The bloody, war-torn twelfth century was economic and artistic boom-time for Europe, despite the pillage of warring princes who devastated huge areas where rape, mass-murder and starvation stalked the land. At the same time the monastic movement underwent spectacular expansion, making the Romanesque the greatest art movement in history. A large part of the expanding wealth of the monasteries derived partly from the dodgy renting-out of land to its previous owners, partly from their control in the 11th century of the main routes which criss-crossed Europe: the many Pilgrimage roads to Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela. There was also the important factor of a century or two of global warming which allowed a great increase in general cultivation - and grape vines to flourish even in Ireland - before the "mini-Ice Age" arrived in the 14th century, bringing The Black Death in its train.

The rise of the monasteries itself came with the great sigh of relief that Armageddon had not come on the year 1000 A.D. (though of course Homo sapiens is itself Armageddon extinguishing the rest of the natural world). This was followed by the rise of the papacy under Urban II, and his genocidal proclamation of the terrible First Crusade, which attracted some of the most vicious people in Western Europe, who set off, pillaging and burning all the way to a blood-bath in multi-cultural Jerusalem, followed by the establishment of (relatively tolerant) principalities in Palestine. The beginning of a nine-hundred-year war against (and, latterly, humiliation of) Islam, went with the promulgation of the celibacy of the clergy in the Western (Catholic) church, mainly to distinguish it from both the Eastern church and Islam.

At a time when armies, and some individuals - including stonemasons - travelled huge distances by foot or horseback (Eleanor of Aquitaine covered thousands of miles every years with or without her husband Henry II of England, Ireland and Anjou), the Pilgrimage to Santiago became the greatest 'tourist' industry ever. The pilgrimages to Compostela and Jerusalem were symbolic of the pilgrim's progress through life to the Eternal City. They were undertaken mainly to attain merit or to expiate sin: even eating fat meat during lent could be sufficient reason to go (or be directed to go) to Santiago as penitence.

In our own times the autobahns of Germany have produced the Autobahnkirche (Catholic and Lutheran), open at all times to service the 'spiritual requirements' of fraught travellers. These pit-stops for the pious and frazzled are pale and sad imitations of the churches which lined the routes to Rome and, especially, Santiago. Catering for poor pedestrians as well as the rich on horseback or in carriages, they were, of course, far more frequent than the service-stops on modern motorways.

This servicing of the Pilgrim Roads from the Baltic and the Hungarian Plain to Atlantic Spain brought - and distributed - wealth throughout Europe: wealth and the means to move it unknown since Roman times. This wealth, of course, attracted all sorts of unwelcome attachments, such as entertainers, jongleurs and whores, pedlars of all kinds, and people displaying deformities or strange animals. Even now, in France, the last survivors of a disgusting tradition of exhibiting bears, dolphins and (at markets) doped piglets and kids in cages for children to stroke, attract no opprobrium from a population brought up to regard animals as stupid machines.

Concupiscent and/or adulterous woman being dragged to Hell by a devil, a capital at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire.

Female acrobatic exhibitionist mouth-puller on the corbel-table at Fontaines d'Ozillac (Charente-Maritime) click to enlarge

It also created many thousands of craftsmen, including stonemasons and sculptors. The latter could not have failed to observe that the richer people become, the meaner they generally get: to become rich you often have to be mean in all senses of the word. Where money was newest, during the land-grab of the Reconquista in Spain, it seems that the arriviste nouveaux-riches often cheated or short-changed those who built the churches that they endowed, for very many churches there show signs of incompletion, with scaffolding holes not filled in.

But boom ensured the slow economic demise of the monasteries, due to the rise of the cities which used money, and the new monarchies which they serviced. The monasteries used almost no cash, the economy being largely one of deferred payment by goods, services, labour and agricultural produce. However, the economy that they stimulated was a cash economy based on import (mainly spices and other luxuries from the East) and export (such as wool and textiles from Yorkshire, Northern France and modern Belgium). The centres of power shifted from the great abbeys to towns which were centres of pilgrimage in themselves - Limoges, Tours, for example, and towns which were natural hubs of trade and intellect - Poitiers (with its mythical Courts of Love and six Romanesque churches), Toulouse, Paris, Laon, Bologna, Salamanca, Pisa, London and Oxford. The monastic dislike of money and resentment of the rising rich new towns with their luxuried class and their squalid, supporting (if not suppurating) underclass, fed into the iconography of sin, notably in depictions of Wealth (avaritia) - even on large urban churches such as Sainte-Croix in Bordeaux. A very fine example of a rich man or moneylender tortured by hellish monsters can be seen on an interior capital at Lucheux (Somme). (For more on monsters click here.)

And how well-founded their fear of money turned out to be. Luxury largely depends on usury (moneylending). Because usury remained a criminal sin (and forbidden also to Muslims), the lending economy (necessary for most enterprises beyond monastery lands) was initially forced upon the Jews, who were then reviled for this as well as for being 'Christ-killers'. The business quickly passed to professional bankers (mostly from Lombardy) - while the Church itself sold not just benefices to the second sons of counts, princes and merchants, but pardons and indulgences to the masses. This, of course, eventually formed the basis of anti-Christian capitalism - and sowed the seeds of the Reformation which encouraged it.

Wealthy man or money-changer with moneybag, Rots (Calvados)

As power slipped away from the Benedictines and Cistercians to the fat clergy of the new cathedrals based in in the burgeoning towns - and the powerful order of Dominicans who used their control of the Holy Inquisition as an instrument of terror, Europe descended into what we now think of as mediæval superstition, often (and still) obsessed with blood. All sorts of horrors erupted out of Christianity - notably the 'Blood Libel' invented by the clergy of Norwich cathedral in order to acquire a prestigious and lucrative boy-saint at the expense of the 'Christ-killers'. The Blood Libel - the cleverly-insane calumny that Jews used the blood of (usually crucified) boys to make Passover matsos - spread all over Europe. The last official case, in Kiev in 1911, was instigated by an extreme monarchist group and, despite nobbling of the judge and jury by the Tsarist authorities, set free the Jewish scapegoat who soon afterwards emigrated to America. In America today the Blood Libel is still promulgated by video, and latterly, of course, Arabs (notably the Defence Minister of Syria) have started to re-invigorate the story.

The Crusades linked Christian 'spirituality' to violence and ethnicide: the church militant was born - and in no time created the Inquisition. (It took Islam nearly a thousand years to descend to the same level and attempt a payback.) With the decline of the non-urban monasteries and the accompanying rise of Gothic cathedrals centered in the cities, came a complete change in the art and the iconography echoing the change in outlook or Zeitgeist. The whole richly meaningful, and complex and sometimes earthy iconographic repertoire of the Romanesque became old-fashioned like the churches. The Romanesque was very firmly and sanely installed between Heaven and Hell, whereas the unhinged Gothic attempted to float to Heaven on its pinnacles and spires and Inquisitional unreason, despising the earthy, folksy, grounded qualities of the Romanesque. As a result, it served the illiterate badly, driving them to superstition.

Towards the end of the twelfth century a crucial shift in the Western European (but not Eastern Orthodox) perspective on the crucifixion occurred. Whereas from early Roman Christian times Jesus was portrayed as standing triumphant (like a latter-day Apollo) on his cross, conquering death, by the 13th century Jesus was shown in gruesome suffering, hanging from the cross in agony. This might have had something to do with the rise of the mendicant orders, and of the new cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary introduced by St Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians. The triumph over death's dark dominion was no longer due directly to the single event of the crucifixion, but, instead, to the agony and suffering of the crucifixion. Suffering in itself became meritorious, as Western Europe became richer - and more war-torn.

Romanesque sculpture features remarkably few Biblical themes. Adam and Eve (almost always with their 'private parts'covered by hands or fig-leaf) are common on capitals; Daniel and the Lions a little less so, but in greater and marvellous variety. Occasionally there are Noah and his Ark, Tobias (carrying the huge fish) from the obscure book of Tobit, and, from the New Testament, Lazarus and his dog under the Rich Man's table. Most Romanesque sculpture is moralistic (e.g. the Psychomachia or War between the Virtues and Vices), or minatory: 'these things you may not do if you wish to escape damnation'. Many of the latter type occur on corbels, though in some places they were deemed important enough to be placed on doorways and interior capitals.

Doorways very often illustrated also the punishment of sin in Hell, often symbolically as a person being swallowed by a lion or monster: the jaws of Hell. Illustrations of Luxuria almost always show the punishment thought to be meted out eternally to those living 'La Dolce Vita': snakes, toads or even tortoises forever suckling/biting their desiccated dugs, or entering/emerging from their vulvas.

This simple representation of Luxuria, low down on the archivolt of the 12th century church at Olcoz (Navarra, Spain), is being tormented by one snake climbing up her right leg, while another has slid over her shoulder, down below her breast, and is heading for her genitals.

St Bernard famously protested (around 1125) about the fabulous monsters and other frippery which diverted the attention of the (illiterate) people from their imminent damnation. Indeed, he said, "there is seen everywhere such a marvellous diversity of forms that people read with greater pleasure what is carved in stone than what is written in books, and would rather gaze all day upon these singular creations than to meditate upon the Divine Word." Then he reveals himself as the mean cleric he was by adding: "O God! if one is not ashamed of the childishness of these carvings, why does not one spare the expense ?" And expensive they could be. The façade of Notre-Dame-La-Grande in Poitiers could not be carved today for less than tens of millions of pounds sterling.

Romanesque churches feature creatures such as these on a 5th century mosaic from Jerusalem showing Orpheus charming not just real beasts but a centaur and the god Pan as well. Some authorities consider that the Orpheus figure here (with Phrygian cap that survives symbolically today on the head of Marianne, who personifies France on French stamps, etc.) is Jesus as Lord of Beasts - and Gods and Monsters. Compare with Orpheus as Adam, Lord of the Beasts in Eden, on a 5th century ivory, and with a 12th century carving of God the Father or Jesus as Lord of Beasts. Ancient, pre-Classical beast-motifs prefiguring Romanesque themes.

Figurative Romanesque corbels for the most part represented two groups of subjects: beasts and monsters; and images of sinners mostly on the margins of society, including entertainers: jongleurs, acrobats, tumblers, contortionists, mummers, ventriloquists, 'musical' farters, and, of course, musicians.

Le Puch (Gironde) : Performing Bear and musician-tumblers.

The outside walls of churches lent themselves to didactic art, where the ideas of the sculptors and the intentions of the patrons could meet. The patrons regarded the figures as a gallery of sinners, while the artists drew from their own lay and popular culture in carving the detail: what Glenn W. Olsen has suggested as a coming-together of the preoccupations of monks and the voice of the countryside. A somewhat similar situation occurred in late 18th century England, when the great artist Hogarth sold his prints and engravings of low life and debauchery (Gin Alley and so on) in quantity for people to hang to amaze and amuse and smugly instruct each other in the drawing-rooms (originally withdrawing-rooms) that had recently come into fashion.

Bewhiskered shawm-player, Cénac (Dordogne)

But in the thirteenth century corbel-tables disappeared from outside the churches (where most social and economic activity took place) or moved inside, making them less visible. At the same time, the images of entertainers became stereotyped as well as much less frequent. In addition, the virtual disappearance of Romanesque images of monstrous creatures points perhaps to an urban society that was more smug and less imaginative. The symbolism and meaning attached to corbels degenerated into mere grotesquerie, and was largely banished to barely-visible roof-bosses and gargoyles, and to amusing misericords approachable only by the élite.

With the rising of lofty cathedrals which expressed the worldly power of the Church, religious art in Europe began a terminal decline into the sickening sentimentality of Christian Realism which continues to this day in its obsession with crucifixion, martyrdom, saintly masochism, and hysteric or ascetic hallucination.

There seems to be an innate human tendency to revere if not worship images, and the monotheisms have fought a losing battle against this wired-in weakness (which no non-humans have) - as against other evolutionary errors. Perhaps the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic (with its roof-bosses and misericords and gargoyles), as between the Sermons in Stone and the Petrified Hags is illuminated by the following quotation from Mircea Eliade's book on hermaphroditism, The Two and the One:

"When the metaphysical significance of symbols is lost,
people perceive symbols at increasingly cruder and crasser levels."

Rathcline Church (Longford) photographed by Gay Cannon.

With the rise of the Papacy from its lowest point in the 10th century, and the rise of the Gothic cathedrals, came the anti-Christian obsession with money. The corruption and venality that the Benedictines, Augustinians and Cistercians abominated turned into an industry - in fact a new economic engine. The monasteries had created wealth through bringing marginal land into productive cultivation - and reducing the forests of France, Italy, Northern Spain and England by nearly a third. They had established safe trade-routes along the Pilgrim Roads, so that the towns could create wealth through import and export.

The difference between the world-views of the 12th and 13th centuries can hardly be exaggerated. It is something like the difference of German experience between the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. Or, perhaps, from another point of view, like the difference between Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and in the 1990s.

For example, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 permitted heterosexual marriage in churches - thus reversing the teaching of St Augustine and the early church. This allowed the parish churches and cathedrals to impose charges for the wedding and related services, which previously had been held (if at all) outside the church. This same Council promulgated the incredible doctrine of Transubstantiation and instituted the practice of Confession. The Second Lateran Council in 1139 (when the papacy and hierarchy were still relatively weak) had been much more concerned with behaviour, excommunicating jousters and urging the 'repression of marriage and concubinage among priests, deacons, subdeacons, monks, and nuns'. In this council also, the rising power of princes was reflected in Canon 20, wherein kings and princes were commanded to dispense justice in consultation with the bishops, whose power was growing more or less in step.

Loot from Constantinople and the many other places pillaged during the various Crusades (which were financed by merchants who expected a good return) also fuelled the new economy. Contacts with Arab and Muslim cultures brought new ideas - for example the quasi-Sufic/neo-Platonic idea of Chivalry, which was the direct opposite of the behaviour of the Crusader thugs and war-lords. The highly-sophisticated and tolerant culture of Moorish Spain, victim of the so-called shameless and terrible Reconquistà during the 12th century, provided new tools for scholarship and learning. The first universities were set up...and so on...

The first capitalist enterprise involving shareholders occurred also in the 12th century near Toulouse, when a group of merchants teamed up to build water-mills on the river Garonne, and distributed the resulting profits as interest on investment.

This capital at Piacenza in Italy shows a squatting female a little like the later, insular sub-class called sheela-na-gigs - but the bulbous eyes of her and the devouring monsters are distinctly oriental.

Avaritia and Luxuria quickly lost their status as the two most terrible sins. The brief experimental window of Christian community in the West, which was carried from Egypt via Spain (where it died out under the Vizigoths) to Ireland and thence eventually (with the travelling saints such as Columbanus, Gall, Fiacra etc.) to the Frankish kingdoms, ceased in the 12th century, when the Roman Church became married to wealth. The last pillar of Jesus' fragile teaching, which had been shakily re-erected for 600 years, was toppled. Eight hundred years later, wealth, luxury, vainglory and carnality are the cornerstones of our culture. Now, la luxure means 'lechery' (from lècher, to lick) in French - while 'luxury' is le luxe. The modern French word for Luxuria is la crapule.

(For more on the Egyptian Connection, click here.)

So the serious monks' minatory corbels became decorative heads and beasts, jokey/lampooning roof-bosses and gargoyles to amuse the merchants and bishops who were the economic and moral backbone of increasingly town-based religion. Unlike the didactic and minatory Romanesque sculptures, roof-bosses and misericords are caprices and satires carved for a kind of freedom-zone within a church. The post-Romanesque sub-class of exhibitionists known (for peculiar historical reasons) as sheela-na-gigs ) are, however, desperately serious, as their hideous appearance and crude execution demonstrate. They are much more likely to have been placed on the walls of churches to acquire status rather than to 'paganise' or colonise Christianity with 'old magic'. In Ireland they moved onto castles, and, as their significance was lost they ended up on gateways all over Europe (e.g. Antwerp, Milan, Barcelona), then on town houses (e.g. Drogheda), and, at their last gasp, on the baroque handles of flintlock pistols. However, a few exhibitionist images of Satan can be found on or in Spanish Plateresque churches. (By the fifteenth century Satan was generally thought of as a king - the king of Hell - following 300 years of the rise, and rise, of monarchies.)

Exhibitionist and hermaphrodite Satan on the 18th century doorway of the church of San Pedro, Soría (Spain). click for a Satanic Luxuria figure.

Sculptors began to be employed in carving elaborate tombs for princes and princes of the church. Eventually, images of carnality and venality degenerated into lampoons such as are found on misericords and pew-ends - and into the bizarre and usually very crude female exhibitionists which to this day defy explanation: the so-called Sheela-na-gigs, originally named from the grotesque figures found in Ireland. These figures have neither the wit nor skill of the Romanesque corbels and capitals, and impress mainly by a kind of bleak paranoia emanating from them. Over a hundred have been claimed for Ireland, of which 12 have disappeared and a further dozen do not display genitals. There is less than half that total in Britain - where more Romanesque exhibitionists are discovered as time goes by.

Whereas even the most rustic Romanesque images of carnality had a certain folksy charm,

Ithyphallic male as load-bearing corbel (cul-de-lampe)
inside the porch at Virville (Seine-Maritime)

the post-Romanesque images more resemble in their shrill insistence the mural paintings that appeared and disappeared in Belfast in recent years.

Yet the Romanesque figures were not all tucked away in their minatory context on corbel-tables and nave-capitals. As we have seen, some were on the capitals of doorways where all who entered could see them. One particularly large and striking example is the concupiscent, lascivious woman - naked except for her shoes - falling into Hell, unavoidable on one of the four pendentives of the dome of the richly-sculptured church of Civray (Vienne) - overlooking the altar.

click to enlarge

On the other pendentives are: a squatting, naked but not exhibitionist bearded male figure with arms raised; a naked non-exhibitionist male bending forward with his hands on his knees; and a bull's head.

Another female exhibitionist in the company of other sinners and of snakes can be seen on a remarkable rustic Romanesque font at Cleckheaton in Yorkshire.

At this point it is important to point out that concupiscentia (what we would now call 'sex') was not only the act of penetration act: all 'lewd' and lecherous behaviour, from frottage and inter-femoral/-crural to oral and anal sex were also condemned. For an insight into the Christian ascetic approach to sex, click here.

All the elements that were to be found in the thousands of Romanesque corbels can be found in the dozens of the post-Romanesque sheela-na-gig figures that survive - but disturbingly exaggerated: some dire message is being screamed out with neither wit nor art to help - but surely not a warning against the sins of the flesh ? And whereas there are more male than female Romanesque figures, males are extremely rare after the 12th century. Couples were not uncommon in the 11th and 12th centuries, but rare thereafter - the only example known to me being at Aldsworth in Gloucestershire. Acrobatic figures are also extremely rare, most Sheela-na-gigs being portrayed more or less the stance of the figures above - legs splayed and usually bent, feet out-turned and hands pulling enormous vulvas, often with labia and sometimes with clitoris shown. Several (such as Ballynahinch Castle, county Tipperary - one of a few showing its anus) look as if they are dancing. A few (mostly in Ireland) have one hand to their heads in a kind of salute, while the other passes above or beneath a thigh to pull or indicate the vulva, while the out-turned feet are at different heights, strangely reminiscent of oriental dance - in particular the images of the god Shiva dancing.

Compare the sheela-na-gig on Kiltinane Church, county Tipperary (left), with a bronze statuette of Shiva on a Lotus, from Aligarh. Note the hand on the thigh. click for an image of the dancing Shiva.

And compare the Sheela above with a 17th century wooden statue of Kali menstruating. Note the hand to the head.         click the photo to enlarge

Interestingly, there seem to be no intermediate carvings - though a late-Romanesque tongue-protruding exhibitionist at Tugford in Shropshire also has something of the sheela-na-gig about it - perhaps it is the legs which just fade away into nothing.

Tugford (Shropshire) photographed by John Harding.

And the 16th century figure on Ballinderry Castle (Galway) - otherwise crudely carved - has elaborate and asymmetric braids which recall the tresses and hair-styles of the Romanesque figures. A recently-discovered figure from Rahara Church has symmetrical ones, likewise beautifully carved, and - uniquely - good enough to be Romanesque.

Rahara (Roscommon) photographed by Gay Cannon.

LIST of PHOTOGRAPHS of MALE and FEMALE EXHIBITIONISTS
on this site, outside this text.

continued on

 

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on the nature of 'christianity'