University of Virginia Library

I. 1

PREVIOUS LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

ONE of the most remarkable facts about the Plan of St. Gall is that it still exists and that it is still at St. Gall. Aside
from the length of time that has elapsed since the days it was first made, there were several specific dangers that
threatened its existence even after it was incorporated into the Library of St. Gall, such as the sack of the Magyars in
926, in expectation of which all the books were evacuated to the monastery of Reichenau,[1] and the stormy days of
secularization at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth which spelled disaster to so
many other monastic libraries.

In addition to these external dangers there were those created by the Plan's unusual shape. Being a sheet of
parchment of unwieldy proportions it was subject to the same hazards of housekeeping that tend to beset all holdings
that do not fit neatly into a normal shelving system. That the Plan survived at all under these circumstances must be
credited—as Johannes Duft has correctly pointed out[2] —to an unknown monk of St. Gall who, at the close of the
twelfth century, availed himself of the unused back portions of the skin to inscribe upon it the text of a Life of
St. Martin. Conscious perhaps of the important role this document had played in the renovation of his monastery

and the construction of the buildings in which he lived, he refrained from cutting the Plan apart, but folded it lengthwise
and crosswise into a sequence that furnished him with fourteen pages for his text, plus two empty pages that
served as covers (fig. 1).[3] Thus the physically unmanageable Plan was transferred into a book-sized volume that
could easily be incorporated into a conventional shelving system.

The author of the Life of St. Martin did not proceed with equal wisdom when he discovered toward the end of
his task that the back of the Plan was not large enough to accommodate all of his text. With his mind set on finishing
his work, he turned the Plan over and entered the last twenty-two lines of his text on the lower left corner of the
front side of the Plan. In order to use this portion of the parchment for his text, he erased the lines and explanatory
legends of a large building that occupied the northwest corner of the monastery site (fig. 1.X).

I.1.1

FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE
MIDDLE OF THE 19th CENTURY

The Plan was thus made subservient to a hagiographical
text of lesser importance, and in this new association—
as the subsequent history shows—its original meaning fell
into oblivion. In a fragmentary catalogue of the holdings
of the Library of St. Gall, which was written in 1461 under
Abbot Kaspar of Breitenlandenberg, the document is
listed as a "large animal skin with the life of St. Martin
written upon it and a delineation of the houses of his
monastery" (pellis magna continens vitam S. Martini
scriptam structuramque domorum eius depictam). The author
of this catalogue, as is obvious from this entry, considered
the text on the back of the skin to be the principal part of
this document and interpreted the drawings on the front
of the skin as an outline of the monastery of St. Martin at
Tours.[4]

The true character of the Plan was rediscovered by
Henricus Canisius who in 1604 published the verses of the
Plan,[5] primarily for their literary interest. Canisius (d.1610)
was unaware of the paradigmatic character of the Plan but
thought it was a site plan of the monastery of St. Gall
"as it looked at the time of Abbot Gozbert." He was the
first to identify the "Cozb[er]tus" of the dedicatory legend
with Abbot Gozbert, who presided over the monastery of
St. Gall from 816-836, and inferred correctly from the fact
that the abbot was addressed as "my sweetest son"
(dulcissime filie) that the author of the Plan was a man of
higher rank and must have been a bishop.[6] One of the
consequences of the rediscovery of the Plan by Canisius
was that some time in the seventeenth or eighteenth century
(the date can no longer be established) the Plan was
strengthened with a backing of linen, which concealed the
Life of St. Martin.

On the basis of the interest awakened by Canisius, the
great Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon (1632-1707)
featured in the second volume of his Annales ordinis
sancti Benedicti[7] the first graphical reproduction of its
explanatory titles. This engraving was neither complete nor
free of errors, but being published in a widely distributed
historiographical work, made the contents of the Plan
accessible to the learned world.

I.1.2

THE FIRST MONOGRAPHIC STUDIES

It took another 140 years for the Plan to become the
subject of a separate study. The first monographic treatment
of the Plan was published in 1844 by Ferdinand
Keller, the founder of the Antiquarische Gesellschaft of
Zurich.[8] It included as a novelty an attempt to interpret
the construction of the buildings shown on the Plan. Keller
intended to publish a full scale lithographic facsimile edition
of the Plan, but the stone on which the design was drawn
broke apart during the first printing and was subsequently
replaced by a smaller stone on which the outlines of the
Plan were reduced to four-fifths the original size. The
explanatory legends were superimposed in their original
dimensions upon this reduced image, and in this discordant

form the Plan was published, together with a detailed
description of its drawings and legends.

Although by no means free of errors and omissions—
the most serious of which is the omission of the dedicatory
letter—Keller's "facsimile" nevertheless was an excellent
specimen of lithographic reproduction and formed the
basis for all future research. In the English-speaking world
the Plan became known through an enlarged and annotated
translation of Keller's text by Robert Willis, published in
the 1848 volume of the Archaeological Journal;[9] in France,
through Albert Lenoir's treatment of the subject in his
Architecture monastique of 1852,[10] and through a translation
of Willis into French by M. A. Campion,[11] which appeared
in the Bulletin monumental of 1868. The latter formed the
basis of Leclercq's widely read description of the Plan of
St. Gall in Cabrol-Leclercq's Dictionnaire d'archéologie
chrétienne et de liturgie[12] which added nothing original to
the study of the Plan.

I.1.3

ENTRY OF THE SPECIALISTS

It was only natural that the Plan of St. Gall, once
published, should become an object of primary attraction
to the students of vernacular architecture who were not
slow in recognizing its signal importance for the history of
medieval house construction. This aspect of the Plan was
the concern of such men as J. R. Rahn (1876), Rudolf
Henning (1882), Julius von Schlosser (1889), Moriz Heyne
(1899-1903), Karl Gustav Stephani (1902-3), Christian
Rank (1907), Franz Oelmann (1923-24), H. Fiechter-Zollikofer
(1936), Otto Völkers (1937), and Karl Gruber
(1937 and 1952).[13]

Of deeper and even wider impact were the discussions
raised by the design of the Church and the claustral
structures of the Plan, as well as by certain discrepancies
between the drawing of the Church and the measurements
given in its explanatory titles. The literature of these
subjects has swollen into discouraging proportions. It
includes the writings of such men as: Hugo Graf (1892),
Georg Dehio (1892 and 1930), Wilhelm Effman (1899 and
1912), August Hardegger (1917 and 1922), Friedrich
Ostendorf (1922), Joseph Hecht (1928), Ernst Gall (1930),
Joseph Gantner (1936), Hans Reinhardt (1937, 1952, and
1962), Edgar Lehman (1938), Fritz Victor Arens (1938),
Otto Doppelfeld (1948 and 1957), Walter Boeckelmann
(1956), Wilhelm Rave (1956), Karl Gruber (1960), and
Wolfgang Schöne (1960). Landmarks in this sequence of
studies were the articles of Otto Doppelfeld (1948) and
Walter Boeckelmann (1956), each of which offered a new
solution to the difficult problem of the "dimensional
inconsistencies" of the Plan. Less successful were Wolfgang
Schöne's (1960) and Adolf Reinle's (1963-64) attempts
to settle this question.

The thorny problem of the origin of the cloister was
studied by Julius von Schlosser (1889), Joseph Fendel
(1927), and Ossa Raymond Sowers (1952). To add to these
names the countless references made by other authors who
addressed themselves to various aspects of the Plan in studies
not specifically devoted to this subject would be a
hopeless and unrewarding task.

An indispensable reference work that no student of the
Plan can by-pass is Hermann Wartmann's exhaustive
publication of the documentary sources of St. Gall (186392).[14]
An informative review of the economic history of St.
Gall, based on this material, is Hermann Bikel's Wirtschaftsverhältnisse
des Klosters St. Gallen;[15] a valuable
study of the monastery's literary and scriptorial activities is
J. M. Clark's The Abbey of St. Gall, as a Centre of Literature
and Art.[16]

I.1.4

A NEW ERA: THE FACSIMILE
EDITION OF 1952

A new era in the history of the investigation of the Plan
was initiated in 1952 with the publication, under the
auspices of the Historische Verein des Kantons St. Gallen,
of a facsimile reproduction of the Plan.[17] This praiseworthy
undertaking was initiated and carried out by the
late Hans Bessler of St. Gall and his lifelong friend Dr.
Johannes Duft, the distinguished director of the Stiftsbibliothek,
who together nursed this project through all its
critical stages.[18] Printed by the most advanced methods of
color reproduction, this facsimile has not only secured the
survival of the Plan in hundreds of widely distributed
copies, but has also opened the field for new studies on the
scale and construction methods used in the laying out of
the buildings shown on the Plan.[19]

The 1952 facsimile was accompanied by a descriptive
text by Hans Reinhardt,[20] which appeared as the 92.
Neujahrsblatt of the Historische Verein des Kantons St.
Gallen, together with an article by Johannes Duft on the
previous history of the Plan,[21] an analysis by Dietrich

[ILLUSTRATION]

1.A PLAN OF ST. GALL

VERSO OF THE PLAN WITH THE LIFE OF ST. MARTIN INSCRIBED MORE THAN THREE
CENTURIES AFTER THE PLAN WAS DRAWN ON THE RECTO.

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE PLAN OF ST. GALL

The first fold divided the parchment into
two equal areas. The and & 3rd foldings
were then made to the first
fold.

For ease in folding the outer rows X and Y
were made slightly shorter than the two center
rows.

1.B

Compactly folded the manuscript can
now be returned to the library shelf.
The blank space (space with no
writing) functions as front and back
cover.

THE LIFE OF ST. MARTIN AND THE FOLDING OF THE
PARCHMENT IN RELATION TO THE READING SEQUENCE

1.C

THE UNFOLDING PROCEDURE AND READING SEQUENCE

The scribe planned the LIFE OF ST. MARTIN to be easily read with the pages
following each other in numerical order from left to right. The reader, on taking the
manuscript from the shelf, had in hand a "package" as shown in fig. 1, diagram 8.
Laying the LIFE on the table, the reader opened the package. Before him, in
normal reading position, he saw page 1 on the left and page 2 on the right:

After reading pages 1 and 2, page 1 was turned backwards (on fold line 4) to the
left, and page 2 was turned to the right (on fold line 5). The reader then saw a
rectangle like this:

The row of pages 3, 4, 5, 6, was brought toward the reader and laid flat on the
table. This is what he saw—pages 7, 8, 9, 10, in reading sequence left to right:

So far the page numbers flowed in normal sequence, left to right. Page 11, however,
was clearly in view but upside down. The parchment was rotated 180 degrees to
permit the upside-down pages to be read.

After reading the sequence of pages 11, 12, 13, 14, left to right, in fig. 5, the
parchment was rotated back to the position shown in fig. 4. There was more to be
read; 14 was not the last page of the LIFE OF ST. MARTIN.

At this stage, the reader lifted the lower row of pages, 7, 8, 9, 10 (on fold line 3),
toward him and placed the parchment face down on the table. This is what he saw:

In the lower left corner, on the back of page 7, in reading position and clearly in
view, was the last page of the LIFE OF ST. MARTIN, page 15.

On the remainder of the parchment, intact and without erasure, was displayed
Haito's Plan of St. Gall: a graphic configuration, a senseless geometric abstraction.
Three centuries after its conception and delineation, it was neither with meaning
nor historical significance to a reader of the LIFE OF ST. MARTIN, until its
discovery or rediscovery in 1604 by Henricus Canisius (See p. 2, above).

We can be grateful that the LIFE OF ST. MARTIN was not treated to conventional
bookbinding techniques composed of cut leaves, folded and sewn into signatures.

The marvel of the survival of the parchment has been treated by Dr. Johannes
Duft (see above, p. 1, note 1).

Schwarz of the manner in which the Plan was folded by
the twelfth-century monk,[22] and a report by Hans Bessler,
on the technical measures taken for the preservation of the
Plan.[23]

Reinhardt did not propose to undertake a comprehensive
treatment of the subject and did not claim to deal with it in
an exhaustive manner. He offered a new solution to the
controversial issue of the inconsistent measurements of the
Church, and advanced some new thoughts about the origin
of the two circular towers, but touched only briefly on the
difficult problem of the reconstruction of the guest and
service structures of the Plan.

In 1949, during the preparatory stages of this great
facsimile edition, while the Plan was under photographic
examination in the Landesmuseum of Zurich, it was
freed from the linen backing with which it had been reinforced
during the seventeenth or eighteenth century.[24]
This brought to light the text of the Life of St. Martin
which covered the verso of the Plan. X-rays and other
penetrating photographic methods brought back the
outlines of the erased large service structure in the northwest
corner of the monastery (fig. 405), but failed to revive
its explanatory titles.[25] The last hope that these legends
could ever be recovered vanished when Dr. Duft discovered
that they belonged to a group of obliterated texts
that had fallen victim to the chemical experiments undertaken
either by the distinguished historian Ildefons von
Arx (1755-1833), or perhaps by Anton Henne, who served
as provisional librarian between 1855 and 1861.[26]

I.1.5

THE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
AT ST. GALL, 1957

It had been one of the wishes of Hans Bessler that the
publication of the facsimile edition of the Plan of St. Gall
should be followed by a symposium of scholars concerned
with the Plan, and that the work that would emerge from
this gathering should subsequently be made available in a
scholarly publication. Hans Bessler did not live to see both
of these dreams fulfilled. A symposium, organized and
conducted by him and Dr. Johannes Duft, was held in
St. Gall from July 12-16, 1957.[27] The publication of the
studies that emerged from the symposium had to be undertaken
by Dr. Duft alone and appeared as a memorial for
Bessler under the title, Studien zum St. Galler Klosterplan,
in the Mitteilungen zur Vaterländischen Geschichte, published
under the auspices of the Historische Verein des
Kantons St. Gallen.[28] It contained, apart from a masterful
review of the previous literature on the Plan by Johannes
Duft,[29] a fundamental analysis of the paleographical
problems of the Plan by Bernhard Bischoff;[30] two articles
by the writer of the present study, one on the question of
the originality of the Plan,[31] the other on the relation of the
Plan to the monastic reform movement;[32] an article on the
altars of the Plan by Iso Müller, OSB;[33] a study of Hildemar's
commentary on the Rules of St. Benedict and its
implications for the Plan by Wolfgang Hafner;[34] a study of
the plants and gardens by Wolfgang Sörrensen;[35] and two
brief essays by Heinrich Edelmann, one dealing with the
relation of the Plan to the actual building site of the
monastery of St. Gall,[36] the other with the history of the
three-dimensional model of the buildings of the Plan which
was executed in 1877 by the sculptor Jules Leemann of
Geneva for the Historisches Museum of the city of
St. Gall, where it is still on display.[37]

THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT THE
SCALE OF THE PLAN

A new study dealing with the "dimensional inconsistencies"
and the presumptive scale (or "scales") of the
Plan was published in 1963/64 by Adolf Reinle.[38] It departs
completely from all previous views expressed on this
subject and offers a radically different interpretation of the
large axial title of the Plan that records the length of the
Church as being 200 feet. The merits and demerits of this
thesis, as well as the opinion of others who had been
intrigued by this problem, were discussed in an article of
my own published in the September-December issue of the
Art Bulletin of 1966.[39] The old, yet still controversial,
problem "Schema oder Bauplan," was briefly and successfully
reviewed by Konrad Hecht,[40] in an article published
in 1965, which also offered some new and important
observations about the shrinkage of the parchment upon
which the Plan is drawn, and the relevance of this change
to the interpretation of the scale of the Plan.

I.1.6

COUNCIL OF EUROPE EXHIBITION
KARL DER GROSSE at AACHEN, 1965,
AND ITS IMPETUS

Recently a powerful impetus was given to the study of the
Plan of St. Gall by Dr. Wolfgang Braunfels who invited
the authors of the present work to furnish him with the
research and architectural drawings for a three-dimensional
model of the monastery shown on the Plan, to be put on

display at the Council of Europe Exhibition Karl der Grosse,
held in the city of Aachen in the summer of 1965. The birth
of this book, whose beginning reaches many years back, is
intimately connected with this project, and my gratitude
to Dr. Braunfels for motivating this final push has no
limits. There is no more acid trial for any theoretical
assumptions about the three-dimensional appearance of
buildings known only in simple line projection than that of
testing them in the constructional reality of a scale-drawn
model. As in previous studies posing similar problems, I
found myself in the fortunate position of being able to
draw on the professional knowledge, constructional experience,
and superior draftsmanship of Ernest Born and
Carl Bertil Lund, without whose expert and devoted
collaboration that project could never have been carried
out.[41] We are fortunate, in turn, to have found in Siegfried
Karschunke a model-builder of rare resourcefulness and
impeccable skill. It is on the work-drawings made for this
model that most of the reconstruction drawings of this book
are based. The costs of making these drawings were carried
by the University of California; the costs for the construction
of the model itself by the Council of Europe.[42] A
brief description of the model and the criteria used in the
reconstruction of its various installations was published in
the catalogue of the Aachen Exhibition.[43]

OTHER MORE GENERAL WORKS &
NEW CRITICAL EDITIONS

I cannot conclude this review of the historical and
bibliographical vicissitudes of the Plan of St. Gall without
drawing attention to two further events of vital importance
for this study, neither of them directly concerned with the
Plan. The first of these was the publication in 1910-43 of
the six volumes of Emile Lesne's monumental Histoire de
la propriété ecclésiastique,[44] a veritable storehouse of
knowledge, harboring a wealth of information on the
monastery as a legal, manorial, administrative, and educational
institution. The second was the publication, in
1963, under the general editorship of Kassius Hallinger,
OSB, by the Pontifical Athenaean Institute of St. Anselm,
in Rome, of the first volume of the Corpus consuetudinum
monasticarum,[45] a new critical edition of the monastic
consuetudinaries of the eighth and ninth centuries, elucidated
by a critical apparatus of incomparable excellence
and including inter alia the new edition of such crucial
contemporary sources as the resolutions, preliminary and
final, drawn up in 816 and 817 in connection with the two
reform synods of Aachen,[46] as well as that masterpiece of
administrative and manorial logistics, the so-called Statutes
of Adalhard of Corbie (Consuetudines Corbeienses), drawn
up in January 1821/22 by one of the most distinguished
abbots of the Frankish empire.[47] A complete translation of
this informative source, by my colleague Charles W. Jones,
will be found in Appendix II.[48]

The publication of this vast collection of monastic
consuetudinaries was preceded and accompanied by a
series of penetrating studies on the monastic legislation
enacted during the reign of Louis the Pious, from the pen
of one of its principal editors, Dr. Joseph Semmler,[49]
which opened new avenues for the understanding of the
monastic reform movement that forms the spiritual home
of the Plan of St. Gall. My indebtedness to the Corpus
consuetudinum monasticarum and the distinguished editors
and commentators is visible in countless places throughout
this book.

[ILLUSTRATION]

2. PLAN OF ST. GALL: THE DEDICATORY LEGEND

Addressed to Abbot Gozbert of St. Gall (806-836) by a churchman of higher rank who fails to identify himself, this letter of transmission
discloses (in the term EXEMPLATA) that the Plan is not an original but a copy, and therefore presumes the existence of a prototype.

The nature of its scripts reveals that the copy was made in the Abbey of Reichenau, perhaps around 820, but not earlier than 816/817 or later
than 830, the year in which Gozbert began to rebuild his monastery with the aid of the Plan.

The placement of the letter on the Plan's upper margin reveals that this scheme was to be viewed from west to east, not from south to north as
would be the case in similar post-medieval, and modern layouts.

A typographic transliteration of the letter with English translation is shown on the opposite page

I.1.7

THE SCOPE OF THE PRESENT STUDY

The opinions voiced on the various problems raised by
the Plan of St. Gall are numberless and, scattered as they
are in a vast array of books and disparate journals, prove to
be beyond the control of anyone but the most dogged
specialist. The time, therefore, is ripe for a general synthesis
of this scattered knowledge, and for a thorough and
comprehensive review of the issues raised in these
discussions.

Two queries, hitherto unsolved, require special consideration,
and perhaps more space than is desirable in the
context of the summary study that we have proposed. The
first of these is the highly controversial question of the scale
and construction methods followed in the Plan of St. Gall,
its initial mental conception and the actual drawing up of
the original scheme. The second is the question of the
constructional nature of the monastery's guest and service
structures. The former is the most tangled and most
widely debated single issue of the Plan;[50] the latter, the
most difficult and most complex, but also probably the most
rewarding. To settle it would be a breakthrough, not only
because of the light it would throw on the history of
monastic building, but also because of the contribution it
would make to our knowledge of vernacular architecture
at the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious.[51]