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McClendon, Charles B. The Origins of Medieval

English
English
Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600-900. New Submit

Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. 265, 210

illus., 43 color. $65.00 (hb). ISBN: 978-0-300-10688-6,
ISBN-10: 0-300-10688-2 (hb).
JOURNAL
Reviewed by: CONTENT
Judson Emerick
Search
Pomona College
jemerick@pomona.edu
Search Scope

No medievalist, architectural historian or not, will want to miss Charles All

All
McClendon's fine, new, compendious study of early medieval architecture Search

in
Latin-speaking Europe. In some 209 text-pages and 200 plus
illustrations (45 in
color), McClendon selects a revealing series of major
Browse
monuments from the
seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, explains how
By Issue
we may see each of them in
political and religious context, and assesses
By Review
the latest archaeological
discoveries. McClendon designed his book to do Author
double duty: not only to provide
an introductory survey for a broad By Title
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. FONT SIZE
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
ARTICLE
conscientiously from McClendon's text to the
endnotes, and back, will find
TOOLS
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 Print this
urgency. McClendon's pages on the Carolingian St.-Denis,
the gate house article
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

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07.04.10, McClendon, Origins of Medieval Architecture | Emerick | The Medieval Review

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Copyright (c) 2007 Judson Emerick

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