Cluny and the Twelfth Century
Cluniac Art ot the Romanesque Period, By Joan Evans. (Cam bridge University Press. £3 los.) MISS JOAN EVANS'S book on Cluniae art is yet another panopl added to the trophy which she as been building since the war Each new work "has had in itself the quality of a magnum opus None of them is easily read, and the latest is no exception. By all are illustrated in a way which- in itself would make them indis pensable, and the text always has a mass of important detail a well as a notable central theme. The theme here is the contributio which the monastery of Cluny made to the iconography of Frenc mediaeval art, and the- sources from which that contribution wa drawn.
. To piece together the details is not easy, owing to the destructio of the church at the time of the revolution, a disaster whir obliterated much of the evidence for the artistic importance o Cluny. But American excavations have to some extent recovere what was necessary—enough at least. for the various architectura phases through which the church passed in the eleventh an twelfth centurier-to he now clear ; and there is .enough- earl) twelfth-century sculpture from Cluny itself to judge the superb quality which was achieved there. Apart from that Miss Evan uses evidence from other houses which were dependent on Cluny. She makes out the case for the thesis originally advanced b) M. Emile Male (in one of the most brilliant and profound, as also occasionally one of the- most perverse, books ever written on the art of the twelfth century) that the inspiration of the great revival came largely from illustrated copies, from Spain, of Beatus' Com- mentary on the Apocalypse. The interest of her interpretation is not only in connecting the revival with Cluny, but in showing its beginnings to be considerably earlier than M. Male suggested. I seems certain that schemes which were derived from the Beams manuscripts were already being sculptured in Cluniac churches before the end of the eleventh century, perhaps some time before; and if no predecessors of the Moissac tympanum ate known, we are here shown a series of Corinthian capitals earlier than that of the Moissac cloister' The revival, in fact, begins right back before 1050, in the long abbacy of Odilo (994-1049).
A series of illustrations like these poses a whole array of questions. The subjects represented by the sculptors are mainly from manu- scripts. Whence do the new techniques-come?' , What were the tools used for that deep underdutting which is such a feature of fine twelfth-century sculpture, and if familiarity with these tools came from Byzantine workshops, by what route did it reach France ? Some of the models..of the magnificent clitsical patterns. like those of the Saint Gilles Gard façade, might have been books of the ninth-century revival. But the models for the classical draperies in the Saint Gilles Passion series must go back to Roman imperial times, not simply to Carolingian work. Again and again Miss Evans is moved to use (and how rightly) the adjective "Roman of the Saint Gilles façade. It is significant that this is a churei of Provence, and though she doubts whether classical reliefs with suitable subjects *Lore even herewidely available, yet much of ale
work here seems to proclaim that it is a direct copy of Roman models.
The'-study of the transition from Romanesque draperies like those ,tif the Moissac tympanum or Cluny capitals to forms which are classical in inspiration is one of the clues to the history of the "renaissance of the twelfth century." The illustrations of this book offer important material for it, as they do • for that fascinating problem of the relation between English and French art at this time. The Shaftesbury Psalter shares its drapery forms with the Moissac and Cluny sculpture. No one would claim—in spite of that masterpiece, the Raising of Lazarus, at Chichester—that English sculpture, so far as it can be judged from its remains, is likely in the twelfth century to have rivalled that of Cluny or Chastres. But for English books of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, though not beyond, the claim can seriously be Made that at their finest they outrivalled anything produced in France. Why should that be so ? To such a problem M. Male, who for all his greatness dismissed English work of the twelfth century as simply provincial, was blind. Material is now accumulating that may eventually make it possible to 'correct him. One link- in the chain connecting French and English illumination in the late eleventh century has been forged by Dr. Pacht, who has just succeeded in proving that the artists of an Exeter and of, a Durham book of this period were both trained on the Norman sole of the Channel.
WALTER OAKESHOTT.
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