University of Virginia Library

A faulty interpretation of the
Gallo-Roman courtyard house

Oelmann subscribed to Rahn's idea about the St. Gall
house and felt convinced that Schlosser was right in
defining it as a descendant of the Etruscan urn house of
Poggio Gaiella, which both he and Schlosser, however,
interpreted wrongly as a structure of basilican type. Oelmann
conceded that the city of Pompeii, with all its wealth
of architectural information, "does not furnish any convincing
parallels,"[23] then added, "but in the secular architecture,
not so much of Italy as of the Gallo-Germanic
provinces of the North, we can find analogies for practically
each and every subvariety of the houses of the Plan of St.
Gall."[24] He undertook to support this assertion by assembling
the plans of a considerable number of Gallo-Roman
houses and juxtaposing them, type by type, with what he
believed to be their constructional counterparts on the
Plan of St. Gall. In establishing these parallels, he adopted
a procedure, as unorthodox as it is startling, by simply
reversing the views of the archaeologists by whom these
houses had been excavated. The latter were convinced that
what they had unearthed were the foundations of typical
Roman courtyard houses, i.e., houses in which the rooms
were ranged peripherally around an open central court as
in the Roman atrium house. In two of them, a farmhouse
in the vicinity of the village of Nendeln, Liechtenstein
(fig. 270),[25] and a Roman villa in Bilsdorf, Luxembourg
(fig. 271),[26] they had found the remains of a large impluvium,
tangible evidence of the correctness of this interpretation.
Oelmann did not conceal these facts,[27] but simply
brushed them aside with the contention that what the
excavators declared to be an inner court was in reality a
covered hall, and that the rectangular basins found in the
center of these structures had to be interpreted not as catch
basins—as the excavators thought—but as hearths!

It is difficult for me to see how an experienced excavator
would confuse the straight and careful lining of a Roman
impluvium that had never been exposed to fire with the
scorched and blackened remains of a hearth whose rims
were never as regularly set; but what makes Oelmann's
categorical reversal of the thinking of his predecessors even
more perplexing is the fact that in one case at least, namely
that of the villa at Bilsdorf in Luxembourg, the excavator
had unearthed not only the remains of the catch basin
itself, but also a good portion of its drainage ditch. In his
account of the villa of Bilsdorf, Oelmann is guilty both of
factual distortion and of suppression of vital archaeological
evidence. He does not tell us that from the presence of heat
ducts found in the walls of chambers A and J (fig. 272) the
excavators had concluded that at least the avant-corps of
the villa must have been a double-storied structure. He
leaves us in ignorance about the fact that, while many of
the peripheral rooms were carefully paved with tiles (Rooms
B, C, and F) or opus signinum (Rooms A, M, L, K, and J),
the floor of the court consisted of nothing but stamped
clay. And least to be excused, he furnishes us with a plan

[ILLUSTRATION]

271. BILSDORF, LUXEMBOURG [after Oelmann, 1928, 127]

[ILLUSTRATION]

270. NENDELN, LIECHTENSTEIN [after Oelmann, 1928, 127]

Oelmann's rendering of the villa at Bilsdorf is a highly simplified version of the very detailed and exemplary plan published in 1910 by its excavators, E. and R.
Malget (fig. 272). It suppresses information (given in our caption to figs. 272-273) that makes incontrovertible the fact that the inner part of the house was an open
court surrounded by a covered walk, with a center opening (IMPLUVIUM) beneath which rain collected in a catch basin (COMPLUVIUM). Thus Oelmann's interpretation
of this villa as a house of basilican design is untenable.

The Bilsdorf villa was destroyed by fire, possibly set by invading Franks, toward the end of the 3rd century A.D. A welter of skeletal remains suggests the house burned
in the course of a violent battle. Both Bilsdorf and Nendeln are typical Roman standard houses with living quarters ranging around an open inner court, of the type
commonplace throughout the length and breadth of the Roman empire. For the original excavation report on Nendeln see S. Jenny, Mitteilungen der K.K.
Central Commission, XXIII, 1897, 121ff.

(fig. 271) that wholly suppresses[28] all of the four heating
units (two furnaces, one hypocaust, and one brazier) that
the excavator found in the peripheral chambers (Rooms A,
C, F, and J) and carefully recorded in his own original plan
(fig. 272). All this evidence taken into account suggests
precisely what its excavator thought it to suggest—namely,
that the villa of Bilsdorf was a classical example of the
tetrastyle Roman atrium house, i.e., a house in which a
peripheral suite of rooms, ranged all around a central open
court, was surrounded by a covered walk that had a large
rectangular opening in the middle of the roof through which
the rain drained off into a central basin in the floor beneath
it. The rooms could be heated by classical Roman heating
devices (hypocaust, furnaces, brazier), either in pairs or
individually. In the tetrastyle Roman atrium house, Vitruvius
tells us, the roof of the surrounding gallery of the
court "was supported at the angles by columns."[29] In the
villa of Bilsdorf all of the base blocks of these posts were
found still in their original emplacement. In its vertical
elevation, then, the villa of Bilsdorf bore not the slightest
resemblance to Rahn's St. Gall house, but rather might be
imagined to have looked like the house shown in figure
273.[30]

What I have tried to demonstrate with regard to the villa
of Bilsdorf holds true for all of Oelmann's other comparisons.
In not a single case could he actually demonstrate
on the basis of controllable evidence that his houses looked
as he claimed them to look; and in whatever cases I have
been able to check, his own interpretation of the facts
either contradicted that of the men by whom these houses
had been excavated or were open to at least one other
explanation.

In claiming that Oelmann's attempt to trace the missing
Gallo-Roman prototypes of Rahn's St. Gall house was a
failure, I do not mean to imply that houses of the type that
Oelmann had in mind might not have existed. But as long
as the proof of their existence rests on authoritative assertion
rather than on archaeological demonstration, I cannot
see how such a house type could be used as a prototype
form for the reconstruction of the guest and service structures
of the Plan of St. Gall.