Appropriating the Past: Romanesque Spolia in Seventeenth-Century Ireland

Although a relatively young subject, the historiography of Irish architecture has had a remarkably significant impact on the manner in which particular styles have been interpreted and valued. Since the genesis of the topic in the mid-eighteenth century, specific styles of architecture have been inextricably connected with the political history of the country, and each has been associated with the political and religious affiliations of its patrons. From the mid-nineteenth century, the focus on identifying an Irish ‘national' architecture became particularly strong, with Early Christian and Romanesque architecture firmly believed to imbue ‘the spirit of native genius', while Gothic, viewed as the introduction of the Anglo-Norman invader, was seen as marking the end of ‘Irish' art. Inevitably, with such a strong motivation behind them, early texts were keen to find structures that were untouched by the hand of the colonizer as exemplars of the ‘national architecture'. Scholars, including the pioneering George Petrie (1790–1866) in works such as his 1845 study of the round towers of Ireland, believed that through historical research he and others were the first to understand the ‘true value' of these buildings and that any former interest in them had been purely in their destruction, rather than in their restoration or reconstruction. It was believed that such examples of early medieval architecture and sculpture as had survived had done so despite, rather than because of, the efforts of former ages, and, although often in ruins, the remains could be interpreted purely in terms of the date of their original, medieval, creation.

Informed by such studies, from the mid-nineteenth century a movement grew to preserve and consolidate a number of threatened Romanesque buildings with the guiding philosophy of preserving the monuments as close to their original ‘pre-colonial' form as possible. Consolidation of the ruins of the Nuns' Church at Clonmacnoise (Co. Offaly) is traditionally amongst the earliest and most celebrated of these endeavours, undertaken by the Kilkenny and Southeast Ireland Archaeological Society in the 1860s, setting a precedent for both the type of monument and method of preservation that was to become the focus of activity from the 1870s, and thus for the first State initiatives in architectural conservation.