Garde Church

The building material of Garde Church is limestone of grey shades, and brick, which is used exclusively in a few decorative elements in the tower facade. The church is whitewashed, except the portals, the corners of the chancel, nave and tower, and the plinths of the tower and the chancel — these are made of more carefully hewn limestone.[15] The church has four entrances, three of which (in the tower, and one on each side of the nave) are simple, Romanesque portals. The northern portal of the nave may originally have been the entrance to the now vanished first chancel, and moved to its current location when the church was rebuilt in the 14th century.[16] The southern portal of the chancel is Gothic in style. The portal opening is stepped inwards with three columns on each side in the angles. The capitals are decorated with plant ornaments with faint traces of original paint.[17] The tympanum above the portal is decorated with a sculpture of a sitting Christ with one hand resting on a book and the other raised in a gesture of blessing.[18] The nave has six windows, of which four are medieval and of a simple, round arched design. The chancel has two large, pointed Gothic windows with tracery. These are of a type also found in Väte, Grötlingbo and Hablingbo churches.[19]

The tower has three storeys in addition to the top floor containing the church bell. The bell was, according to an inscription upon, it made in Lübeck in 1608 and later re-cast in Stockholm.[20] Before the tower has enlarged in the 13th century, there were four sound openings at a lower level. After the heightening of the tower, there are now in total twelve comparatively tall openings with pointed arches, three on each side of the tower. The combination of limestone and brick in their decoration is similar to the openings in the church towers at Lye and Burs.[21]

The former church tabernacle, 14th century. The wooden doors are modern.

The church interior is divided into three main spaces: the ground floor of the tower to the west, the nave in the middle and the chancel to the east. The tower ground floor is comparatively small and dark, and connected with the nave with a narrow but tall decorated arch. The nave has highly placed, small windows, while the larger chancel gets its light from the large Gothic windows in the eastern and southern walls. The chancel arch connecting the nave and chancel is made of finely cut limestone. The ceilings of the nave and the tower ground floor are flat, wooden ceilings, while the chancel is covered with its original vault.[22] Above the ceiling of the nave, and under the current roof, old well-made Romanesque roof trusses are preserved.[23][13] The floor of the church largely dates from the renovation in the 1960s. At that time, fragments of several picture stones were found in the original floor. Some of these have been placed next to the southern wall of the church.[24] There are five niches in the walls of the chancel, dating from the construction period. The largest one of these is a niche with a seat in the southern wall of the chancel, the interior of which is decorated with a painting from the 14th century.[25] The painting depicts Christ seated on a throne.[26] On the northern wall of the choir there is a smaller niche that originally served as a tabernacle, which also contains decorations from the 14th century.[25] The inside of the walls of the church contains a number of carvings, both runic inscriptions and depictions of ships, the latter probably from the late Middle Ages.[27] No original stained glass remains in the church, though the chancel windows still contained medieval stained glass panes in the 1860s.[27]

The entire nave was probably originally decorated with murals, but most of these have vanished.[28] One set of murals, on the soffit of the arch connecting the nave to the ground floor of the tower, is however still very well preserved and have never been covered.[29] These are Russo-Byzantine in style,[7][30] with some influences from Gothic art discernible in the purely ornamental details.[31] They are recognised as being of high quality and have been called "the best evidence of a byzantinizing workshop on Gotland and as such are justly celebrated".[29][32] It has been suggested that there is a relationship with fragmentary paintings in Källunge and Havdhem churches, but otherwise no comparable paintings exist in Sweden.[33] They were probably made c. 1200.[34]

The wall paintings depict two male saints standing under arches decorated with palmettes, supported by pillars with decorated capitals. Each saint is standing upright, tending towards contrapposto, and faces the viewer, with the left hand raised in a blessing gesture and the other holding a cross.[35][36] They are richly dressed in Byzantine dress. This way of representing saints is known from Russia and also from other areas (e.g. St Mark's Basilica in Venice), but always from areas under Byzantine influence.[35] It has been suggested that they depict the saints Florus and Laurus, and the similarities with a similar depiction of these saints in the Church of Agioi Anargyroi in Kastoria, Greece, has been noted.[34][37]

Several efforts have been made to identify from where the stylistic influences of these murals may come, and to speculate about the origins or identity of the artist who made them. The first art historian to point out their relation to Byzantine art was Johnny Roosval in 1911.[38] The following year, a first attempt at finding stylistic parallels in Russian art was made by Ture J. Arne, who suggested a link between the paintings at Garde and the murals in the Russian churches of Nereditsa and St. George in Staraya Ladoga.[38][39] Later research has also highlighted the similarities with St. George's Church in Staraya Ladoga.[36] The exact nature of the link between these Russian churches and the paintings at Garde remains an open question. It is known that there was a Russian church in Visby (now a ruin) and it is possible that a Russian artist went to Gotland to decorate this church, and at the same time decorated the church at Garde.[40] It may also be that traders from Gotland brought a Russian artist to Gotland from the eastern coast of the Baltic sea.[40] Furthermore, it has been pointed out that the paintings also display possible direct influences from Greek and Sicilian art, as well as Western art, which further complicates any definitive judgment on the origins of the artist who made them.[41] This mixture of influences has led to the hypothesis that the artist was trained in a Russo-Byzantine environment but also worked using illuminated manuscripts as pattern books.[42] Contemporary parallels with Russian and Byzantine illuminated manuscripts have also been pointed out.[43][44] Wherever the artist may have found the inspiration, it has been underlined that the church was built as a Catholic, and not as an Orthodox church; similarly to the churches of 12th-century Sicily, the artistic influences were derived from Orthodox art "despite doctrinal and liturgical differences".[45]

• Russo-Byzantine paintings
• 
  Male saint, southern side
• 
  The arch with the paintings
• 
  Male saint, northern side

• Andrén, Anders (2011). Det Medeltida Gotland. En arkeologisk guidebok (in Swedish). Lund: Historiska Media. ISBN 978-91-85873-83-8.
• Jacobsson, Britta; Johansson, Eva; Johansson, Per; Andersson, Rolf (1990). Våra kyrkor. Västervik: Klarkullens förlag AB. ISBN 91-971561-08.
• Jonsson, Marita; Lindquist, Sven-Olof (1987). Vägen till kulturen på Gotland (in Swedish). Visby: Gotlands fornsal. ISBN 91-971048-1-7.
• Lagerlöf, Erland (1972). Garde kyrka (PDF). Sveriges kyrkor, konsthistoriskt inventarium (in Swedish). Vol. 145. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. ISSN 0284-1894.
• Trotzig, Gustaf (1970). "En arkeologisk undersökning i Garda kyrka på Gotland" (PDF). Fornvännen. Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research: 1–17. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 March 2020. Retrieved 20 March 2020.

• Arne, Ture J. (1912). "Rysk-byzantinska målningar i en gotlandskyrka" (PDF). Fornvännen. Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research (in Swedish): 57–64. Archived from the original (PDF) on 19 March 2020. Retrieved 21 March 2020.
• Cutler, Anthony (1969). "Garda, Källunge, and the Byzantine Tradition on Gotland". The Art Bulletin. 51 (3): 257–266. doi:10.2307/3048630. JSTOR 3048630.
• Tuulse, Armin (1971). "Väst och öst i Gotlands romanik" (PDF). Fornvännen. Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research (in Swedish): 154–172. Retrieved 21 March 2020.