"Romanesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with masonry, and his successors built out still farther, until some two hundred feet of stonework ends now in a perpendicular wall of eighty feet or more. In this space are several ranges of chambers, but the structure might perhaps have proved strong enough to support the light Romanesque front which was usual in the eleventh century, had not fashions in architecture changed in the great epoch of building, a hundred and fifty years later, when Abbot Robert de Torigny thought proper to reconstruct the west front, and build out two ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... completely made me over that it is as though you had created me yourself. I am thirty-five. I have known everything else but what you have awakened in me, and because I have this knowledge and this hunger I can see clearer what we must do. You and I are a little romanesque, but remember that even a great love may tire and grow stale, and that is what I won't have, what must not be." Her voice had risen with the intensity of her mood. She said more solemnly: "You are afraid ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... replied Judith, who had been beautifully pillowed up and otherwise made comfortable on Janet's solo-couch. The audience was scattered around on cushions, on the floor, on chairs, and even on the one narrow window sill. Queening it from her pillows Judith looked quite Romanesque, with Jane perched on a cretonne pedestal above the divan's level, waving her riding crop regally. The pedestal really was a specially favored trunk of Jane's which had escaped storage quarters and served many ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... admitted by a lay-brother dressed in the beautiful white habit, caught about the waist by a leathern girdle from which a rosary hangs. Upon his feet are rough shoes and his head is shorn but he greets you with a smile of welcome and leads you into a large quadrangle, where before you is the great Romanesque church with a chapel upon one side and the refectory upon the other, and all about are cloisters. Here over the entrance to the church is a statue of St Hugh. Within, the church is divided by a screen into two parts, the choir for the Fathers, the nave for the lay-brothers. ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... right over the street resting on solid wooden posts. But more interesting than the domestic architecture are the remains of the abbey founded by Judith of Brittany very early in the eleventh century for it is probably one of the oldest Romanesque remains in Normandy. The church is cut up into various rooms and shops at the choir end, and there has been much indiscriminate ill-treatment of the ancient stone-work. Much of the structure, including the plain round arches and square columns, is of the ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... church, of which the principal architectural features suggested an ancient foundation. It is true that, in the church of fifty years ago, the Norman details were still very distinct, though the round arches of the arcades had been parodied by the Georgian windows of the east end, and by the plastered romanesque reredos; but gloom and darkness overspread the whole place, encroachments of the most incongruous kinds had invaded the most sacred portions, and to the casual observer it seemed impossible that the church could ever be rescued from the ruin with which it was ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... most delightful of associates. Another in this category was the Bavarian secretary, Baron Guttenberg, whom I often met later at Berlin. When I spoke to him about a visit I had made to Wurzburg, and the desecration of the magnificent old Romanesque cathedral there by plastering its whole interior over with nude angels, and substituting for the splendid old mediaeval carving Louis Quinze woodwork in white and gold, he said: "Yes; you are right; and it was a bishop of my family ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... mass. It had been the habit of the Byzantines to break up their draperies by a large number of minute folds. Norman and Romanesque sculpture showed much of the same character. Giotto melted all these folds into broad masses of colour; so that his compositions have sometimes almost a Titianesque look in this particular. This innovation was a healthy one, and led to very noble results when followed ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... churches of Pistoia. Is to be found; because this quality, tense and restrained and distributed with harmonious evenness, reveals itself only to a certain fineness and carefulness of looking. The little churches (there are four or five of them) belong to the style called Pisan-Romanesque; and their fronts, carved arches, capitals, lintels, and doorposts, are identical in plan, in all that the mind rapidly inventories, with the fronts of the numerous contemporary churches of Lucca. But a comparison with these will bring out most vividly the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the insulted fell into each other's arms before these daubs, and they parted, each delighted with the other. These pseudo-Titians were for Monsieur About his Alcibiades's dog's-tail. He spent one every month. Literary, picturesque, romanesque, historical, agricultural, Greek, and Roman questions were never subjects to him: he considered them merely advertisements to puff the transcendent merits of Edmond About. Before he left "Figaro" he determined to show me what a grateful fellow he was. He made me the mark for all his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... standing out as much as a cubit from the stone, so that you see on every side of them, so well carved that they could not be better done — the faces as well as all the rest; and each one in its place stands as if embowered in leaves; and above it is in the Romanesque style, so well made that it could not be better. Besides this, it has a sort of lesser porch upon pillars, all of stone, and the pillars with their pedestals[384] so well executed that they appear as if made in Italy; all the cross pieces and beams are of the same stone without any planks or timber ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... tradition. It could break away more readily than any other form of art, because of the great variety which existed in different parts of the Roman Empire—the Byzantine in the south of Italy, the Gothic in the north, and Romanesque in Rome and the provinces. There was no conventional law for architectural style, hence innovations could be made with very little opposition. In the search for classical remains, a large number of buildings had already become known, and many more were uncovered as the searching ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... interesting and important. A man needs a good eye and a good education to feel and thoroughly appreciate the grand symphonies which this wonderful architectural music of the Middle Ages has so long been silently playing. San Miniato belongs to the close of the Romanesque or Latin period. The early Christian school had expired in the midst of the general convulsions of the ninth and tenth centuries,—in the struggles of an effete and expiring antiquity with the brutal, blundering, but vigorous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... native province, which it always seemed she must know by magic; for, were it Basque or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-song of the Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules of Alsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri—Cigarette knew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but ever sung to every soldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother's cradle-song and of his first love's lips. And there had been times when ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... the bay, under the green shadow of the hills overlooking it, Frederiksted has the appearance of a beautiful Spanish town, with its Romanesque piazzas, churches, many arched buildings peeping through breaks in a line of mahogany, bread- fruit, mango, tamarind, and palm trees,—an irregular mass of at least fifty different tints, from a fiery emerald to a sombre bluish-green. But on entering the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... power in eternal life, and it might well need a thousand years of prolonged and intense experiment to prove the value of the motive. During these so-called Middle Ages, the Western mind reacted in many forms, on many sides, expressing its motives in modes, such as Romanesque and Gothic architecture, glass windows and mosaic walls, sculpture and poetry, war and love, which still affect some people as the noblest work of man, so that, even to-day, great masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far countries to look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... desolator of Yorkshire, we must confess the superiority of the Normans to the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes, whom they met here in 1066, as well as to the degenerate Frank noblesse, and the crushed and servile Romanesque provincials, from whom, in 912, they had wrested the district in the north of Gaul, which still ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... temples similar to those I have described; some of them of Saracenic architecture, equal to that of the Alhambra or the Persian palaces. The pure Hindu designs differ from the Saracenic as widely as the Gothic from the Romanesque, but often you find a mixture embracing the strongest features of both. The rich and the strong gave expression to their own sense of beauty and taste when by the erection of these temples they sought to honor and glorify the gods ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... tower and a presbytery were added to the existing building by Archbishop Cynesige. The 'Frenchman's' influence was probably sufficiently felt at that time to give this work the stamp of Norman ideas, and would have shown a marked advance on the Romanesque style of the Saxon age, in which the other portions of the buildings were put up. After that time we are in the dark as to what happened until the year 1188, when a disaster took place of which there is ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... episcopate of Bishop Ridel (1174-1189), and completed as high as the first battlements during that of his successor, Longchamp (1189-1197), producing a fine example of what is called the Transitional style. During this latter period the Romanesque had been rapidly giving way to the Pointed style, and thus as the building progressed one style merged into ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... old garden near that has not some carved stones of curious shape recognisable by the antiquary as having once formed part of a shaft, a window, or an archway of the proud Abbey. Of these scattered fragments the most important is the lectern of alabaster, Romanesque in style, now, after long misuse and neglect serving its original purpose in the church of Saint Egwin at Norton, a village lying nearly three miles to the north of the town. A description of this relic will be found in the last section of ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... things for awhile. She called David by his first name, pronouncing it the French way, and when Claude said he hoped she would do as much for him, she said, Oh, yes, that his was a very good French name, "mais un peu, un peu... romanesque," at which he blushed, not quite knowing whether she were making fun ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather |
