Romanesque’: the Zodiaque Series1

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Romanesque’: the Zodiaque Series1 Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series1 Janet T. Marquardt Figure 1 Example of early photogravures of Vézelay from Zodiaque 12-13 (January 1953), reused in Bourgogne romane, first edition (1954) [Les Nuit des temps 1], pages 212- 213, laid out by Angelico Surchamp, photographs by Pierre Kill, a professional from nearby Avallon. © Photothèque-Zodiaque Between 1951 and 2001, la Pierre-qui-Vire monastery in Burgundy published an illustrated journal, appearing three times a year, as well as multiple series of 1 This research would not be possible without the kind assistance of the monks from the abbey of la Pierre-qui-Vire: Abbot Luc Cornuau, Brothers Mathieu and Ambroise, as well as their generous permission to use figs. 1, 6 and 7 (Photothèque-Zodiaque, La Pierre-qui-Vire, 89630 Saint-Leger- Vauban, France). Equally helpful is Père Angelico Surchamp, who answers endless questions, both in person and via email, on a regular basis. Thanks are also due to two colleagues, Colum Hourihane and Alyce Jordan, who reviewed this essay and greatly improved it by their insightful suggestions, as well as the journal’s efficient editor, Richard Woodfield. I am also grateful to the wonderful staff at l'Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC), the nicest archive in France, where I am working through the prodigious amount of papers deposited by the abbey of la Pierre-qui-Vire, and to my medieval taxonomy session colleagues (Laura Morowitz, Donna Sadler, and Mary Shepard) as well as the hosts of the Western Society for French History conference where this paper was first presented at Boulder, Colorado in October 2009. Many other colleagues have been supportive of this project. I would like to particularly mention Kathryn Brush, Yves Chevrefils Desboilles, Andrea Gibbs, Jean- Marie Guillouët, Todd Gustavson, Christopher Hanlon, Ruth Hoberman, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Danielle Johnson, Terryl Kinder, Gerd Koehler, Guy Lobrichon, Max Marmor, Christine Merllie- Young, Eric Palazzo, Anne Prache, Annie Pralong, Willibald Sauerländer, Mary Caroline Simpson and Otto-Karl Werckmeister. Journal of Art Historiography Volume 1 December 2009 Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series lavishly illustrated books, nearly all focusing on Romanesque art.2 The central and most popular book series, La Nuit des Temps, ran to eighty-eight volumes.3 Another dozen series were spun off the collected material, pushing the total number of books to over three hundred. A printing workshop was established at the monastery, similar to the medieval scriptorium, for the text pages and a few color photographs. The primary illustrations, consisting of rich black-and-white photogravures, were from photographs taken first by professional photographers and later by the monks themselves [Fig. 1]. The glass negatives from these were burned to copper plates, touched up, and printed on thick paper with rich ink. The results are subtle with warm grays, contrasting light reflections and deep black shadows. The graphic intensity was maintained by the use of matte paper cut to a small scale, placed inside cloth covers and completed with ribbon bookmarks, suggesting precious religious texts. During the same period, other publishers, such as the Louvre and Arthaud, were bringing out books on medieval monuments, many also with photogravures.4 However, Zodiaque imagery stands out because the selected monuments and wealth of decorative details are presented in a highly aestheticized light, demonstrating deliberate artistic compositional manipulation of the subjects through lighting, cropping, angles, and framing. In addition, many of the styles among Romanesque art forms suggest corresponding graphic and spare qualities. In this way, the black-and-white medium often served to highlight and reinforce the artistic presentation of Zodiaque’s subjects. Finally, their simple clarity makes these photographs highly significant historical documents of monuments that have suffered erosion, restoration, or even demolition. The monastery of La-Pierre-qui-Vire had been founded in the middle of the nineteenth century on the medieval Benedictine model, including the emphasis on scholarship as opus dei or ‘work of God’. These publications thus served founder Jean Baptiste Muard’s original intention to renew sacred life in France through Figure 2 Frères Surchamp and the monastic ideal. Producing a series of illustrated books Norberto photographing a church in on religious subjects in the twentieth century gave the Aragon September 23, 1986. (Photo: monks at La-Pierre-qui-Vire a project comparable to the Jaime Corbreos, Románico) opus dei of medieval scriptoria. Searching out the sites of Romanesque monuments and visiting them to make photographs, literally initiated ‘pilgrimages’ by small 2 http://www.abbaye-pierrequivire.asso.fr 3 http://www.romanes.com/biblio/zodiaque_fr.html 4 For example: Marcel Aubert, La Cathédrale de Chartres, Paris: Arthaud, 1952; Maurice Gieure, Les Églises romanes en France. Series ‘Pierres Sacrées’ edited by Maurice Malingue, Paris: Editions du Louvre, 1953. 2 Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series troupes of monks traveling across Europe to find Romanesque art from Spain to Scandinavia and from Ireland to the Holy Land [Fig. 2].5 There were few publications on Romanesque art when the Pierre-qui-Vire team began. By disseminating the scholarship of key art-historical authors, the monks not only brought to light many obscure monuments off the beaten path of the art-historical canon and rarely visible details of more famous sites, they also contributed to a growing literature debating the origins of the Romanesque style and its regional differences. One cannot deny the apparent nationalistic vision of such a project, especially in light of its appearance immediately succeeding two recent wars against Germany during which French medieval monuments had been gravely damaged. Certainly France had widely claimed medieval innovations from the nineteenth century onwards, for instance Pierre Francastel’s vehement argument published 1945.6 This may not have been a conscious goal; nevertheless the thrust of the program seems reminiscent of the arguments over who invented Gothic architecture.7 The Zodiaque book series aided in the creation of a cultural history of Romanesque art along nationalistic lines. But it also helped define what is understood today by the very word ‘Romanesque’. A somewhat fluid term from its Figure 3 Advertisement used in inception in the mid nineteenth century through Zodiaque for subscriptions showing the first half of the twentieth, ‘Romanesque’ is covers of various issues. sometimes defined in terms of date, sometimes style, architectural engineering or even circumstances of production (monastic versus urban, et cetera). These books seemed to visually and comprehensively document the existence of a European Romanesque art even as the wide variety of examples destabilizes the term. Zodiaque’s approach was wildly successful, selling over 46,000 copies of the first edition of the initial Nuit des Temps volume on the region of Burgundy, published in 1954. This single book went through nine more editions and eventually sold 140,000 copies, representing the most successful art book ever published in 5 Janet T. Marquardt, ‘La Pierre-qui-Vire and Zodiaque: A Monastic Pilgrimage of Medieval Dimensions’, Peregrinations 2/3, Summer 2009 [http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu]. 6 Pierre Francastel, L’Histoire de l’art, instrument de la propagande germanique, Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1945. 7 This argument began in 1772 with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s On German Architecture and grew in intensity over the next two centuries. See Conrad Rudolph, ‘Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art’, A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 16 ff. 3 Janet T. Marquardt Defining French ‘Romanesque’: the Zodiaque series France.8 As two volumes were produced annually, the activity generated a printing workshop in the abbey of a dozen monks and the income helped fund the enlargement of la Pierre-qui-Vire’s physical layout. The genesis of these Zodiaque books was in a little journal of the same title, which followed another, also from la Pierre-qui-Vire, entitled Temoignages. The latter appeared during World War II under the direction of Dom Jean-Nesmy, whose younger brother contributed articles on art. This younger brother, Angelico Surchamp, had trained with the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes and formed a painting atelier with two other young monks to create modernist wall paintings of religious subjects. Surchamp wrote an essay for Témoignages 21 (April 1949) defending abstract art after an exhibition, organized for tourists by this atelier at Vézelay that paired the medieval sculpture with contemporary Christian art, drew criticism.9 He added a second essay on the same subject to create his own journal, Zodiaque, first appearing in March 1951 [Fig. 3].10 In both these essays, Surchamp addressed the problematic term ‘abstract art’ as part of the contemporary French debate over what constituted ‘sacred art’ (l’art sacré). This latter was a longstanding ‘quarrel’ of major concern to modern artists who sought to bridge the huge gap between what they perceived, on the one hand, as saccharine and meaningless religious art of the nineteenth-century ‘Saint-Sulpician’ variety and, on the other, cutting edge
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