CLUNIAC ART AND ARCHITECTURE

During the 250 years after their foundation, the monastic houses of Cluny became the most important and widespread in Europe, comprising some 1,450 priories and some 10,000 monks in England and on the Continent as far east as Poland. Very active in the arts, the Cluniacs were responsible for bringing to fruition the Romanesque style, especially in France. The practicing of St. benedict's precept of prayer and work (ora et labora ) virtually guaranteed the order great church and cloister architecture. Music was essential also; odo, a former precentor at Tours and the first great abbot at Cluny (927–49), firmly established the inseparable musical and spiritual traditions of the Cluniacs (see cluniac reform). peter the venerable, the last great 12th-century abbot at Cluny (1122–57), gave an intellectual and artistic interpretation to labora: "It is more noble to set one's hand to the pen than to the plow, to trace divine letters upon the page than furrows upon the fields." It was during his abbacy that Cluniac art reached its zenith.

Architecture. The most important single Cluniac manifestation of Romanesque style was the great church of SS. Peter and Paul constructed at Cluny under Abbots hugh of cluny (1049–1109) and Peter the Venerable between its official founding, Sept. 30, 1088, and its formal dedication by Pope Innocent II, Oct. 25, 1130. Work continued until about 1450 on the western towers, long after Cluniac power had diminished. The church itself was destroyed, save for the south arm of the western transept, between 1798 and 1823. Cluny III, so termed in contradistinction to two earlier churches of the 10th century that it superseded, was the largest church in Europe save St. Peter's in Rome and was the principal expression of Benedictine Romanesque monastic architecture.

Built on the plan of a double-armed archiepiscopal cross, Cluny III was over 600 feet in length, including a Gothic narthex completed about 1225, and reached an interior vaulted height of 100 feet for the first time in medieval architecture. This feat duly impressed a chronicler in 1120, who wrote, "… and suddenly [as one enters the nave] a giant basilica surges up…." As capitalchurch of the Cluniac congregation of Benedictines, Cluny III was able to hold all the monks of the order; in 1132 there were 1,212 monks assembled in procession in the church. Medieval visitors were no less impressed by its workmanship than by its size; later visitors were equally awed by its total effect: "If you see its majesty a hundred times, you are overwhelmed on each occasion" (Mabillon, 1682).

The chevet of the great church had five isolated chapels radiating from an ambulatory, a distinguishing feature of later Cluniac Romanesque architecture. It is seen in Saint-Étienne at Nevers, consecrated 1097, and Paray-le-Monial, 1104, each of which has three chapels. But at Cluny concentration focused on the great altar whose top is preserved in the Musée Ochier, Cluny, and from which for nearly 700 years song and incense rose daily to the large "Christ in Glory" fresco in the apse. This painting is now destroyed, but a contemporary reflection may be seen in Abbot Hugh's chapel in the Cluniac grange at nearby Berzé-la-Ville (c. 1100). The mosaic floors with images of the saints led past two transepts (a rare feature for the time), each with lateral chapels, to the great fiveaisled nave. The central nave aisle, 33 feet wide and 100 feet high under its pointed, ribbed barrel vault (part of which collapsed in 1125 but was rebuilt by 1130), was flanked by compound piers eight feet in diameter. It consisted of a main arcade, a false triforium having no lateral passage in the wall, and a clerestory. The pointed arches used at Cluny III for the first time on such a scale in medieval architecture may have reflected, as did the cusping of the triforium arcade, Islamic influences from Spain, one of whose monarchs, Alfonso el Bravo (d. 1109), was married to Hugh's niece Constance and contributed annually 200 ounces of gold to the abbey. The basic concept, however, was neither Spanish nor Islamic. The architects of Cluny III were Gunzo, a retired abbot of Baume, who served as designer (μηχιανίκος), and Hérzelo, a former canon of Liège, who served as builder (ἀρχιτέκτων). As K. J. Conant has demonstrated, the design was based on several systems of musical numbers, notably the Pythagorean series of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, and 12. Further, since Gunzo is known to have been a musician (psalmista praecipuus ), it is not impossible that the design should have been related to gregorian chant, an essential part of Cluniac ritual and one demanding vaulted churches for acoustical reasons.

A number of buildings reflect the interior disposition of Cluny III, especially the nave of Autun cathedral (c. 1125) and the Cluniac priory churches of Paray-le-Monial and La Charité-sur-Loire (consecrated 1107), but there never existed a Cluniac school of architecture in the sense that Cistercian churches of the 12th century unquestionably relate to a single concept. (see cistercian art and architecture.) Cluniac influence may account for the general uniformity found in the great churches of the pilgrimage roads, such as Sainte-Foi at Conques and Saint-Martial at Limoges, the latter a Cluniac dependency; but, despite discernible interdependent relationships and groupings among the some 325 Cluniac churches remaining at least in part (for example, the en échelon apse plan of Cluny II and Payerne, Switzerland, after 1050), Conant is correct in saying that the "Cluniacs were more zealous for uniformity in customs, discipline, and liturgy than in architecture."

Sculpture. Cluniac sculpture developed from manuscript illustrations, the expected source in an intellectual order. St. Benedict's Rule required each monk to read one book during Lent, and the library at Cluny possessed some 570 volumes in the 12th century. Nowhere is the relationship between manuscript illustration and sculpture more clearly seen than by comparing the cloister plaques at Moissac (c. 1100) with manuscripts known to have been at the Cluniac abbey. However, the most artistically complete treatment of iconographic themes is to be found at Cluny III itself. The now-destroyed "Christ in Glory" with symbols of the evangelists of the central west tympanum (carved c. 1115; destroyed 1810) was "painted like a manuscript page" and was the first large sculptural expression of this theme, the forerunner of many such portals extending in time well into the Gothic period (Carennac, c. 1130; Charlieu porch, c. 1145; Last Judgment at Beaulieu, c. 1135; central narthex tympanum at Vézelay, by 1135).

Cluniac capitals were often Corinthianesque in form, especially after 1090, and the order found place also for such Islamic motifs as pointed arches (Cluny III; Parayle-Monial; Vézelay) and cusping (Cluny III; La Charité-sur-Loire; Chalais, c. 1150). Cluny did not, then, invent Romanesque themes or inaugurate stylistic features, but it did give the former a coherency and the latter a fullness that neither had previously.

This consummate combining of theme and style is most evident in the ambulatory capitals surviving from the chevet of Cluny III, consecrated Oct. 25, 1095, by Pope Urban II (Musée Ochier, Cluny). The illustrated themes provided the first important series of allegorical capitals in Romanesque art. Inspired by the writings of Radulphus Glaber, they included the four seasons, the cardinal virtues, the four trees (a new subject), and the four rivers of paradise. Two capitals from the ambulatory represented the eight tones of the chant; they indicate a link between Cluniac liturgy and art. These personifications of the musical tones, based on a late 11th-century tonarius manuscript from Saint-Martial at Limoges (Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS lat. 1118), are among the finest of all early Romanesque capitals and demonstrate fully how the Cluniacs gave sculptural substance to musical and allegorical themes.

St. bernard of clairvaux (d. 1153) disliked Cluniac "ostentatiousness" in art, but even he acknowledged its "endless varieties of forms … fashioned with marvelous subtlety of art" (Apologia ad Guillelmum, c. 1125). Through the enrichment of decoration with meaningful and systematic symbolism, the Cluniacs made one of their most important contributions to the development of medieval art.

Bibliography: j. evans, The Romanesque Architecture of the Order of Cluny (Cambridge, Eng. 1938); Cluniac Art of the Romanesque Period (Cambridge, Eng. 1950), the two best gen. introds. to Cluniac art and architecture, with extensive bibliogs. k. j. conant, "Mediaeval Academy Excavations at Cluny, VIII: Final Stages of the Project," Speculum 29 (1954) 1–43, author's many earlier Speculum articles are cited on p. 1; "New Results in the Study of Cluny Monastery," Journal of the Society of Architectural History 16 (October 1957) 3–11; "Mediaeval Academy Excavations at Cluny, IX: Systematic Dimensions in the Buildings," Speculum 38 (1963) 1–45, good illus.; Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture, 800 to 1200 (Pelican History of Art Z13; Baltimore 1959). m. aubert, "Église abbatiale de Cluny," Congrès archéologique de France 98 (1935) 503–22, a good description, but dating of the sculpture too late. f. deshouliÈres, "Le Rôle de Cluny," Bulletin monumental 94 (1945) 413–34, indicates the specific Cluniac contributions of Romanesque architecture.

[c. f. barnes, jr.]