The Brick System of Romanesque Architecture

Description:

"At the beginning of the eleventh century in northwestern Italy builders created a comprehensive system of architecture, integrating the square edges of stacked bricks on the exterior with arches, vaults, and niches inside the wall. Throughout southern Europe builders copied this system. In major abbeys in Catalonia builders carefully followed and also imaginatively enriched it, creating a new type of interior, different from the early Christian model perpetuated in the central vessel of contemporary Italian churches. In major churches in southern France successive generations incorporated many of these changes to the brick-based model and added significantly to them. Seen in this new light, early eleventh-century architecture in Lombardy and Catalonia belies its longstanding reputation as a superficially decorated, pendulously massive, unprogressively folkloric, and largely irrelevant First Romanesque prelude to High Romanesque architecture"--Page 4 of cover.

subjects: Romanesque Architecture,  Church architecture,  Architecture, spain,  Architecture, romanesque,  Church architecture, france,  Church architecture, spain,  Church architecture, italy,  Brick Building