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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