Portal to Illumination

In the shorthand of introductory history courses, Western civilization lapsed into a dark night of the soul with the fall of the Roman Empire, to re-emerge in Italy hundreds of years later during the Renaissance. As scholars have long known, that formula was never entirely true, but it was tidy enough to shape the thought of a schoolboy. In the true sense of the meaning of Renaissance, it can be argued, an earlier rebirth occurred at the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 12th centuries. The age produced in its cathedrals perhaps the greatest architecture yet contrived and, less widely recognized, a powerful vocabulary of sculpture.

To celebrate this earlier renaissance, the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design has mounted a small but superb exhibition of 63 Romanesque and early Gothic stone sculptures.

Compression and Restraint. The show was organized by Brown University's Medievalist Stephen K. Scher. The most distinctive characteristic of Romanesque and Gothic sculpture, he points out, derives from the fact that it was designed to be incorporated into a church. "Whether it be the pyramid of a capital," says Scher, "or the perpendicular wall planes of the portal, the sculpture is forced to obey the laws of the structural mass. The resulting compression and restraint resemble a collected horse in dressage; the energy returns upon itself and becomes totally contained within the basic form."

The museum has gone to great lengths to install the sculpture in settings that suggest the churches from which it came. The main entrance to the exhibition is a massive 12th century limestone portal from western France. Grotesque demons, beady-eyed saints, capitals, reliefs and niche ornaments are ranged on piers within a series of specially constructed pseudo-Romanesque arcades.

With the sculptures at the top of columns, they demonstrate Scher's point about contained energy. But, mercifully, the columns are much shorter than the originals. The sculpture's modeling is calligraphic rather than realistic, and they take on new power to modern eyes conditioned to depreciate the technical skills of representation in favor of the purer visions of stylization. Samson grappling with the lion, an llth century capital from Avignon's Notre Dame des Doms, contains within its stylized forms both the violence of the struggle and the authority of an abstraction. Its companion piece, representing Samson pulling down the temple on his head as six Philistine heads loom above, demonstrates Auden's observation that the old masters were never wrong about suffering: "How well they understood /. . . how it takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along." The small figure of St. Peter from the Third Abbey Church at Cluny is stylistically as spare as anything Matisse ever contrived, humanistically as moving as Rembrandt's Peter. Weighed down with the keys of the church he was charged to found, the guilt of his denials etched in his face, this Romanesque Peter creates an image that was born of faith but survives in beauty.

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