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Reprint of the original, first published in 1840.
In this collection of original essays, twenty-five leading scholars reconsider the long history of proportional systems across numerous periods and places, and from diverse methodological approaches including archival exploration, advanced laser scanning, and more. Prior to the advent of modern structural engineering, architects and builders used proportional systems to imbue their works with a general condition of order that was integral to their intertwined notions of beauty and structural stability. These mostly invisible intellectual frameworks ranged from simple grids and symbolic numbers, to sly manipulations of geometry and numbers that required privileged knowledge and arithmetical calculations to access. Since the origins of architectural history, proportional systems have served as objects of belief and modes of iconographical communication. Whether they are capable of fulfilling more tangible functions remains a matter of debate today, for this ancient and diverse belief system continues to infiltrate architectural thinking in subtle and sometimes surprising ways.
This new facsimile edition of the Portfolio of the 13th-century Picard artist Villard de Honnecourt is the first ever to be published in color. The thirty-three leaves are reproduced at actual size from high-quality color transparencies to ensure the best possible color reproduction of the drawings. One can now see variations in inks and quill strokes, traces of preliminary drawings, and corrections made by the artist. This study is also the first to give a thorough description of the condition of the leaves, analysis of each drawing in the portfolio individually, and new transcriptions and literal and free translations of the inscriptions. The opening chapter covers the history and physical condition of the portfolio, including reassigning "hands" to text found on the leaves. The author analyses the tools and inks used, Villard's drawing technique and style, and evaluates Villard as an artist-draftsman. Chapter II, the body of the book, is devoted to detailed analyses of the leaves, one by one, and their drawings and inscriptions. These analyses are of interest to those concerned with medieval technology and theology as well as to those interested in medieval art and architecture. Chapter III is a new biography of Villard that challenges the many wild speculations of the last century and a half about Villard, separating obvious fiction from possible fact. Barnes analyzes in detail Villard's drawings of different Gothic buildings and makes a case for Villard having been a lay representative of the cathedral chapter at Cambrai, one of the buildings Villard drew. An extensive bibliography of Villard studies and a glossary of Villard's technical and artistic terms complete this important new study.
"Three eyewitnesses of Gothic. Villard de Honnecourt: ymagier and interlocutor ; Possessing Villard ; The role of the interlocutor in the Villard enterprise ; Animating the artifact ; Animating the beholder ; Controlling the artifact ; Conclusion: deceit and desire in the Villard enterprise ; Gervase of Canterbury: cronicus and logistics man ; Storytelling ; Mnemonics: remembering the old ; The means of production: controlling the new ; Old and new reconciled ; Apocryphal storytelling: a building that "speaks" ; Conclusion: signs, miracles, and illusionism ; Suger, abbot of S-Denis, and the rhetoric of persuasion: manipulating reality and producing meaning ; Rhetorical structure of de consecratione: manipulated dialectic ; Production of the text: from oral to written ; Making connections ; Production of the new church, production of salvation ; Apocryphal stories ; Conclusion: the abbot who spoke the building -- Staking out the plot. Interlocutor and monument ; Material contexts: the means of production ; How on earth did they do that? ; Economic means ; Reading the signs: construction history ; The production of meaning ; Similitude to nature; local roots ; Similitude to other buildings ; Modernism and reason ; An image of heaven ; Conclusion -- Animating the plot. Picturing the three agents of construction ; The cathedral as object of desire ; Triangulating desire ; The gap between vision and realization ; Compression and expansion: plotting ; My desire ; Conclusion: Gothic plots' synchronic, diachronic, and spatial."
The flowering of Gothic architecture depended to a striking extent on the use of drawing as a tool of design. By drawing precise "blueprints" with simple tools such as the compass and straightedge, Gothic draftsmen were able to develop a linearized architecture of unprecedented complexity and sophistication. Examination of their surviving drawings can provide valuable and remarkably intimate information about the Gothic design process. Gothic drawings include compass pricks, uninked construction lines, and other telltale traces of the draftsman's geometrically based working method. The proportions of the drawings, moreover, are those actually intended by the designer, uncompromised by errors introduced in the construction process. All of these features make these drawings ideal subjects for the study of Gothic design practice, but their geometry has to date received little systematic attention. This book offers a new perspective on Gothic architectural creativity. It shows, in a series of rigorous geometrical case studies, how Gothic design evolved over time, in two senses: in the hours of the draftsman's labor, and across the centuries of the late Middle Ages. In each case study, a series of computer graphics show in unprecedented detail how a medieval designer could have developed his architectural concept step by step, using only basic geometrical operations. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate both remarkable methodological continuity across the Gothic era, and the progressive development of new and sophisticated permutations on venerable design themes. This rich tradition ultimately gave way in the Renaissance not because of any inherent problem with Gothic architecture, but because the visual language of Classicism appealed more directly to the pretensions of Humanist princes than the more abstract geometrical order of Gothic design, as the book's final chapter demonstrates.
The purpose of the project is to provide the most up-to-date survey on issues dealing with practical geometry and how it might have been applied in the design of medieval architecture. Chronologically, the topics cover a wide span - from early Medieval through Late Gothic. Geographically, the monuments under discussion range from Early Medieval Florence through Carolingian Germany, Crusader Cyprus, Romanesque France and Gothic England. The applications of both geometry and metrology are considered in this volume, often with illustrations generated by computer-assisted design (CAD) software. The project therefore offers recent scholarship in the field, as well as cutting-edge technology which helps propel the pursuit of such studies. To this end, the project is the first of its kind both in terms of its focus and its comprehensiveness. Such a project is sorely needed to introduce this highly specialized discipline to other historians of art, history, and science of the Middle Ages, as well as historians in most humanistic areas.
This handbook provides the student, practising architect or interested layman with a well-illustrated and readable comparative guide to proportion systems in architecture.