Pre-Romanesque Art known as the historiography of the first great cycle of medieval art in Western Europe, coinciding with the High Middle Ages. It was coined by Jean Hubert in 1938. Stylistically it does not designate an aesthetic movement with well-defined artistic forms, but rather it is a generic expression that encompasses the artistic production of Latin Christianity between primitive Christian art and Romanesque art.
Now, in the East, the continuity of the Roman Empire allowed the development of Byzantine art, the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the time of the invasions opened in the West a period of great political instability and cultural decay in which the Germanic peoples merged their art and culture with the partial survival of classical Greco-Roman culture selected and reconciled with Christianity by new institutions. For its part, from the 7th and 8th centuries the Mediterranean space was divided by the Arab expansion that settled on the southern shore, from Spain to Syria, where Islamic art developed.
This type of art is made up of a fairly heterogeneous group in which different proposals have been combined: Christian art, the various options that stood out at the beginning of the Middle Ages, such as Byzantine, Roman, Pre-Romanesque, Germanic and the Arab. Of all of them, it became a specific type of language that was manifested in the different artistic proposals: architecture, sculpture, painting, and others.
Not having been the result of a single moment, of a single nationality, country and region is that in each country that appeared, Italy, Germany, Spain and France, it did so in a very local way, with its own characteristics, although, This This situation does not take away from him the sufficient unity that he also showed and that is what made him consider it as the first international artistic style in Europe.
Meanwhile, its birth is considered to be the result of various situations that began to happen after the 8th century, for example, the arrival of the Capetians to the throne of France, the consolidation and diffusion achieved by Christianity, the beginning of the Reconquest in Spain and especially the appearance of Romance languages. Approximately in the year 1000, an incipient economic and cultural expansion caused a real fever for construction and later, Romanesque art took the entity as such.
