Among all the great styles known to the history of European art the Romanesque was the last to receive system recognition. The generation which experienced that tremendous "rebirth" which has come to be known as the Renaissance itself already spoke of the revival of a more ancient language of forms, and it is well known that at that time the phenomenon of Gothic art was recognized as a style--though with an underlying rejection and condemnation. And it was exactly the same with the Baroque style. This style was determined by protest against it, having been formulated by men of the late eighteenth century who indignantly defined as "Baroque" the style that was just going out of fashion.
If the men of the twelfth century had cared to define and characterize the phenomenon which nowadays we call Romanesque, their definition might well have been found in the protest of Bernard of Clairvaux. However, the first great experience of this art was granted to the generation of the French Romantics.
What then is the inner relationship between the sentiments of the Romantics and the forms of Romanesque art? The plates illustrating this book, especially those showing the capitals and the paintings give a clear answer. It was the supernatural, irrational world which impressed the Romantic, a world based on the idea of unconditional devotion to God. This world opened up quite new vistas, and revealed the dream-like as well as the grotesque, the strong and cruel as well as the gentle and delicate. It was those very aspects of Romanesque art which 700 years earlier Bernard of Clairvaux, the passionate contemporary, had censured as "ridicula monstruositas", "deformis formositas - that especially delighted the eyes and rejoiced the heart of the Romantic who - according to Baudelaire--liked to take refuge from the "trivialité positive" in the "monstres de la fantaisie".
Yet the history of Romanesque art-research during the nineteenth century proves that this first flowering of interest in the circle of the Romantics would not have sufficed to give Romanesque art that commanding position which it occupies in the twentieth century. To achieve this the field had to be ploughed once more, and this tillage we owe to the abstract art of the age in which we live.
Through the present-day tendency in art to dematerialize the subject, we are enabled to look deeper into both the hidden and the manifest abstractions of Romanesque art, to recognize better its effects on the entire language of artistic form, and to distinguish these effects in their individual, yet manifold degrees. Of course, Romanesque art aspires no more than any other historic style to that total abstraction which makes modern art such an unique phenomenon in the history of the human mind. On the contrary, it is completely dominated by its subject matter. But since, with an exclusiveness that was never to occur again, this subject matter is God alone - that is, a spiritual power in the highest sense - the shaping of Romanesque art is by its very nature lodged in the sphere of pure imagination, and it is this that brings it so close to our modern sensibilities. For, far removed as it is from all traditional religious feeling, this modern outlook has created in its own way a world of pure symbols.

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