The Plan of St. Gall :: :: University of Virginia Library

In attempting to explain this disturbing incongruity
three further theories have evolved. One group of students
of the Plan proposed that the linear layout of the Church
was only a schematic concept and that the true intent of the
draftsman was revealed not in the drawing, but in the
accompanying explanatory titles. The main proponents of
this view are Georg Dehio,[320] Joseph Hecht,[321] Wilhelm
Pinder,[322] Hans Reinhardt,[323] and Wolfgang Schöne.[324] All
made an attempt to reconstruct what they believed to be
the author's "true intentions" by modifying the plan of the
Church in the light of the measurements listed in its
explanatory legends.[325]

[320]

The first modified drawing of the Plan was published by Dehio and
von Bezold, Plates I, 1887, pl. 42 fig. 2. The same drawing is reproduced
in all editions of Dehio's Geschichte der Deutschen Kunst; see 1st ed., I,
1919, 25, fig. 37.

[321]

Hecht, I, 1928, 27ff and pl. 8 fig. a. Hecht questioned the trustworthiness
of the drawing, because no other monastery churches of
comparable length were attested for the Carolingian period (ibid., 28).
This view is incompatible with the measurements of the abbey church
of Fulda, with a length of 321 feet (see below, pp. 187-89), and was
further weakened by Doppelfeld's discovery under the pavement of
Cologne Cathedral of the foundations of a Carolingian church that was
300 feet long; see above, p. 26, fig. 14, and p. 27.

[322]

Pinder, 1937, 69, fig. 4.

[323]

Reinhardt, 1937, 270ff and overlay of 273; Reinhardt, 1952, 18ff,
and figs. on 21 and 22.

[324]

Schöne, 1960, 147-54.

[325]

For a discussion of the respective merits of these reconstructions,
see below, p. 178f.

University of Virginia Library

THE TITLES NOT THE DRAWING REFLECT THE INTENT OF THE ORIGINAL SCHEME

THE TITLES NOT THE DRAWING REFLECT
THE INTENT OF THE ORIGINAL SCHEME