WOLFGANG SCHÖNE (1960)
By far the most radical attempt to reconcile the drawing
of the church of the Plan of St. Gall with that of its corrective
explanatory titles was that which Wolfgang Schöne
published in 1960.[203]
Schöne not only shortened the church
to the desired 200 feet, but applied the same reduction to
all the other buildings of the Plan. However, in advancing
this theory he either overlooked or disregarded the fact that
the same proposition had already been discussed and convincingly
rejected twenty-two years earlier by Fritz Viktor
Arens, who pointed out that if one were to redraw the Plan
according to the measurements given for the length of the
Church (i.e., 200 feet), the Cloister and all of the service
structures of the Plan would be too small to perform their
designated functions.[204]
My own analysis of the scale used in designing the Plan
confirmed this view. Were the Plan redrawn in this manner
not only would the monks, including the abbot and the
visiting noblemen (i.e., Monks' Dormitory, Abbot's House,
and House for Distinguished Guests) no longer fit into
their beds, but the Refectory of the Monks would be too
small to seat the full contingent of monks, the horses would
lack the required floor space to stand in their stables, and
the workmen could not carry out their respective crafts and
labors.[205]
The most decisive counter argument, however, to
Schöne's interpretation of the Plan is to be found in a
statement made by a man who lived at the time when the
Plan was drawn. In his commentary on the Rule of St.
Benedict, written around 845 in the monastery of Civate,
Hildemar, a monk from Corbie, declared that in his days
"It was generally held that the cloister should be 100 feet
square and no less because that would make it too small."[206]
Schöne reduces it to a little less than 67 × 67 feet. It is
historically incongruous to assume that a scheme of paradigmatic
significance should propose a cloister whose dimensions
fall by one-third below what at the time was
considered to be the lowest suitable limit.