ROMANESQUE SCULPTURE It was not until the 11th century that sculpture became once more a monumental art. In the Romanesque monasteries, which covered Western Europe, sculpture, being made once more sub ordinate to architecture in the decoration of cloister and abbey doorway, began a fresh development which carried it from archaic beginnings to a superb culmination in the sculptural ensembles of the 13th century cathedrals.
The basis for this new sculpture was the Christian iconography of the East and of Rome, derived as we have seen from a some what distant Hellenic tradition. The Romanesque sculptor had to learn anew the technique of his craft but he had for his model the forms of an art already sophisticated and even decadent. The theocratic spirit of the age turned him from the observation of natural or human beauty. Preoccupied with spirit and not with form, he could not evolve his Christ, like the Hellenic Apollo, from a naked athlete. The Christian sculptor began with symbols —symbols made sacrosanct by authority and usage. His reliefs, cut in the tympana of abbey portals or moulded on the panels of bronze doors, repeat the types, the proportions, even the stylistic treatment—the low relief, the concentric folds and clinging drap ery, the colour and gold—of a Byzantine miniature or ivory carving.
But ivory carvings and miniatures cannot be fitted, without some modifications, into an architectural scheme. To do that a re arrangement of their figures, a redistribution of shadow and emphasis, and an enlargement of scale are necessary. Figures placed in the semi-circular tympanum of a doorway demand a balanced composition in which a central figure is made dominant and all the lines and shadows made to bend in harmony with the wide arch over them. Figures chiselled on a lintel demand a regu lar and rectilinear arrangement, free from deep shadow and bent line; figures placed on the splays of doorways must stand rigidly upright and be free of gesture or a too marked individuality; and figures cut into a capital must follow, in a symmetrical, flower like arrangement, the warped surfaces which are transitional be tween shaft and arch. In this way the Byzantine forms, already abstract, suffered in the hands of the monastic builders a further abstraction ; they are transformed into architecture.