Tea at Trianon: The Romanesque Gaze

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, August 4, 2025

The Romanesque Gaze

Anyone who is interested in sacred art and beautiful writing should subscribe to The Sacred Images Project. From Hilary White:

Why do these faces feel at once so strange and so compelling? However abstract or otherworldly they appear, we are caught by them; their gaze captures ours. They seem to defy our ideas about what sacred art is for; they do not invite us into a personal, interior, intimate moment. We feel silenced when looking, as if we are being in turn looked at, from an unimaginable distance.
We call it “Romanesque” today but this is a much later academic nomenclature; a term from academics of the early 19th century, whose attention was always trained on Imperial Rome. They saw the architecture, the barrel vaults, rounded arches and solid stone construction, as a “revival” of Roman imperial greatness. But this label risks obscuring the deeper and more immediate roots of the style in monastic liturgy, Christian cosmology and the symbolic imagination of the Middle Ages - all greatly despised by 19th century “men of reason”.
Much later, post-Christian scholars may have named it “Romanesque” but at the time it wasn’t a conscious revival of Classical Antiquity; medieval men would probably have thought that ancient, Classical pagan Rome deserved its fate for murdering the saints. The churches, paintings and sculptures of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were shaped by the practical and spiritual needs of a new Western Christian society, defined by Benedictine monasticism, growing pilgrimage networks and a theology that prioritised symbolic meaning over naturalistic representation. When we talk about early medieval western sacred art, we’re talking about Romanesque.
In the Romanesque, the human faces and figures of Christ, the Virgin, the saints and angels were not painted to resemble any specific individual. Far from it. These are faces abstracted sometimes almost out of recognition into stylised, linear geometric forms intended to express visually the eternal mysteries. In manuscripts, frescoes and sculpture, these faces served as symbols: condensed signs of a humanity transfigured by divine life. (Read more.)