Villard de Honnecourt's Animals

We're talking about Villard de Honnecourt, who traveled Europe and Hungary between 1225 and 1235 (at least), sketching along the way. As well as buildings (especially churches), machinery, and people, he sketched a lot of animals. Some were studies in how geometry helps to draw. Some were animals for their own sake. 

For instance, here's a snail that was added to the page on which the soldier from the previous post was found. And a bear and a swan on their own page. Just under the swan's tail is a church he wanted to sketch, but the swan was more important?

He sketches horses on more than one page, and there are numerous small creatures: there's even a page of insects.

There is one animal that he draws more than once, and one of the drawings gets a whole page to itself. I'm talking about the lion.

It would probably be more appropriate to say a lion, because I cannot imagine he ran into more than one. In the image to the left we see a lion tamer. Villard's note makes sure you know that this is "from life."

The term he uses that is translated "from life" is the Medieval French contrefait. If that word looks familiar even to non-French speakers, that is because it is the origin of the modern word "counterfeit." Don't be alarmed that it seems to contradict what he said about "from life": contrefait did not have the same connotations. It meant (and still means) to imitate. Modern parlance defines this is "not real." For Villard, it meant that he may not have been sitting there watching the event when he drew it, but he is imitating a factual thing. He is assuring us that this scene happened. We have no reason to doubt him. That does not mean that he observed this himself; just that he is adamant that it is real. He includes another picture in which he makes the same claim.

Lions in Medieval Western Europe would have been scarce or non-existent, appearing largely in literature and on heraldic designs, usually very stylized. Still, he was confident enough about the lion that he was sure he could draw it convincingly. Was there the possibility that he would have seen a lion in captivity? Or had the opportunity to look at one face-on so he could draw it?

Were there zoos in the Middle Ages? If there were, what were they like? Where did the animals come from?

Which all sounds like an excellent topic to explore next.

Villard de Honnecourt's People

Who was Villard de Honnecourt? He mentions in his sketches that he had been to many lands, including spending several days in Hungary. He doesn't tell us why he was there, but a theory has arisen. One of the radiating chapels in the new chevet of Cambrai Cathedral as dedicated to St. Elizabeth of Hungary. It is possible that Villard was there to obtain a relic of the saint for the cathedral. Elizabeth died in 1234 and was canonized 27 May 1235 by Pope Gregory IX (canonization in those days wasn't as rigorous a process as it is today). Ten miles south of Cambrai Cathedral is the village of Honnecourt. Villard may have been an architect/engineer for Cambrai.

It is entirely possible that he was tasked with traveling to procure a relic, and used the opportunity to make sketches along the way. Not only did he record architectural details and draw machines, he also drew subjects "from life."

Some of them are figures of saints or Christ, likely taken from art, but some are obviously activities of real people. The first illustration here is a soldier at rest. We get some idea of what a soldier would wear; we see what looks like chainmail under his tunic, along with a chainmail coif. Unlike the simplified straight lines of his machine drawings, here we see attention to the detail of folds and pleats in the fabric.

Another interesting sketch from life is the wrestlers.

Is it a serious bout, or just two friends playing? We will never know, especially because he doesn't even caption this, as he usually does with his sketches. The regular design cut off on the right side of the illustration is part of Cambrai Cathedral: This is the plan of the apse and the choir (chevet) of Our Lady of Cambrai as it is now rising from the ground.

This page has been turned sideways so that he can include the wrestlers, but as much as he cared to represent them carefully—the folds of their loincloths, the contours of their bodies—it was just an idle addition.

He was, however, interested in demonstrating how to draw from life. Some of his sketches show the geometry and symmetry of the human body and face, as a guide to drawing. In the drawing below he endeavored to show how easy it was to find the proper proportion in drawing from life. 

His caption reads: Here begins the method of representation as taught by the art of geometry, to facilitate work.

On a page of the twelve apostles (and three other figures, he writes: Here you will find the images of the the Twelve Apostles, sitting. Villard de Honnecourt greets you and begs all who use the devices found in this book to pray for his soul and remember him. For in this book will be found sound advice on the virtues of masonry and the uses of carpentry. You will find strong help in drawing figures according to the lessons taught by the art of geometry.

The illustration to the left shows that he wasn't just interested in people. He had quite a few sketches of animals, and one species in particular (besides the occasional horse) was of such interest that he stressed to the viewer that it was "from life" and not imagination. But that is tomorrow's topic.

Villard de Honnecourt's Machines

I've mentioned Villard de Honecourt back in 2012; he is so worth another look. Anything we know about him is entirely incidental. Around 1225-1235, he traveled around Europe, and went as far as Hungary, sketching artwork, buildings, machines, animals and other items of interest to him along the way—250 separate items sketched in all. His sketches have prompted us to assume he was an engineer and/or architect. (Panofsky obviously assumed architect; see the previous post.) He sketched various figures that were clearly on the facades of cathedrals, as well as floor plans and elevations of cathedrals. He had a fascination for machines, however. 

One of his drawings, pictured here, is for a perpetual motion machine. He has captioned it: Often have experts striven to make a wheel turn of its own accord. Here is a way to do it with an uneven number of mallets and with quicksilver.

He also made simplified drawings of a machine for cutting the tops of piles under water when creating a pier, for straightening a sagging house, for bracing the spokes while making a wheel, and more. And here's another set of machines.

Starting from the top, his notes describe a saw that operates itself, a crossbow that won't miss, engines for lifting heavy weights, and how to make an eagle that turns toward the deacon when he preaches.

Despite the above implication that you can learn a lot from his drawings, an early theory that he intended these drawing as teaching tools has been dismissed since, other than the drawings themselves, there are no details regarding construction or operation.

His collection passed through various hands, some of whom have written their names on pages, and eventually came into the possession of the Bibliothèque National de France in the winter of 1795-96. If you want to purchase a facsimile edition, or at least view a brief video of one, click here.

I think some of his sketches taken from life should get some exposure. See you tomorrow.

Scholasticism and Gothic Architecture

There is a 20th century art historian who has appeared in two posts because of his eye-opening contributions to the field in the 1940s: here where he explained multiple renaissances, and here where he pinpointed the birth of gothic architecture and the motivating factor behind it. (I recommend you check those links before you read further.) He followed those in 1951 with a lecture called "Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism."

He noted that gothic architecture originated and flourished in the "100-mile zone around Paris" and was contemporaneous with the growth and spread of scholasticism. This would have been interesting enough on its own as an observation, but he went further, insisting there was:

A connection between Gothic art and Scholasticism which is more concrete than a mere "parallelism"...the connection which I have in mind is a genuine cause-and-effect relation.

We can extrapolate some connections ourselves without looking further into Panofsky: the architect and the scholastic were two of the most educated people in the community. Both, in their own way, were blending the religious (a site for worship, church doctrine) with something more "grounded" (a complex building, logical reasoning).

Panofsky also sees the scholastic trend toward categorization and chapter/sub-chapter organization of thought in the arch>smaller arch layering of the typical Gothic elevation (see the illustration). Likewise, he sees the desire to match scholastic clarification in the large windows that allowed more light than the previous Romanesque style, and the intellectual desire for getting at the "unvarnished truth" in the exposed buttresses.

He concludes with one more observation:

...which shows that at least some of the French thirteenth-century architects did think and act in strictly Scholastic terms. In Villard de Honnecourt’s “Album” there is to be found the groundplan of an “ideal” chevet* which he and another master, Pierre de Corbie, had devised, according to the slightly later inscription, inter se disputando. Here, then, we have two High Gothic architects discussing a quaestio, and a third one referring to this discussion by the specifically Scholastic term disputare instead of colloqui, deliberare, or the like. And what is the result of this disputatio? A chevet which combines, as it were, all possible Sics with all possible Nons.

In other words (Panofsky uses some Latin terms analogous to the lectio and quaestio and disputatio explained in the previous post), de Honnecourt and Corbie, who are not scholastics, are reaching an ideal design/conclusion using the methods standardized by scholastics. The Latin terms in his last sentence allude to the scholastic Peter Abelard's "Sic et Non" ("Yes or No") in which he discusses 158 contradictory points among church father writings. 

You can download a digital copy of Panofsky's work with illustrations here.

But what's this "Album" of Villard de Honnecourt's that he mentions? That's an excellent question. Stay tuned.

*A chevet is an apse with an ambulatory giving access behind the high altar to a series of chapels set in bays. See the second illustration.

Geometry in Nature

The Fibonacci series, mentioned here, has been found to correlate to patterns found in nature. There is no evidence that Fibonacci himself ever made the connection between his arithmetical progression and the world around him, but the link between math and nature was recognized in other ways in the Middle Ages.

There is a unique manuscript called "The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt." We know nothing about Villard except what can be gleaned from the internal evidence of this manuscript, which seems to be a notebook of his travels and interests. MS Fr 19093 now is in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris; it has been extensively copied and studied since it became widely known in 1849.

From the language and the 250 drawings found in his 33-page manuscript, we assume he was an architect from Picardy in northern France (there is a village called Honnecourt-sur-l'Escault in Picardy), traveling in the early-to-mid 1200s. Although architectural features make up the majority of his sketches (and presumably his interest) by far, there is no documentary evidence that he ever was connected with the design or construction of a building; nor did he sign his name with a title such as "master," to which he would have been entitled had he trained as an architect.

Still, he seems particularly introduced in buildings, drawing detailed façades of Laon and Reims Cathedral, a clocktower, the geometry of buildings; but he also depicts animals and insects, sculptures and mechanical devices such as a trebuchet, a machine for lifting heavy objects, a self-operating saw, a crossbow that never misses, and a perpetual motion machine. Alas, he draws them without explaining how to make them work.

Some of his notes, such as the one attached to the Lion shown above, are suspect. It is a very good drawing, but the caption tells us "Here is a lion seen from the front. Please remember that he was drawn from life." It seems unlikely that he saw a lion himself. The porcupine on the same page has the note "a little beast that shoots its quills when aroused," which tells us that he was getting his information from traditional bestiaries, not from real-life observation. On the lion's face you can still see the faint symmetrical guidelines he drew to start the artistic process.

Sketching guidelines was not an unusual start for medieval artists. Villard, however, offers us several examples of the correlation between geometry and representations of organic figures. Shown to the right is Page XXXVI of his manuscript, in which he shows how geometry fits into faces and figures.

His note in the bottom of the page depicted here says "Here begins the method of representation as taught by the art of geometry, to facilitate work. Elsewhere you will find the method of masonry."

A brief video showing some of his pages is here: