Romanesque Tympana: The Last Judgment Carved in Stone
The tympanum — the carved semicircular space above the central portal of a Romanesque church — was the medieval church's most theologically charged surface. Every person who entered the church passed beneath it; every pilgrim who arrived after a journey of weeks or months encountered it before crossing the threshold into sacred space. The Romanesque master sculptors who filled these semicircles with stone images of the Last Judgment, the Pentecost, the Christ in Majesty — working in the compressed, expressive, anatomically unconventional style that characterizes the great Romanesque portals — were not decorating a doorway. They were creating a statement about what lies beyond death, who enters paradise and who does not, and what the stakes of a human life actually are. The violence and tenderness of these carvings — the saved ascending in joy, the damned consumed in hell's demons, Christ presiding over both with equal calm — encode a theology that takes human moral choice compl...