Saint-Lazare in Autun rose in the twelfth century on one of the pilgrimage routes of medieval Christendom. The composition of the semicircular relief (tympanum) above the doorway is signed 'Gislebertus hoc fecit' — 'Gislebertus made this.' To place an artist's name so early and so visibly is unusual for the Middle Ages; three centuries before the Renaissance, the idea of the individual signature flickers here for a moment.

At the centre of the composition is a Christ figure nearly twice human size. To his right, souls rise to paradise; to his left, large-handed demons clutch at people and the damned are flung into hell. The figures are not anatomically correct — arms longer than they should be, necks elongated, bodies stretched in the service of drama. This is the central Romanesque move: nature is not imitated, the message is visually concentrated.

The relief was originally painted; pigments now lost — red, blue, gold — make it possible to imagine how vivid this scene appeared to the illiterate peasants who came to mass on Sundays. The tympanum is a teaching technology: a theology of heaven and hell told not in words but in stone.

In the eighteenth century the relief was judged 'ugly' by Enlightenment taste and plastered over; paradoxically this preserved the detail. When rediscovered in 1837 the head of Christ was missing; it was found only in 1948 in a private antiquities collection in Lyon and reinstalled.

Gislebertus's figural language at Autun — length, tension, expressive power — would be refined a few decades later in the sculptures of the Gothic cathedrals, but its emotional intensity remains here, as the last word of the Romanesque.