Romanesque churches’ explicitly sexual carvings were ‘the nobility’s political propaganda’

Why is there a carving of a woman showing her vagina at the crest of a church column? And a woman with bare breasts grasping a man’s penis? A monk having sex with a woman?

These carvings in Romanesque churches in northern Spain have been there for around 1,000 years — Romanesque architecture thrived in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries — but why they are there has been open to interpretation. The scholar Isabel Mellén, 38, has just published Sex in Romanesque Times, which explains these explicit images and explores the context in which they were created: “That of the open mentality of the nobility, who paid for these churches and for whom sexuality was fundamental to maintaining their status through reproduction,” as she explained during a recent interview at the Casa Árabe in Madrid.

Mellén talks about the sexuality of the Romanesque while avoiding adjectives such as “erotic” or “obscene” because using them would imply “a value judgment, a patriarchal and heterosexual gaze.” If we call it erotic, “we will be contemplating them from the male pornographic perspective.”

Mellén’s book explores numerous examples of churches that contain this type of iconography, which is particularly prevalent in the northern Spanish region of Cantabria. “It has to do with the situation that existed in each kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula. There are more depictions in places of secular power, as in Cantabria,” she said. The greatest example of Spanish Romanesque carvings is in the Church of San Pedro de Cervatos. There, the tops of the columns are populated by individuals engaged in sex, men and women showing their genitals and ladies giving birth. “In Catalonia, there are fewer examples because the Gregorian reformists arrived there earlier, across the Pyrenees.” The term ‘reformist’ is used because Pope Gregory VII wanted to eradicate the common concubinage of the clergy.

The church of Santiago el Viejo in Zamora, built in the late 10th or early 11th century, is another example. At the top of one of its columns, “there is a scene that could be described as an orgy,” Mellén notes in her book, “with women and nobles having sex in different positions.” Another carving is of a lady on all fours about to be penetrated by a nobleman.

What is going on is “pure political propaganda by the nobility to legitimize the dynasty,” explains Mellén, who offers documented sources on the construction of the churches throughout her book. It was, she says, about conveying a message: “We have the right to rule you because we are the descendants of a lineage.”

So, the nobles ordered stonemasons and artists to reproduce scenes that would boast of who they were and what they did, which was fundamentally to reproduce. “They are depicted in elegant dress; the men almost always in the role of the warrior or hunter and the women in a reproductive role, which is why there are so many births.”

A scholar of the Romanesque period “with a gender perspective,” Mellén is also the author of Land of Women. The Women Who Built the Romanesque in the Basque Country. And shes hosts the podcast Disseminators of History together with the journalist Naiara López de Munain.

Mellén explains that aristocratic women played the role of “matronage,” meaning “they designed and managed Romanesque works of art and churches, and these became family pantheons.” So it is to these women that we owe “many of the Romanesque depictions of a sexual nature.” Meanwhile, in the churches that were not financed by the nobles, the decoration was completely different, she says. “In the Cluny buildings [named after the Catholic reformist order founded in Burgundy in the 10th century], sexuality is buried, there is nothing explicit.”

The backdrop to these two contrasting visions encompassed the political and ideological power struggle between the 11th and 13th centuries. “We are in a moment of transition in sexuality, between the one that came from the classical world and the one that promoted chastity,” Mellén explains. “These mentalities are in conflict, the first was hegemonic, but the second emerges in a very powerful way through the Gregorian reform church.”

The Catholic Church wanted to wrest political power from the feudal lords and defended a more repressive morality that only existed in a minority of the clergy, Mellén says. However, with time and the ecumenical councils, the repressive approach is the one that prevailed.

This repression reached its peak “in the 19th and 20th centuries, when it permeated the whole of society,” says Mellén. In fact, she points out that some sexual images of the Romanesque period were destroyed in the last century.

Also involved in this “crusade of the Church against sex” was an issue almost as old as humanity: money. “As the priests then had children, the distribution of inheritances could end up threatening Christian unity” as fights broke out. So, the Church imposed celibacy on its religious brethren in order to “isolate them from their families and keep them faithful to the institution, and to influence them.” In this scenario, Mellén explains that the wives or concubines of the religious men became scapegoats in the eyes of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: “They were considered instruments of the devil and had to go underground or were plunged into poverty,” she says.

Mellén criticizes “the habit of attributing the religious system of our time to the Romanesque period, when, in fact, medieval society was very diverse.” Alluding to the typical interpretation history of art gives to these sexual images, she says: “They are interpretations that have focused on the genitals, on people who are naked and practice intercourse, and what was missing was to investigate issues such as desire and power, rather than plugging the gaps in our knowledge with stereotypes. The male gaze that desires and the one that censures have been the backbone of all the discourses on the Romanesque period to date, ignoring aspects as relevant as female sexuality, homosexuality or even transsexuality.”

If we enter the homes of the nobles of those times, Mellén says it was the women who “directed the love relationship; as they were marriages of convenience, they had extramarital relations, known to her husband.”

“For the couple, the important thing was to have children. So the woman could have underlings who would do whatever she asked them to do. The reward for them was sex.” What they were not supposed to do was to have children, in this case, bastards. So “vaginal penetration was secondary, they had fun in other ways, with all kinds of sexual practices, but, of course, they ended up having children, which were relegated to some position or another.”

With so much sex, intimacy was very different than it is now. On the wedding night, there were witnesses around the bed, usually the parents of the bride and groom, to see if the marriage contract was being fulfilled. “Also, the noble houses were little more than a room in which everyone lived together,” Mellén explained. “There was one bed, and the others slept around it, and if they were lucky they had some separating tapestry.” It was common, Mellén explains, to find people having sex “in the corners of the palaces and, usually, among relatively close relatives,” a practice that was common in monarchies in later centuries.

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