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Before reading the following article, I didn't even know there was a St. Victor, let alone an Abbey of St. Victor that was established in 1108 near Notre-Dame Cathedral, at the beginning of the "Twelfth-Century Renaissance", in Paris.

The surprising history of architectural drawing in the West

Karl Kinsella, Aeon (12/21/23)

Here's a quick tutorial from the National Design Academy on the architectural language alluded to in the title of this post:

What’s the Difference Between a Plan, Elevation and a Section?

This brief guide uses an ingenious way of looking at an orange from four viewpoints to explain these four main terms of architectural language.  Armed with this fundamental knowledge, let us now join Karl Kinsella in learning about the architectural drawings of the Abbey of St. Victor and other Western religious edifices.  I should preface my overview of Kinsella's article by pointing out the it is accompanied by seven extraordinary period illustrations.

Kinsella begins with Vitruvius' De architectura in the 1st c. BC and moves quickly to the 15th c. when "the artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti, in his brief mention of architectural drawings, assumes that they are done only by architects."  Then comes the real story:

Towards the middle of the 12th century, a Scottish theologian named Richard moved across the Channel to Paris and to the Abbey of Saint Victor on the left bank, about a 20-minute walk from where Notre-Dame Cathedral stands today, but outside the walls of the medieval city. Here, Richard penned a commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, filled with more than a dozen plans and elevations that systematically represent the buildings the prophet describes. These are key to understanding the beginning of architectural drawing in the West. Richard is the first person to use the term ‘plan’ with reference to a drawing that would be recognised as a plan today. He was the first person we know of to represent a building more than once, offering a three-dimensional view of the structure; and the first to provide a clear sectional elevation, where part of the building is sliced through to give a view of the interior. His commentary suggests that architectural drawings were in use a full century earlier than is conventionally held, complete with a fully fledged language for the representation of three-dimensional objects.

The Abbey of Saint Victor was established in 1108, at the beginning of what the historian Charles Homer Haskins in 1927 called a ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’. This renaissance was characterised by a renewed focus on classical literature and a drive to understand the physical world. Latin translations of ancient Greek and Arabic works on mathematics, geometry and every other subject gave energy to scholars to interrogate the world a little deeper. Works by Aristotle, Euclid and Plato, dimly known but whose writing was thought gone forever, began to arrive on the shores of Europe. Within this swirling intellectual storm, the members of Saint Victor had one of the best libraries in Europe and a commitment to teach whoever wanted to learn. They were spiritual centrists, never veering close to zealotry and never losing their minds to the new fashion for pure logic, characterised by the infamous self-promotor Peter Abelard.

After that comes Richard's remarkable, pathbreaking commentary on Ezekiel:

With the fine resources and stimulation that Saint Victor provided, Richard began his commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, a daunting task for anyone who has read it. Ezekiel prophesied during the Israelite’s exile in Babylon where the once-captive Jews remained in the centuries following the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. It is a book of consolation and of hope; especially the last section, which contains a detailed architectural description of a new temple that would descend from the heavens onto the mountain when the Israelites returned to their homeland. Ezekiel describes meeting a man with ‘brazen complexion’ holding a measuring stick, who accompanies the prophet around the buildings, while measuring every detail. At first glance, the buildings Ezekiel describes, and their arrangement, seem straightforward. There are three courtyards of diminishing size, set into one another, and each section is accessed via an elaborate gateway. The new temple at the centre of everything (and modelled on Solomon’s original) is perched on the mountain’s plateau. Out front in the smallest courtyard there is an altar for sacrifices, while the Temple contains three spaces: a vestibule, a long narrow hall and a smaller room called the ‘Holy of Holies’.

The details of what Richard spelled out are too intricate and involved to put down in this post.  If you want to learn more about them, go to Kinsella's account.  We may sum up the motivating force behind what drove the Scottish theologian in these words:  "Richard needed to know exactly what the prophet saw."

Richard’s drawings are like nothing made before. They are precocious in pointing to a masterful visualisation of space long before the language of architectural drawing was systematised. Richard used recent developments in geometry to fully articulate the relationship between the plans and elevations: in fact, the drawings represent the beginning of architectural abstraction in the West, not because he uses plans and elevations, but because he uses them together to give readers a real sense of the buildings’ three dimensions. As far as we know, no one in Europe had done this previously.

…To aid readers, Richard labelled the rooms in Latin, making it easy to work from one drawing to another. We can take the complexity a little further, since, in the elevation, the viewer can see the interior of the ground floor as if the drawing were a section where part of the building is cut open. This would make it the first clear sectional elevation, and an important development in architectural drawing.

None of Richard’s innovations are accidental. Rather, they are rooted in the language of geometry: by including the elevation, the viewer sees that the gatehouses are located on a mountainside. Yet having to reconcile the plan with the elevation disturbed Richard’s attempt at accuracy. He knew that measurements taken along a flat surface and on a sloped one would be different when compared with one another, and result in discrepancies between his plans and elevations. To combat the problem, Richard proposed a method by which a ‘plan’ measurement could be translated into one that accommodated the mountain’s slope, using something very similar to the Pythagorean theorem, which was then circulating around western Europe. The plans include measurements that assume the site was flat, and so he calls them ‘planum’. This is the first time this term was used in reference to a drawing. For Richard, a ‘plan’ was a two-dimensional drawing that showed the layout of a building on a plane (ie, flat) surface – language that we still use today.

There is much more that could be said about this "visual language" of which Richard was a deviser and practitioner.  For the present, it is worthy of note that in his work there is a synesthetic crossover between sound and sight (language and art).

Selected readings

• "Synesthesia and Chinese characters" (3/9/17)
• "Sacré bleu! — the synesthesia of Walmart cyan" (10/8/22)
• "Chinese Synesthesia" (7/26/17)
• "Condensation and displacement in word aversion" (4/3/13)

[h.t. Chiu-kuei Wang]

December 22, 2023 @ 8:11 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and art, Language and religion

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