Misadventures of a Style: Romanesque art and the Druids in eighteenth‐century France

At a time when Romanesque art scarcely interested French academicians, a certain group of twelfth‐century buildings and sculptures attracted a great deal of attention from a handful of antiquarians. Uncertain of what to make of an octagonal chapel at Montmorillon, the antiquarian Bernard de Montfaucon assigned it to Gaul's pagan priests, the Druids. He developed a complex iconographic history around this chapel, and other scholars after him followed his lead by identifying as pagan a score of other twelfth‐century structures. This essay explores how the case of mistaken identity intersected with the gradual acceptance in academic study of Romanesque architecture. Consideration of antiquarian methodology, with its categories of knowledge inflected by notions of race and nationalism, sheds light on the pre‐history of Romanesque research and on the interpretive tools employed for medieval art's early study.