Impressionist European Oil on Canvas. Painting of of a Romanesque church, with a priory or monastery, separated tower, and plaza. Signed indistinctly lower right. 

Overall Size: 11 x 14 3/4 in. 

Sight Size: 7 1/4 x 11 1/4 in. 

Frame Thickness: 1 3/4 in. 

Cathedrals, collegiate churches, and monastic churches like those of abbeys and priories, often have certain complex structural forms that are found less often in parish churches. They also tend to display a higher level of contemporary architectural style and the work of accomplished craftsmen, and occupy a status both ecclesiastical and social that an ordinary parish church rarely has. Such churches are generally among the finest constructed buildings locally and a source of regional pride. Many are among the world’s most renowned works of architecture. Examples include St Peter’s Basilica, Notre-Dame de Paris, Westminster Abbey, Antoni Gaudí’s incomplete Sagrada Família and the ancient cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, now serving as a mosque. The earliest large churches date from Late Antiquity. As Christianity and the construction of churches spread across the world, their manner of building was dependent upon local materials and local techniques. Different styles of architecture developed and their fashion spread, carried by the establishment of monastic orders, by the posting of bishops from one region to another and by the traveling of master stonemasons who served as architects. This explains why some of the grandest Catholic churches are found in the New World, sometimes adorned with native iconography and imagery as a way of encouraging local indigenous populations to attend service. The successive styles of the great church buildings of Europe are known as Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, and various Revival styles of the late 18th to early 20th Centuries, as well as Modern and even Abstract styles. Underlying each of the academic styles are the regional characteristics, some of which are so typical of or specific to a particular country or region that they appear, regardless of style, in the architecture of churches designed many centuries apart.

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