Working with Limestone: The Science, Technology and Art of Medieval Limestone Monuments (review)

Addressed primarily to art and architectural historians, Working with Limestone is a useful compendium of recent technical investigations of Romanesque and Gothic limestone sculpture and architecture. The editor credits William Clark for promoting this gathering of eleven conference presentations at various venues by fourteen experts in different disciplines. The collection is a miscellany, not a cohesive text. Multiple narratives weave chemistry, archaeology, geology, economics, trade, history, and layered technical, artistic, and architectural developments. The introduction, by Clark, Georgia Sommers Wright, and Nancy Wu, succinctly reviews recent literature, especially French and North American.

In chapter 1, French geological engineer Annie Blanc, and two Brook-haven National Laboratory chemists, Garman Harbottle and the late Lore Holmes, all deeply involved in the ambitious Limestone Sculpture Provenance Project, explain neutron-activated analysis. NAA is an analytical tool supporting a growing database currently capable of differentiating limestones from fifty-nine medieval French quarries. Seven specific assumptions constrain using the technique to establish provenance of a limestone object. Four other chapters unnecessarily reiterate this material. Early reports from the Limestone Sculpture Provenance Project appeared in the journal Gesta in 1994. Compared to progress in better-funded scientific fields, advances reported here seem slow, perhaps hampered by limited financing of costly technologies.

In chapter 2, Wright, Holmes, and Harbottle demonstrate use of NAA and its database to determine probable origins of several Gothic heads of kings and apostles in American and French museums. Art historical analyses of these fragments narrow down possible provenances. Subjecting orphaned heads to NAA eliminates some alternatives, often settling questions of origins. Chapter 3, by Thomas Russo, Holmes, and Harbottle, discusses the use of NAA at Lincoln Cathedral to help date a Norman Romanesque frieze on its facade that is traditionally dated to 1140 though it is embedded in a wall built ca. 1090. This is work in progress; results remain unclear.

In chapter 5, Jean-Pierre Gély and Michaël Wyss use traditional petrographic analysis to identify likely quarries supplying stone for almost one-and-a-half millennia to the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, the French royal pantheon where Gothic architecture was born around 1140, and reconstituted around 1230. Chapters 4 by Blanc and Gély, 6 by Jonathan Hoyte, and 8 by Janet Snyder offer introductions to limestone, its geology, quarries, and conservation. Hoyte describes the environmental mechanisms that corrode limestone and current methods for cleaning and consolidating it. Limestone is a fine-grained sedimentary stone, soft when freshly quarried, and easy to carve. Snyder recounts that 45 million years ago a sea covered the Paris basin, depositing calcium carbonate that became compacted under pressure, creating multiple shallow limestone layers with distinct qualities. The finest, most-coveted limestones were extracted from underground quarries in layers known as banc royale and liais franc, about ten meters below the surface. Blanc and Gély map the spread of Parisian limestones to churches built throughout the Île-de-France from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.

Further south, in Burgundy, sandstone was more common than limestone. Walter Berry’s chapter 7 examines stonework at Autun, where limestone was used in imperial Roman monuments, but restricted to sarcophagi and spolia in Merovingian and Carolingian construction. Eleventh-century Romanesque builders quarried limestone sparingly for sculpture, but expanded extraction for the prestigious twelfth-century pilgrimage church of Saint Lazare.

Snyder’s chapter 8 and Vibeke Olson’s chapter 9 argue that Parisian quarry workshops developed in-situ prefabrication, standardization, and serial production of components—unfortunately mislabeled “mass-production on assembly lines.” These techniques added value to and reduced the weight of ashlars and sculpture, expensively transported by water on barges and pirogues to faraway building sites such as Chartres, Auxerre, and England. This hypothesis upturns attributions of French early Gothic portals to traveling masters and their workshops.

Roger Stalley’s chapter 10 reviews medieval Ireland, where fine limestone was unavailable. Dry-stone masonry—mortarless assemblies of tightly...