Romanesque Patrons and Processes : Design and Instrumentality in the Art and Architecture of Romanesque Europe

The twenty-five papers in this volume arise from a conference jointly organised by the British Archaeological Association and the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. They explore the making of art and architecture in Latin Europe and the Mediterranean between c. 1000 and c. 1250, with a particular focus on questions of patronage, design and instrumentality.

No previous studies of patterns of artistic production during the Romanesque period rival the breadth of coverage encompassed by this volume – both in terms of geographical origin and media, and in terms of historical approach. Topics range from case studies on Santiago de Compostela, the Armenian Cathedral in Jerusalem and the Winchester Bible to reflections on textuality and donor literacy, the culture of abbatial patronage at Saint-Michel de Cuxa and the re-invention of slab relief sculpture around 1100. The volume also includes papers that attempt to recover the procedures that coloured interaction between artists and patrons – a serious theme in a collection that opens with ‘Function, condition and process in eleventh-century Anglo-Norman church architecture’ and ends with a consideration of ‘The death of the patron’.

Jordi Camps is Chief Curator of the Medieval Department of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) in Barcelona, where he has curated a number of exhibitions. He is one of the principal scientific coordinators of the Enciclopedia del Románico en Cataluña and is a member of the project Magistri Cataloniae. His personal research interests revolve around sculpture between the 11th and 13th centuries, and the history and historiography of the Romanesque collections at MNAC.

Manuel Castiñeiras is Associate Professor of Medieval Art History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), where he acted as the Head of the Department of Art and Musicology from 2014–17. His research focusses on Romanesque art and medieval panel painting, though he has also worked widely on pilgrimage and the question of artistic exchange in the Mediterranean. He is currently the 2017–18 Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts-National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC.

John McNeill teaches at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education and is Honorary Secretary of the British Archaeological Association, for whom he has edited and contributed to volumes on Anjou, King’s Lynn and the Fens, the medieval cloister and English medieval chantries. He was instrumental in establishing the BAA’s International Romanesque conference series and has a particular interest in the design of medieval monastic precincts.

Richard Plant has taught at a number of institutions and worked for many years at Christie’s Education in London, where he was Deputy Academic Director. His research interests lie in the buildings of the Anglo-Norman realm and the Holy Roman Empire, in particular architectural iconography. He is Publicity Officer for the British Archaeological Association and co-edited the first volume in this series, Romanesque and the Past.