Rarely does an attractive, expensive picture book, normally destined for cocktail-table display, boast both a valuable text and relevant illustrations. This desirable combination is achieved, nevertheless, in all the books produced by Max Hirmer, an art professor who uses his obvious talent for photography to record important monuments of art history. As his previous series of art books on Greece amply prove, he is able first to choose the significant works to photograph, then commission a highly informed text to explain them. But more than just a scholar, Hirmer is a passionate aficionado, who wishes to lead laymen to an appreciation of Mediterranean cultures.
Early Medieval art provides a severe test for Hirmer’s photographic talents, since the masterpieces of this period are either architectural spaces with curved painted surfaces or dainty miniatures in metal, ivory, or illuminated manuscripts. He handles both extremes with consummate skill; the color plates in particular are intensely beautiful. Illustrations and text both recognize the need to examine all forms of artistic production, for in no other period of European history did art touch so many facets of life.
The text, based on an original manuscript by Pedro de Palol, head archaeologist at the University of Valladolid, essentially provides a descriptive handbook of the monuments illustrated, with brief though sometimes irrelevant historical introductions to each phase. In its detailed attention to individual monuments, however, this description often misses the general characteristics of the style of each phase. For instance, although many manuscripts are tagged “Mozarabic” or “Romanesque,” these terms are never defined. Fortunately the stylistic analysis of architecture is much more systematic, with clear drawings of plans, sections, and isometric interiors for each church.
Masterpieces within a style, chosen with sound esthetic judgment, are often justified by meaningless clichés such as “great freedom” or “highly expressive.” Occasionally such vague characterizations even contradict each other; for example, the Santo Domingo de Silos relief work is said to be “produced with intensity of expression, restraint, and nobility” (p. 108). “It is Spanish in all its features, in all its expressiveness and insistence,” the text continues; however, these characteristics are really those of the Romanesque style, which transcended modern boundaries. Foreign influences on Spanish art are generally correctly indicated, be they the Byzantine forms in Visigothic Spain, the obvious Umayyad elements in Mozarabic art, the introduction of the first Romanesque style from Lombardy, or the High Romanesque “pilgrimage” style from France. In this last, however, De Palol defends its Spanish character, as a counterbalance to the usual French-oriented scholarship, and he even emphasizes the reverse flow of Compostela elements back into France. All this only reveals the lack of national styles in feudal Europe, which was unified more by monastic orders, pilgrimages, and dynastic marriages than it was divided by incipient kingdoms.
Although the text does not brilliantly synthesize the period, it serves perfectly as a guide to practically all the known monuments of the time, specifying their historical and artistic background and significance. The handsome photographs are related to the text only by marginal numbers, too numerous to justify constant flipping back and forth. More judiciously restrained in number, the footnotes refer the interested reader to the specialized bibliography. For providing this invitation to further study, and for presenting both redrawn architectural figures after Puig or Whitehall and beautiful, descriptive, original photographs by Hirmer, this book can be highly recommended as the best reference source on early medieval art in Spain.
