Friday, November 19, 2010

King of the Jungle


In relief (ha) of Romanesque art and architecture, my Art History class was presented with the task of creating our own tympanums. Inside our tympanum, Hannah and I depicted (the suggestion of) Simba from “The Lion King”. His power is represented through his (somewhat sacrilegious) placement inside a mandorla, the surrounding bowing animals and framing monkeys cooling him with fan-like leafs, and his very size at the center of the lunette. He appears (literally) “putting his foot down” or ruling over the jungle, with a powerful roar that scares away even the hunters on the lintel. We recreated an archivolt from leaf voussoirs and 2 jambs and a trumeau from trees.


Although characterized by the renewal of “Roman-like” and

classical elements, the Romanesque age is also characterized by the revival of monumental sculpture in stone. As a sort of updated Greco-Roman pediment, these Roman wannabes depicted large-scale carved Old and New Testament figures (rare in Christian art) in the lunettes (formally: tympanums) above the doorways to religious sanctuaries. Beneath the voussoirs, didactic images appeared in a symbolic image of each doorway as a the beginning of the path to salvation through (the doorway of) Christ— “I am the door; who enters through me will be saved” John 10:9

From this process I have a much greater respect for the detail of Romanesque tympanums (and their artists). I highly doubt, however, that any Romanesque church would consider our efforts anything more than comical.

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