capitals of the choir of Cluny — the queen abbey of Christendom — figured notably the tones of liturgical music. At Vézelay, more than a hundred capitals unroll a veritable moral and biblical encyclopaedia: the mystic mill where Moses pours the grain of the Old Testament which Saint Paul gathers as the flour of the Gospel, a striking image of the Christian reading of the Bible. At Autun, Gislebertus sculpts a Flight into Egypt and a Dream of the Magi of unprecedented tenderness. At Chauvigny, in the Vienne, the capitals show even demons carrying off souls, with inscriptions naming the scenes^[20].

Reading the visible: the bestiary and the vices

The Romanesque capital readily uses symbol and bestiary: the lion, the eagle, the dragon, the siren are no fancies, but a language. Each animal bears a moral meaning, codified by the medieval bestiaries: the siren figures temptation, the dragon the demon, the lamb Christ. This art asks to be read, and that is precisely its pedagogical strength: it compels the gaze to grow attentive, to pass from the visible to the invisible. It is also this profusion of images that will provoke the great objection of Saint Bernard, as will be seen.

The third support of Romanesque catechesis is the most fragile, and therefore the rarest today: mural painting. Where sculpture has withstood the centuries, fresco has often vanished beneath whitewash, damp or rebuilding. But what survives reveals that the Romanesque church was, originally, entirely painted: a book of images spread across all its walls and vaults.

Saint-Savin, "the Romanesque Sistine Chapel"

The most extraordinary of these ensembles is the abbey church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, in the Vienne, nicknamed "the Sistine Chapel of Romanesque art"^[21]. On the long barrel vault of the nave, painted at the end of the 11th or the beginning of the 12th century, unfold nearly fifty episodes from the Old Testament — the Creation, Noah and the ark, the tower of Babel, Abraham, Joseph, Moses — across some 700 square metres of frescoes, one of the vastest painted cycles preserved in Europe^[22].

The genius of Saint-Savin is to unroll the narrative above the faithful as they walk: advancing down the nave, they "read" sacred history as one turns the pages of a book. The ensemble was rescued from oblivion in the 19th century through the intervention of the writer Prosper Mérimée, then inspector of Historic Monuments, and inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1983^[23].

Berzé-la-Ville and the radiance of Cluny

Close to Cluny, the modest monks' chapel of Berzé-la-Ville preserves, in its apse, one of the finest painted Christs in Majesty of Romanesque art (c. 1100), surrounded by apostles and saints. Rediscovered in 1887, these frescoes with their deep blue ground and refined draughtsmanship testify to the art of Cluny at the height of its power, strongly marked by Byzantine and imperial influence^[24]. They show that monumental painting was not reserved for the great pilgrimage abbeys, but radiated even into small chapels.

The Catalan Pantocrators

South of the Pyrenees, Catalan Romanesque art produced painted apses of unequalled power. At Taüll, in the Boí valley, the church of San Clemente, consecrated on 10 December 1123, housed a monumental Christ Pantocrator, by an anonymous master named by art history the Master of Taüll — today the most famous Catalan fresco, preserved at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia^[25]. Christ thrones there in his mandorla, holding the open book inscribed "Ego sum lux mundi" ("I am the light of the world"), exactly like his Eastern cousin (cf. Christ Pantocrator). The teaching image knows no frontiers: from Sinai to Catalonia, it is the same face instructing the Christian people.

Why did the Church not merely tolerate, but will this immense deployment of images? The answer is not first aesthetic: it is theological. Three foundations support it.

The foundation: "The Word became flesh"

The root of every Christian image is the Incarnation. The invisible Godhead cannot be painted; but the Son of God "became flesh" (Jn 1:14): he took a face, hands, a gaze. To depict Christ is therefore not to enclose God in matter — that would be an idol — but to confess that he made himself visible^[26]. It is this foundation that The Theology of the Icon develops in detail, and that the iconoclast quarrel had settled in the East at the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Romanesque art is its Western application: if God showed himself, then to show him is to proclaim the Gospel.

The threefold reason for the image

Scholastic tradition specified what the image is for in church, in a formula that has remained classic. Saint Bonaventure sums it up in three reasons: images were introduced into the Church "on account of the rudeness of the simple, on account of the slowness of the affections, and on account of the frailty of memory"^[27]. In other words: to instruct those who do not read, to move hearts slow to turn toward God, and to fix in memory what the heard word merely passes through.

"Images were introduced into the Church for a threefold reason: on account of the rudeness of the simple, on account of the slowness of the affections, and on account of the frailty of memory." — Saint Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, book III^[28]

This threefold reason sums up the whole ambition of Romanesque art, and may be read as a programme:

Durandus of Mende: to see, to remember, to be moved

A century later, Bishop William Durandus of Mende, in his great treatise on the liturgy (the Rationale, c. 1286), takes up the same doctrine while stressing the affective superiority of the image: "painting moves the soul more than writing", for it places the fact before the eyes, whereas writing merely recalls it to memory^[29]. That is exactly the pilgrim's experience before the Conques tympanum: no page of catechism grips the heart like the maw of hell sculpted above the door.

This triumphant catechesis was not unanimously welcomed. The strongest voice raised against the excess of images was that of a saint: Bernard of Clairvaux, the Cistercian reformer. His objection deserves to be taken in all its force, for it comes from a man who loved God, not from an iconoclast.

The Apology to William of Saint-Thierry

Around 1124–1125, Bernard addresses to his friend William of Saint-Thierry an Apology in which he sharply criticises the luxury and profusion of images in the great Cluniac abbeys^[30]. His target is not dogma — he does not deny the legitimacy of images — but their excess and their distracting effect. Before capitals crowded with monsters, he cries out:

"What are these ridiculous monsters doing in the cloisters, under the eyes of the brethren busy reading — this strange deformed beauty and this beautiful deformity? These filthy apes? These fierce lions? These fabulous centaurs? […] There is more pleasure in reading the marbles than in books, and the whole day is spent admiring them rather than meditating the law of God." — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Apology to William of Saint-Thierry, c. 1125^[31]

The objection is serious: the image, meant to lead to God, can hold the gaze upon itself and become an end, a curiosity, a vanity. It is the permanent risk of all sacred art.

The decisive distinction: church and cloister

But Bernard is no destroyer of images, and here he must be read precisely. Far from condemning religious art wholesale, he establishes a distinction which saves Gregory the Great's principle. Bishops, he writes, must indeed use ornaments to instruct the people:

"Bishops have an excuse: being debtors to the wise and to the foolish alike, they awaken by material ornaments the devotion of a carnal people, where they cannot do so by spiritual things. But we monks, who have left the world… whom, by all this, do we seek to please?" — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Apology to William of Saint-Thierry^[32]

The point is limpid. Bernard does not say images are bad: he says they are made for the people, not for monks already trained in pure contemplation. In the church where the crowd passes, the image teaches and touches with good reason; in the cloister, where monks read and meditate, it becomes superfluous, even a temptation. Far from denying the catechesis of images, Bernard confirms its raison d'être — while reserving it for those who need it.

A fruitful tension, not a contradiction

There is therefore, between Cluny and Cîteaux, no quarrel of faith over the lawfulness of images, but a difference of vocation. Cistercian austerity — bare churches, white glass, no figured sculpture — is no reproach to the Romanesque art of the people's churches: it is a pedagogy for monks, called to pass beyond the sensible. Both ways are Catholic. The Church has always held together the catechesis through image for the many and the way of stripping for those God calls to it. The tension between Bernard and Cluny is one of the most fruitful of the Middle Ages: it kept sacred art from sliding into pure decoration, constantly reminding it that it stands at God's service, not its own.

The catechesis of images is no mere medieval custom destined to pass: it is confirmed by the Magisterium of the Church, yesterday and today.

From Nicaea II (787) to the Council of Trent (1563)

The Second Council of Nicaea (787) had already defined, against the iconoclasts, that the veneration of images is lawful and that it "passes to the prototype" — it goes back to the person depicted, not to the painted matter^[33]. Seven centuries later, this time against the Protestant reformers who smashed statues and whitewashed churches, the Council of Trent solemnly reaffirms, in its session of December 1563, the same doctrine, and restates the teaching function of images, exactly in the line of Gregory the Great:

"Through the images which we kiss and before which we uncover the head and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ and venerate the saints whose likeness they bear. […] The people are instructed and strengthened by recalling the articles of the faith through images of the mysteries of our redemption." — Council of Trent, session XXV (December 1563)^[34]

Trent also specifies the safeguards already present in Gregory: no worship of matter, no false or indecent images, vigilance against superstition. It is the same balanced doctrine from the beginning: the image teaches and leads to God; it never replaces him. The systematic refutation of Protestant objections against images belongs to other articles; here, only the continuity is retained: what Conques sculpted, Trent canonises.

The Catechism today

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gathers this whole heritage in a formula that could serve as the motto of Romanesque art:

"Christian iconography expresses through the image the Gospel message which Sacred Scripture communicates by the word. Image and Word illuminate each other." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1160^[35]

And it recalls, quoting Saint Basil and Nicaea II, that the veneration of images is relative: it "passes to the model", a thousand leagues from the worship due to God alone^[36]. Thus, from the Conques tympanum to the 1992 Catechism, it is a single thought unfolding: the image at the service of the Word, the visible at the service of the invisible.

Before a Romanesque tympanum or fresco, the modern visitor is tempted to see only a work of art. Yet these stones were not carved for the museum: they were made to teach and to make pray. To read them according to their intention is to do them justice.

The method of the gaze

Reading a Romanesque church requires a few simple keys, which every medieval pilgrim possessed. First spot the tympanum: what does it show — the Judgment, glory, mission? Distinguish Christ's right and left: on his right the elect, on his left the damned. Recognise the symbols: the tetramorph of the evangelists, the mandorla of glory, Saint Michael's scales, the bestiary of the capitals. Finally follow the narrative of the frescoes, from Creation toward Redemption. The church then begins to speak, and one understands it never ceased to do so.

The oldest catechism in Europe

Romanesque art remains, nine centuries later, the greatest catechism ever offered to the Christian people. Before printing, before school for all, it handed down to whole generations the essentials of the faith: who God is, what he has done for men, what awaits them. It did so freely, in the open air, for whoever raised their eyes. In this it fulfils to the letter Gregory the Great's promise: to make those who cannot read read "what must be worshipped". Today's pilgrim who stops beneath the Conques tympanum still receives, intact, the same lesson in stone.

• The Theology of the Icon — why and how the Church justifies the veneration of images
• Christ Pantocrator — the Eastern counterpart of the Romanesque Christ in Majesty
• The Byzantine Icons — the spiritual grammar of the Eastern icon
• The Gothic as Theology of Light — when stained glass succeeds the painted wall
• The Stained Glass of Chartres — the Bible of glass and light
• The Architecture of a Cathedral — how sacred space is read
• The Fresco of the Last Judgment — the same theme in the Renaissance age