Romanesque secular and domestic architecture
Examples of purely domestic architecture include the great hall of a fortified manor in England, and a small number of large town houses in France and Germany and several palazzos in Venice.
Much of Europe was affected by feudalism in which peasants held tenure from local rulers over the land that they farmed in exchange for military service and employment on building projects.
From this time onwards, monasteries were established across Europe, bringing about not only the construction of large churches, but also cloisters, domestic quarters and other buildings associated with community living such as hospitals, barns, and forges.
The continual movement of people, rulers, nobles, bishops, abbots, craftsmen and peasants, was an important factor in creating a homogeneity in building methods and a recognizable Romanesque style, despite regional differences.
Arcades (rows of arches) occur in the interior of large buildings such as the great hall of a castle, supporting the timbers of a roof or upper floor.
Internally, the large wall surfaces and plain, curving vaults of the Romanesque period lent themselves to mural decoration and traces of them have been found in castles and wealthy homes.
In general, the main living and working quarters of any monastery were the cloisters, four arcaded passages that surrounded a courtyard and were located, wherever possible, adjacent to and on the southern (sunniest) side of the church.
A separate dining chamber known as the "misericord" was often attached to the infirmary, so that sick and infirm aged brothers could benefit by eating red meat, something not permitted in the refectory.
However, a number of fine examples exist, scattered across Europe, with Sénanque Abbey, consecrated in 1178, being a rare survival that has retained many of its original Romanesque buildings intact, including the church, cloister, dormitory, calefactory and chapter house.
[21] At Maulbronn in Germany the medieval monastery has remained virtually intact, but typically the buildings vary in date, with the earliest being Romanesque of the late 12th century.
[22] It rises in four stages of different heights, with a single arched portal and groups of three openings of varied design on the upper levels, between flattened corner buttresses.
The cloisters sometimes retain an upper arcade which gave access to dormitories or cells, as at the Cathedral St. Léonce and the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos in Burgos.
The central tower became the final defensive layer of the castle,[28] while the main domestic quarters were built against the walls around the perimeter, allowing plenty of room for a variety of functions.
Conisborough Castle is an English example, with the shell keep rising on the earlier motte, and a wall with the residential and service quarters built into it, enclosing the bailey.
In Germany the Baumburg Tower in Regensburg is an elegant late 13th-century example showing elements that are transitional between Romanesque and Gothic in its decorative window openings which are different on each floor, and contrast with the smoothly stuccoed walls.
This substantial house of three storeys has a broad street front, braced on one side by projecting bell tower with typical paired mullioned windows.
This modestly sized building, fronting onto a square, has a symmetrical façade, a low gable that retains the appearance of a Classical pediment, and a portal that has a semi-circular arch raised above a broad lintel supported on corbels, a common feature of medieval Italian domestic architecture and also seen at the House of Dante.
Both houses have been much altered and have been fitted with sash windows and shop fronts, but both retain their doorways and both originally had a fireplace to an upper room directly above it, with arches supporting the chimney and framing the door.
The oldest, known as Casa Romanica has two large arches making a loggia at the ground floor, above which rises a plain facade broken only by small windows and a jutting chimney breast.
The loggia leads into a large kitchen with rough-hewn wooden columns standing on stone bases and spreading the weight of the wide beams of the upper floor on projecting horizontal brackets.
The 12th-century "Castelletto" and 13th-century Ezzolino's Tower have both retained Romanesque characteristics, with the later being built of brick and having more ornate features such as paired mullioned windows on its upper floor.
[40] Merchant palaces are essentially city buildings, of initially modest scale but growing in size by the 13th century, where wealthy trading families both lived and carried out their businesses.
While the structures are brick, the favoured material for architectural decoration was marble, which is elaborately carved into intricate details, or laid on the surface as patterned veneers.
Fondaco dei Turchi was built as a private palace for the wealthy Pesaro family and, like the other palazzi along the Grand Canal, was designed to facilitate business, with its long arcade stretching along the main waterway.
While the open loggias of houses were used for trade and those of town halls were widely used for markets, (see below) other commercial buildings were purpose-built, sometimes by city authorities, to facilitate trade, with an important example of an extant commercial building being the Korenstapelhuis (English: Old Corn Warehouse) in Ghent, Belgium, which is close by the quay and has a wide front with two rows of openings to facilitate the handling and stacking of bags of grain.
The open ground-floor loggia that is found in some Romanesque town houses also occurs in Italy at a number of buildings that served civic or communal purposes.
In the cities of Mantua, Milan and Padua the Palazzo della Ragione ("place of reason") and in Como and Pavia the Broletto served as a town hall and centre of local government.
The Tuscan hill town of Massa Marittima has two Romanesque civic buildings which typify the character of medieval architecture of Tuscany as against that found in the north.
The type of modern buildings for which the Romanesque style was most frequently adapted was the warehouse, where a lack of large windows and an appearance of great strength and stability were desirable features.
These buildings, generally of brick, frequently have flattened buttresses rising to wide arches at the upper levels after the manner of some Italian Romanesque facades.
