L’architecture carolingienne François Héber-Suffrin and Christian Sapin

CAROLINGIAN ARCHITECTURE

François Héber-Suffrin and Christian Sapin

Christian Sapin is an archaeologist, art historian and a director of research at the cnrs. He is the author of several works and the director of publications on architecture, liturgy and the decor of religious edifices of the early Middle Ages in France and the rest of Europe. An art historian, François Héber-Suffrin is a senior lecturer at the University of Paris-Nanterre. He is a researcher on Middle Age architecture and sculpture in France and has contributed to several studies on major Carolingian monuments. T he fruit of extensive research by two of the leading specialists in the fascinating history of the Carolingian Empire, this book provides an overview of Carolingian religious and secular architecture. It covers in depth every aspect of this period across a cultural space that still to this day forms the historic heart of Europe. The unity is perceptible across a vast panorama of sites that illustrate the richness of Carolingian architecture: seats of power, palaces and castles, abbeys, and cathedrals and their associated buildings. These monuments, which are of inestimable artistic and historic value, are interpreted with subtlety and panache by the authors. After Jean Hubert’s 1938 book devoted to the architecture of the early Middle Ages, L’Art préroman, no fresh treatment of the subject or attempt to define the specific characteristics of Carolingian architecture was forthcoming until Carol Heitz’s book was published by Picard in 1980. Since then, extensive research has been carried out in France and abroad that has shed new light on this architecture and its decor. This new book draws on the latest scientific findings – many of which till now have appeared only in specialist academic publications and are unknown to a wider public – to explore the wide variety of architectural techniques used in creating these edifices and decors. This work therefore fills a gap in art history by bringing the latest thinking on Carolingian architecture to a broader audience. Brief descriptions are devoted to the monuments that are still standing, fully or in part, and the whole book is illustrated with numerous plans and diagrams, most previously unpublished, and complemented by a comprehensive bibliography of works on the architecture and decor of this period in France and the rest of Europe.