SCOTTISH medieval church architecture took on its most distinctive form between the late fourteenth century and the Reformation of the Church that was formalized in the parliament of 1560. Before then, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the closest ongoing architectural relationships in the Lowland areas had been with England, although it is true that by the later thirteenth century masons were demonstrating an increasing willingness to develop solutions in which models from south of the Border might be little more than a starting point. It may also have been the case by then that Lowland Scotland was itself as much a testing ground for new ideas as was northern England. However, by the later fourteenth century, following some seventy-five years of intermittent warfare between Scotland and its southern neighbour that had erupted in 1296, and which left relatively little opportunity for major church building, there appears to have been a growing sense among Scottish patrons and masons that it was no longer acceptable to have such close architectural links with England.

The range of sources of inspiration underlying the late-medieval Scottish architectural synthesis is still only partly understood. Nevertheless, against the background of a greatly diminishing number of debts to England, it appears that strengthened political, diplomatic, commercial and cultural links with France and the Low Countries resulted in significant direct borrowings from those areas, and perhaps from other parts of the Continent as well.

ERIC, it seems to me, has always harboured an inclination to entertain a bold thesis, to venture down a potentially stimulating path of speculative inquiry, as long as he has felt reasonably sure of his ground – the ingenious paper in which he reframed our vision of that Mona Lisa of prehistoric architecture, Stonehenge, comes immediately to mind. I want to take this sense as licence for offering him the following essay, a token of long friendship and admiration. The argument is founded in large part on the evidence of curiously configured columns, and this seems most apposite, since Eric has done as much as anyone to draw our attention to the ways in which peculiarly ornate columns and piers were deployed in medieval churches to embellish, articulate and dramatize liturgical space.

Ways of seeing

The present paper is concerned with the polished marble columns and veneers with which élite churches were fitted out in late antiquity, with certain aspects of the striking configurations of veining on their highly finished surfaces, and with the ways in which contemporaries saw and understood these features. In its main drift it complements and responds to three studies which have variously addressed these issues, although it was fully developed before I became aware of the last two essays.

IN AN ARTICLE entitled ‘The Romanesque Piers of Norwich Cathedral’, Eric Fernie drew attention to the relationship between the four spiral columns in the nave of the cathedral and the location of the nave altar of the Holy Cross, arguing that this was the product of an integrated design in which differences in pier form were established at the outset of construction, rather than resulting from a change of plan. He labelled this approach ‘architectural synthesis’, to differentiate it from architectural analysis, and suggested that an architectural historian should approach a building in the belief that it was constructed as originally designed, unless there is unequivocal evidence to the contrary. In the following essay, the application of this principle will be extended from the study of columns and piers to other aspects of the design of Romanesque churches and castles. I shall argue that differences in articulation are often allied to differences in function. For the most part, it emerges that richer articulation is associated with a more important space, such as that around an altar or a tomb, both within and on the exterior of a building. Particular attention will be paid to the selective use of vaults and to the isolated uses of ribs where there are various types of vaulting in a single building. Exterior elaboration may also be associated with entry into a church or castle. Above all, differences in articulation will not be related to changes in plan or identified as the work of different master masons. Rather, they will be seen as part of a fully integrated design for the building.

THE VISUAL AND MATERIAL CULTURE of medieval Ireland is far from a neglected area: indeed, with the constant expansion of the road network, man-made objects and landscapes are brought to the public's attention in the most dramatic as well as most humdrum ways, through court cases, media coverage, traffic jams, academic petitions and governmental propaganda. Yet despite this ongoing spectacle of discovery, the study of Ireland's medieval built environment is far from high-profile, while within the academic disciplines, there is a subtle but perceptible friction between art history and archaeology. Given Eric Fernie's contribution to, and continuing interest in, debates on the crossovers between these disciplines, it seems pertinent here to explore the problems and pitfalls of studying Ireland's medieval buildings as architecture. Architectural historians have generally eschewed their study, and the perception has been that they are marginal to the history of European architecture. This apparent marginality is one with which Irish history more generally has also to contend, except perhaps for the period of the sixth and seventh centuries. This paper aims to trace some of the reasons for such perceived irrelevance through a brief historiographic survey, to suggest that a more open theoretical model might allow the reintegration of Irish medieval buildings into their European context, and to raise the problem of modern subjective experiential alienation from such built forms. It is not so much that exciting interpretations of Irish architecture are not being written, as that they are failing to be incorporated into the discourse outside a very limited sphere of specialist writing.

IN A MODERN WORLD bombarded with information, how does the public acquire a view of the role and status of the architect? Given the deluge of news from the press, television and, of course, the Web, today it is almost impossible not to know about construction projects and their often ‘celebrity’ architects. A canny potential client will inspect a practice's previous and current projects, if possible in situ, while a visit to the office – its location, style, staffing – will provide an insight into professional business acumen and financial acuity. If the architect arrives at every meeting in yet another chauffer-driven Rolls-Royce, the client sees only success on wheels. Whether current stars of the architects’ firmament will be remembered five minutes after their demise is another matter. In the recent past, the more astute have commissioned their portrait in oil or print, while others inscribed their names somewhere on the main façade, a popular practice in late-Victorian and Edwardian times. Some have become eponymous with their work: Palladio's villas, the Gibbs building in Cambridge, the Eiffel Tower, numerous worldwide projects by Frank Lloyd Wright and almost anything remotely connected with Le Corbusier.

Were we to project ourselves back to the Middle Ages, how would we be able to judge the status of architects or ‘master masons’ in the society of their day? No architect that we know of was ennobled in the period, but then neither was any goldsmith, painter or sculptor. They all belonged to the ‘paid’ or ‘rewarded’ class of servants, not to the politically useful or financially ‘touchable’.

THERE ARE many possible ‘origins of architecture’. Other creatures make homes that have something of the substance, organization and complexity of buildings made by humans, but in almost all cases their layout is largely the product of behaviours which are manifested by all members of the species, being coded for in the species’ distinctive genetic material. Natural selection means that all members of the species share DNA which codes for the growth of particular neural resources, which then assure the development of those distinctive behaviours which are essential for the species’ survival. The building of a semi-permanent nest by a particular bird or bee species and the construction of a mound by termites are examples of such behaviours. The DNA of other creatures, for whose survival a semi-permanent home is not essential, carries no such coding. Homo sapiens is one such creature, and there are still today human populations which only occasionally construct a shelter. This is, however, increasingly unusual; most human populations make constructions which are far more complex and substantial than those made by any other animals. It is such complex and substantial structures that in European languages are dignified by the designation ‘architecture’, and it is the origin of such structures which is the concern of this paper.

ONE OF MY formative experiences as a student was listening to a lecture about the differences between Romanesque and Gothic figurative art, in which Eric Fernie invoked different styles of comic strips in order to reinforce the point that Romanesque art was about realism and Gothic art about naturalism. My strongest memory is of a comparison he made between the figure styles of Peanuts cartoons and sculpture by Gislebertus at Autun, when he showed how, through a common economy of means, both reached right to the essence of the emotions portrayed. By contrast, the greater descriptive and graphic detail of something like Barbarella, when compared with Gothic sculpture of Reims, indicated a different kind of concentration, more concerned with visual complexity and incident and more conventionally ‘natural’. This projection back from a contemporary genre seemed such an engaging method for investigating the past, especially as it operated as something like a pair of confronted mirrors, reflecting connections between past and present which illuminated both.

My theme here is, however, pattern, not figuration, or, more precisely, elements of continuity and contrast in the use of pattern in architecture in England between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. I aim to explore to what extent different styles are indicative of differing aesthetic preferences in the Middle Ages, and how our understanding of such choices may be illuminated by comparing them with present-day values and interpretations.

THE FRONT, or principal elevation, of a building may represent the character of its interior; alternatively it may express its character or its function, for example the urban cinema of the 1930s as a place of dreams and fantasy. Or it may do neither, whether because nobody thought that it mattered or – a fourth alternative – because the architect set out, for aesthetic reasons, deliberately to mislead. Of the two façades compared in the epigraph and illustrated in fig. 1, that on the right, of the Chiesa Nuova (S. Maria in Vallicella), Rome, has more to do with expression than with representation, because it is considerably larger than the cross-section of the building behind it. That on the left is, in its architect's own description, an expression as well as, in another phrase, a device ‘to deceive the eye of the passer-by’.

IN ITS BREADTH OF SUBJECT MATTER, this collection of essays written in honour of Professor Eric Fernie is representative of his own scholarly concerns, which extend well beyond the boundaries of medieval European architecture, a field to which he has contributed with particular brilliance. Even so, the spectrum of topics covered in the book does not aim to encompass the totality of Eric's interests, excluding as it does, perforce, comic-book illustration, or science fiction.

We are grateful, in the first instance, to Eric's family for raising the idea of this collection, whose theme of ‘architecture and interpretation’ was devised by Sandy Heslop, and to Pamela Tudor-Craig for encouraging the project in its very early stages. Our contributors have responded with remarkable patience and good grace to various requests. We would also like to thank Nicola Coldstream, Peter Draper, Karin Kyburz, Zoe Opačić, and Christopher Wilson for their assistance with the book in various ways, as well as Jocelyn Anderson, who prepared the index. Publication has been made possible by generous financial support from the Research Committee of the Courtauld Institute of Art; the School of World Art Studies, University of East Anglia; a Stroud Bursary from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain; and the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society.

OVERLOOKING the broad reaches of the river Shannon, about half a mile from the ancient monastery of Clonmacnoise, lie the isolated ruins of the so-called ‘Nuns’ Church’, one of the more lavishly adorned Romanesque buildings in Ireland. Completed in 1167 with the assistance of Devorgilla (Dearbhforgaill), daughter of the king of Meath, this small church was designed to serve a community of Augustinian nuns. The only entrance to the building was through a narrow doorway in the west façade, where the nuns were greeted by a series of monstrous animals, chewing the moulding of the arch (fig. 1). These exotic and once, no doubt, colourful beasts seem at odds with the ideals of a female community where the nuns came to worship, dressed, one assumes, in relatively modest attire. Inside the building, the sculpture was more restrained and, given the dim lighting conditions, must have been difficult to discern. Nonetheless, intriguing details would have been visible amidst the chevron of the chancel arch, not least a cheerful lady exposing herself in front of her female audience. Such confrontations are, of course, ubiquitous in the Romanesque world, an arrangement perplexing for the modern spectator, though not apparently for the medieval clients who paid for the carving.

THE IDEAS explored in this paper are based on the premise that, for a brief period of about three decades, within the reign of King Henry I (1100–35), church design for English Augustinian canons normally adhered to a particular type of plan, one that was cruciform with an unaisled nave and chancel. The premise is underpinned by evidence which is set out in more detail elsewhere. This paper interprets this evidence from, broadly speaking, a humanist point of view. The question at its heart, one which only art historians seriously address, is why artefacts, in this case canons’ churches, took the form they did. The conclusions reached differ somewhat from prevailing views, drawing new inferences from the little evidence we have.

It is suggested here that the use of the plan by Augustinian canons was partly customary but also reflected a concerted revival, corresponding to the resurgence of First Christian ideals in Europe during the period that has been called the Medieval Reformation. The assertion here is that the adoption of a distinctive plan was a carefully considered choice that Augustinians and their sponsors consistently made for a time, partly in an attempt to mark themselves out in the religious landscape. Counter-arguments that the plan is devoid of meaning and was merely a cheap, rapid and simple church-building solution are swiftly dispelled by the many large, even monumental examples of its use, while its perceived simplicity was, in practice, liturgically rather awkward and was occasionally modified accordingly.