Romanesque

Romanesque churches have thick masonry walls, round arches and heavy piers or columns. Windows are small and set deep in the walls. Naves are covered by timber roofs or stone vaults: the barrel vault, a continuous half-cylinder, or the groin vault, formed where two barrel vaults cross. Towers often stand over the crossing and at the west front. Carving is concentrated on column capitals and on the tympanum, the semicircular panel above a doorway, which often shows the Last Judgment.

Speyer Cathedral in Germany (begun 1030, consecrated 1061) is the largest surviving Romanesque church. Sainte-Foy at Conques in France, a stop on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, has an ambulatory, a walkway around the east end that let pilgrims reach the relics without crossing the choir. Vézelay Abbey in Burgundy has a carved tympanum completed about 1130 and nave arches of alternating light and dark stone. Gothic builders later replaced round arches and thick walls with pointed arches, rib vaults and external buttresses.

The name dates from the early 19th century: Charles de Gerville used the French word romane in an 1818 letter for building that adapted Roman forms. The style's roots lie in Carolingian work such as Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel in Aachen (about 792-805), designed by Odo of Metz and modeled on San Vitale in Ravenna. In the 10th and 11th centuries, a First Romanesque of rubble walls and simple vaults spread through northern Italy, Catalonia and southern France.

Building increased in the 11th century with the growth of monasteries and pilgrimage. The third abbey church at Cluny in Burgundy (1088-1130) was the largest church in Europe until the new St. Peter's in Rome. Churches on the routes to Santiago de Compostela, whose cathedral was begun in 1075, shared a plan with galleries, an ambulatory and radiating chapels. Romanesque was the first style used across most of Catholic Europe since the Roman Empire. From the 1140s, Gothic, which began at Saint-Denis near Paris, replaced it in northern France and then elsewhere. Romanesque Revival and Richardsonian Romanesque drew on its forms in the 19th century.