Early Medieval Architecture as Bearer of Meaning

Gunter Bandmann, Kendall Wallis

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231501729
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

At last available in English, this classic text was originally published in Germany in 1951 and has been continuously in print since then. Gunter Bandmann analyzes the architecture of societies in western Europe up to the twelfth century that aspired to be the heirs to the Roman Empire. He examines the occurrence and recurrence of basic forms not as stylistic evolutions but as meaningful expressions of meta-material content and develops an architectural iconography of symbolic, historical, and aesthetic elements.

1

The Problem of Meaning in Architecture

THE FACT THAT CERTAIN BUILDING FORMS are either present in certain periods or are not is an important aspect of medieval architecture that has not been sufficiently appreciated in art history. Those responsible for the building’s existence—whether lords, monastic orders, cities, or other individual or collective patrons—either selected and promoted specific building forms from the repertory of forms transmitted from the past, or they rejected those forms. Art historical research, however, has principally concentrated on detailed observations of phenomena such as the modification of architectural forms within regions or periods and the interrelationships between schools and regions, peoples and eras, and has investigated these down to their tiniest ramifications.

The investigation of a problem such as ours does not begin with some kind of stylistic exploration of building types in order to produce a logical arrangement, either by comparing their variations on the basis of stronger or weaker formal differences or by examining the geographical or chronological coordinates of the works of art. On the contrary, our investigation will take as its object the simple fact that a specific ground plan (or vaulting, column, or gallery) exists. No chameleon-like Kunstwollen¹ is sufficient to explain the creation, reception, or rejection of a type; such a force is satisfactory only as an incentive for initiating change within the type.² Rather, religious, political, sociological, and other such factors operating in the larger history of mankind are decisive for the selection of the type in the first place.

Just as the recognizable concept of Kunstwollen might explain the steady development of a type toward a recognizable “coinage” or its modification but cannot explain why a form might be received from the distant past or from an alien cultural context, so also invoking “habit” (the unconscious retention of transmitted forms) is not always sufficient to explain persistence in the use of a specific ground plan or in the shaping of masses.

In order for its phenomena to be understood, medieval architecture must be firmly situated in the context of the period’s conscious respect for tradition. As far as works of art are concerned—and more particularly works of architecture—this outlook takes on a much more profound significance as we come to understand the meanings that determined the reception or rejection of forms. Those meanings can be deduced only partially using methods such as the comparison of forms and stylistic criticism, and hence modern tools specific to art history can be applied only peripherally. Nevertheless, the physical relicts that have come down to us, like cast-off shells or broken molds left behind by vanished states of human consciousness or modes of expression, can aid us in our efforts to understand the works of art those states of consciousness produced.

For example, beginning in the middle of the eleventh century, forms can be observed in Speyer Cathedral that are novel in the context of the architecture hitherto typical north of the Alps (some few Merovingian and Carolingian coinages aside). For example, engaged columns are employed as wall articulation in the eastern choir and as a pattern in the nave and the vaulted side aisles. A dwarf gallery runs around the whole building. Freestanding columns in the Chapel of St. Afra, set slightly in from the walls, support the vaults that resemble baldachins, and the columns have finely wrought, classicizing Corinthian capitals, such as had not been seen in the West since the days of the Carolingians.

Art historical research—which has grown up on the methodology of visual comparison—either has ignored these phenomena, since they fall outside the imagined path of development, or has contented itself with pointing to earlier occurrences in different cultural contexts. The label “northern Italian” was believed to fully explain the architectural ornamentation of Speyer Cathedral. Since the appearance of this ornamentation was too abrupt to be comfortably attributed to the malleable Kunstwollen, the fact that comacini, wandering sculptural workers, can be demonstrated to have been in Speyer and elsewhere seemed sufficient to explain the process of transmission (Kautzsch 1919:77ff., 1921:75ff.).

Hence, Italian scholarship could proclaim Speyer Cathedral an Italian building (Hermanin 1934–1943), while the Germans countered by reducing the obvious Italian relationships to trivialities and turning the comacini into wandering stoneworkers, similar to the itinerant Italian laborers of the nineteenth century.³ Eventually the question was raised whether Speyer Cathedral might have predated the related northern Italian buildings, and whether, contrary to expectations, the architecture of northern Italy might have been molded by the Salian architecture of the upper Rhine (Pühringer 1931).⁴

Strongly charged with nationalist grudges, scholarly research arrived at this conclusion without ever having shed any light on the historical reasons for the existence of those forms in Speyer. Until recently, the outlook of art history seems to have suffered from a weakness or, more accurately, an inhibition that has prevented it from introducing, alongside an exceptionally well-developed sensitivity to the change and development of forms, a corresponding understanding of the continuity of an imprinted form. In other words, it seems to lack a perception of what remains recognizably constant throughout all the metamorphoses of a form and what, in most cases, was the main reason for the reception of the form in the first place.

The traditional methodology took genetics for its model (Töwe 1939). In recent decades, it has been subjected to criticism that has opened up opportunities for posing new questions (some examples among many: Kitschelt 1938; André 1939; Evers 1939; Krautheimer 1942b; Sedlmayr 1948a, 1950; Smith 1950). Rather than explaining the emergence of architectural components as the result either of Kunstwollen or of the changing ways in which shapes or elements of surface relief or decoration are formed—ways perceptible to the eyes alone—this newer criticism considers these components in the context of the forces that compel the meaning within a work of art to manifest itself. In other words, there is an effort to reinstate what was truly characteristic of medieval architecture—that it was not so much the artist, but rather the patron who was of decisive importance. We must also assume, however, that the meaning the architecture held was intended to be transmitted, and that therefore the primary concern of the person responsible for the building, the Bauherr or patron, was to imprint the form with meaning and to bring about the perception of that meaning through the instrument of the artist’s hands. In the Middle Ages, if received forms laid claim from their earliest occurrence to a symbolic meaning, and if the transmitted configurations of the past could be applied in support of symbolic relationships the patron wished to reassert by means of a similar representation (Krautheimer 1942a:1ff.; Paatz 1950), then those forms were again utilized.⁵

Thus it was the meaning contained within these forms that determined their attractiveness, which meant that tradition limited the selection—and, even more so, the creation—of new types. However, the special relationship of the Middle Ages to form, together with latent regional and temporal artistic forces, so enlarged the possibilities of variation within the type that formal congruence between copy and type can actually be observed in only very few points even in cases where written records explicitly state the builder’s intention to receive the form and copy the content.

Recent research in the area of architectural iconography has arrived at these conclusions, but these findings have not been applied to the larger contexts of architectural history, nor has there been a description of the specific behavior of the Christian Middle Ages vis-à-vis the reception of building forms, and that is what we will attempt here. To what degree did the meanings alluded to earlier change during the Middle Ages? What new meanings were read into the forms? Did the church and the empire behave differently? Were the types already “coined” in Antiquity, or did the forms become types through their reception into the Christian worldview? What was the relationship of the prehistoric architectonic customs of individual peoples to the common international types? To what extent can we understand regional style as the dwindling of codified monumental types into unself-conscious local tradition?

All these questions demand elucidation, which, in turn, requires the discussion of a series of preliminary questions. First of all, we must consider some issues that take us back to the very beginnings of architecture and that, unfortunately, can produce results of only hypothetical nature.

The concept of history underlying this work is characterized by two main propositions. First, in its shift from cult object to autonomous work of art, Mediterranean Antiquity anticipated the developments of the later medieval West. Second, the attitude of the Middle Ages toward the work of art was more intellectualized and less based on the work’s innate magic power, the primordial power of the created object, than was the case in Antiquity. Hence, despite the Celtic and Germanic peoples’ untamed force and initially primitive condition, the medieval attitude is one step further along on the developmental path of human consciousness. Where the one attitude—the shift from cult object to autonomous work of art—would permit the problem to be considered starting with the Middle Ages, the other—the more intellectualized approach of the Middle Ages—requires consideration of the pre-Christian era for an understanding of the changes in the meanings of forms that occurred in the Middle Ages.

The Essence of Meaning

Various circumstances lead people to accept that “the building” as well as its parts may have specific meanings. These circumstances have had important consequences for the selection of the components comprising the building as well as for their execution. These meanings are not concerned with static performance in the building’s tectonic relationships, nor do they relate to the artistic merit or significance of the building, for that arises anew in each actualization of a form. The meanings are very much of an a priori nature in that they point toward a higher content, toward a specific contextualized association of ideas.

In the Middle Ages, meaning participated in the making of a work of art to an extent we no longer experience today. To make the “quality of reality” of a building (Dagobert Frey’s Realitätscharakter) from that time come alive for us today, we must reconstruct this meaning for ourselves with the help of contemporary sources. But even if the material and methodological means for this undertaking are at hand, some general reflections on the different character of meaning in the Middle Ages and some discussion of the fundamental attitude of the Middle Ages toward the work of art are needed. Only then can we evaluate the broader implications of that use of meaning for the history of art.

To say that a work of art has a meaning is to point to something, to some arrangement within a wider nexus of ideas that transcends the material and formal organization of the work of art. The realm of the artistic is transcended in that the work of art comes to be understood as a metaphor, as a representative, as the material emanation of something else. This allusion is always present if the work of art portrays, represents, or “indicates” something. “A symbol does not have to be a work of art; indeed a work of art can, by means of the context of its meaning, have a symbolic effect that is not at all (or not exclusively) due to its nature as artistic object” (Frey 1946d:21). This symbolic character is not just some special form of art, however; it is the precondition that constitutes art. It is neither an accidental nor a background phenomenon but the property that integrates the whole.

The importance of this symbolic character of art lies in the varying degrees of intensity with which, at different times, the work of art engages with a higher meaning and the varying degrees to which the power of this higher meaning can be present in the work of art. The possibilities range from identity of the meaning with the object that embodies it to purely speculative and dialectically based associations applied to it by the beholder. In earlier times, the varying degrees to which the work of art partook of the spell-binding, magical essence of its model defined the necessity for the work of art and laid the foundation for, in C. F. von Rumohr’s phrase, “the position of art in the spiritual economy of man.” “The sociological function of art is based in the symbolic” (Frey 1946d:21).

A work of art has the capacity of “pointing toward” or “being indicative of” something—a capacity of being the spellbinding or enchanting embodiment of something. This capacity depends on the extent to which the work of art “denotes” and is equipped with specific formal characteristics—even inscriptions—that ensure instrumental efficacy and establish the connections with that to which the work of art points.

As the anthropological context in which the work of art served as an instrument for enchanting and “binding” a higher idea to physical matter altered over time, that higher meaning, and eventually its very existence, fell into oblivion. In this process, the work of art freed itself from the goal and object of its former context and became an objective creation, an aesthetically enduring composition. The reconstruction of that former context should become the primary concern of art history. Even if the elucidation of the primordial meaning of the work of art does not seem to say much about its individual constituent qualities, it nevertheless provides information of the highest importance for understanding why this form or that form is present in its typical—as opposed to individual—manifestation and why it was selected from the transmitted repertory of forms and was emphasized in particular ways.

The point is now to limit the problem of meaning to a specific subject and period: to architecture, because architecture differs in certain ways from all the other arts. And here we also come to the Middle Ages, to the extent that they can be distinguished from Antiquity and the Modern period, always bearing in mind that the Middle Ages “aufheben” Antiquity, in the Hegelian sense.

Because our own “mythic” commitment toward the now profaned objects is attenuated, we have nowadays only a very inadequate sense of the symbolic, and we understand it in an abstractly intellectual sense as mere allegory.⁶ It is only through the study of primitive (prehistoric) and archaic (early historic) conditions that we can understand the growth and existence of the symbolic and its particular relationship to the architecture of the Middle Ages.

For early cultures, the act of designating a particular form to reify a given meaning, which was then embodied in that thing or shape, and then imprinting this form on physical material (together with accompanying artistic elements), represented something quite extraordinary. To borrow a term from Rudolf Otto, the act of depicting means putting a spell on something “numinous.” In the process of re-creating and conserving that numinous something, a deflecting of its power, indeed a disempowering of what is depicted, happens in the here and now. These are the tools and instruments of primeval people who thought only in images and responded through images.⁷

The reality of the world of images created by man is contrasted to the menace and uncontrollable reality of nature. It is only in our day that it is no longer necessary to acquire power over the world of nature by rendering the ineffable visible. More suitable, more “expedient” practices are now available, ones that no longer partake of the sphere of the artistic.⁸

Because of the instrumental character of these “signifying” and “meaning” forms, the interaction of the beholder with the work of art was hardly a naive one. Rather, the observer originally engaged in an activity representing a very high achievement of the intellect since the higher concepts—the ideas—had to be present in the observer so he could identify the visual representation, decode it, and classify it intellectually.⁹

Until now, our discussion has focused on things and concepts of things, prototypes, and copies. However—and this primarily concerns higher cultures with their differentiated, transcendental religiosity, less fixated on the physical object—it is also possible for the work of art to be an instrument that illustrates and indicates something nonobjective, a comprehensive concept of an order that is not bound to objects, such as the kingdom of a formless godhead, for example.¹⁰ Since in this case the image does not express the whole meaning but rather points toward it and alludes to it, the metaphoric character of the meaning comes to the fore all the more clearly. The work of art becomes the “metaphorical circumlocution of a taboo” (Werner 1919).¹¹ For the Middle Ages, the concept that “an idea takes precedence over the concrete character of a visual representation” (Hegel) was still charged with efficacy and power. Today, our senses hav...