Romanesque Architecture
The Duomo in Pisa, Italy (1060 AD)
The Romanesque style is called that because it is a little like Roman architecture, but it is made around 1000-1200 AD instead of during the Roman Empire.
Between the time of Charlemagne (about 800 AD) and the beginning of Romanesque two hundred years later, people had built practically no big new buildings. Everybody was too busy fighting each other and trying to get enough to eat, and they were too poor to build anything fancy. But by about 975, things were beginning to settle down, and by 1000 kings and queens like William the Conqueror were beginning to order important, stone buildings again, like St. Germain des Pres in Paris.
Mostly castles and churches are built in the Romanesque style. You can see Romanesque buildings all over France, England, Italy, and Germany, and in northern Spain (the part that was not taken over by the Umayyads).Some examples of Romanesque buildings are the Women's Abbey and the Men's Abbey in Caen, France, both built around 1050 AD. Just a little later, you have the cathedral and baptistry of Pisa, Italy, built about 1060 and 1150 AD, the church of St. Sernin in Toulouse (1080 AD), and the baptistry of Florence, Italy, built around 1100 AD.
The Romanesque cathedral at Vezelay (1100 AD)
This is where Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade.
Romanesque buildings were made of stone, but often had wooden roofs because people were still not very good at building stone roofs yet. If they did have stone roofs, the walls had to be very thick in order to hold up the roofs, and there couldn't be very many windows either, so Romanesque buildings were often very heavy and dark inside.
They had round arches, like Roman
buildings, and decorated column
capitals like the Romans too, only Romanesque
capitals often have carvings of people or animals
on them instead of plants.
To find out more about Romanesque architecture, check out these books from your local library or from Amazon:
Oxford Children's History of the World, by Neil Grant (2000). A general history of the world for kids. Good place to start.
Romanesque and Gothic Buildings, by Graeme Chalmers (1998). Specially written for kids.
Gothic architecture
Medieval architecture page
Islamic architecture
Main architecture page
Main medieval page
Gifts and books about the Middle Ages
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