ROMANESQUE Architecture, in its widest sense, may be
taken to include all those structural forms which in any
way descend from Roman building. Roman building itself
was a structural system which borrowed all or nearly all its
decorative features, at first or second hand, from the Greeks
and was itself responsible only for the general ordinance
which resulted from the plan and the structural system. Thus
the Byzantine style is in part Romanesque though much of
its system and decoration is purely Eastern and its Roman
elements have been, in recent years, subjected to a progres-
sive course of subtractive criticism, more and more of its
elements being assigned to the East and less and less to
Rome. The same critical attack has been made on Roman
architecture itself, but without the same success. In this
connexion it is not enough to prove that a form of vault or
a type of plan was in use, many centuries earlier and many
hundreds of miles away, to establish a conscious or uncon-
scious borrowing on the part of the Roman builders. The
solution of a structural problem is in no sense analogous to
such problems as the unique genesis of the human race, even
if that be accepted, and the theory of independent discovery
or rediscovery is far more in accord with probability than the
supposition that the accomplished Roman engineer or archi-
tect took lessons from the amateurish efforts of the brick-
builders of the Near or Middle East.

In this wider sense the term Romanesque is in fact curiously
inexact as a description of the architecture which prevailed
in the western provinces between the fall of Rome and the
end of the first millennium; the architecture of this age is.
normally a reflection, often dim enough, of the church archi-
tecture of the age of Constantine and his successors and

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