THE term 'first Romanesque art' has been invented and
applied by Señor Puig ¹ to a widely diffused type of
building of which he has traced the origin and extent and
which he rightly considers the immediate precursor of the
full Romanesque style.

Following Quicherat he considers that 'the vault, con-
sidered in its form, in its outline and in its economy, is always
the essential feature of Romanesque architecture; apart from
the general lines of the plan and the free fancy of the decoration,
everything is subordinated to it'. The rise of Romanesque,
considered in this light, may be said to be in great part due to
the troubles and disasters which overtook western Europe
during the decline and fall of the Carolingian dynasty. The
almost universal incursions of the Normans with their accom-
panying pillage and destruction, either threatened or over-
took almost every church which had anything worth the
looting. Repeated disasters formed a very pressing and
cogent motive for the production of a form of structure at
once more solid and less destructible than that which had
held the field since the age of Constantine. That such was
the immediate motive for the change in structure in Catalonia
is proved by a number of instances cited by Señor Puig in
which the burning of a church, in this case by the Moors,
was followed by its rebuilding in a form that was unburnable,
the wooden roofs of the earlier building being replaced by
the stone vaults of the later structure. There seems little
reason to doubt that the return to this use of the stone vault
made its first beginnings in those provinces where extensive
survivals of Roman imperial building provided an object
lesson which the needs of the age forced the Romanesque

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