Pre-Romanesque art and architecture

While the term is typically used in English to refer primarily to architecture and monumental sculpture, this article will briefly cover all the arts of the period.

The description in Bishop Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks of the basilica of Saint-Martin, built at Tours by Saint Perpetuus (bishop 460–490) at the beginning of the period and at the time on the edge of Frankish territory, gives cause to regret the disappearance of this building, one of the most beautiful Merovingian churches, which he says had 120 marble columns, towers at the East end, and several mosaics: "Saint-Martin displayed the vertical emphasis, and the combination of block-units forming a complex internal space and the correspondingly rich external silhouette, which were to be the hallmarks of the Romanesque".

From this emerged a renewed faith in the idea of Empire and a reformed Church, creating a period of heightened cultural and artistic fervour.

It was in this atmosphere that masterpieces were created that fused the traditions from which Ottonian artists derived their inspiration: models of Late Antique, Carolingian, and Byzantine origin.

Much Ottonian art reflected the dynasty's desire to establish visually a link to the Christian rulers of Late Antiquity, such as Constantine, Theoderich, and Justinian as well as to their Carolingian predecessors, particularly Charlemagne.

They were a major art form of the time, and monasteries received direct sponsorship from emperors and bishops, having the best in equipment and talent available.

Altar rails and windows of those churches were highly decorated with transparent shallow string-like ornament that is called pleter (meaning to weed) because the strings were threaded and rethreaded through itself.

By joining the Hungarian crown in the twelfth century, Croatia lost its full independence, but it did not lose its ties with the south and the west, and instead this ensured the beginning of a new era of Central European cultural influence.

The Normans in Sicily chose to commission Byzantine workshops to decorate their churches such as Monreale and Cefalù Cathedrals where full iconographic programmes of mosaics have survived.

The first form of Pre-Romanesque in Spain and Portugal was the Visigothic art, that brought the horse-shoe arches to the latter Moorish architecture and developed jewellery.

After the Moorish occupation, Pre-Romanesque art was first reduced to the Kingdom of Asturias, the only Christian realm in the area at the time which reached high levels of artistic depuration.