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

It has become a commonplace of historical reference to
speak of the "anthropomorphic" character of Greco-Roman
and Late Antique art and of the "corporeal"
quality of their figurative and spatial composition; and it
has been stressed time and again that this quality grows
out of a way of thinking that interprets man and his metaphysical
environment "in the image of man," a concept so
embedded that even Christianity could not rout it. We
have not yet found any way of describing or explaining
adequately the way of thinking that impelled the medieval
illuminators to submit the classical prototypes to relentless
abstraction and caused the medieval architects to break up
and reassemble their spaces in controlled volumetrical
sequences.[308] Until we have, we shall not be able to understand
fully the meaning of such a phenomenon as the
square schematism of medieval art or, for that matter, any
other schematisms conceptually related to it. Square
schematism is an intellectual principle by which formerly
existent, yet isolated or only loosely connected parts are
brought into an ordered modular relationship. It is a
principle of intellectual alignment that strikes far beyond
the reality of architecture or book illumination into the
realm of literary and musical composition—as Charles W.
Jones and Richard D. Crocker have shown in recent
studies[309] —reflect a cultural attitude that may have had a

231

[ILLUSTRATION]

186. SPEYER CATHEDRAL (1082-1106)

[after Dehio, GESCHICHTE DER DEUTSCHEN KUNST,
4th ed., I, 1930, plate vol., figure 63]

About 1030, Emperor Konrad II (1029-1039) began to replace the
Merovingian cathedral with a new building (Speyer I) whose crypt
(dedicated in 1041) became a sepulchral sanctuary for the imperial
house. The nave walls of this structure were articulated by a
continuous sequence of engaged shafts rising from the floor to the
head of the walls. The roof was timbered. The aisles by contrast were
covered with shaft-supported and arch-framed groin vaults.

During the reign of Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106, or more
precisely from about 1082-1106), the design of the aisles was
transferred to the nave by the superimposition upon each alternate
tier of a second and heavier shaft, and their connection lengthwise
and crosswise by means of arches capable of carrying vaults. The
view shown above represents the cathedral in the form it had attained
at this point (Speyer II).

direct effect upon even the organization of the relationships
of Church and State, where similar tendencies can be observed
at about the same time. An illuminative reflection of
this mode of thinking is to be found in Walahfrid Strabo's
Libellus de Exordiis, written between 840 and 842. Here
secular rulership and ecclesiastical government are brought
into a system of modular relationships in which each of the
two respective hierarchies is formed by a series of parallel
offices:

Just as the Roman emperors are said to have been the monarchs of
the whole world, so the pontiff of the see of Rome, filling the place
of the Apostle Peter, is at the very head of all the church. We may
compare archbishops to kings, metropolitans to dukes. What the
counts and prefects perform in the secular world, the bishops do in
the church. Just as there are praetors or comites palatii who hear the
cases of secular men, so there are the men whom the Franks call the
highest chaplains who preside over the cases of clerics. The lesser
chaplains are just like those whom we call in Gallic fashion the
lord's vassals (vassos dominicos).[310]

Like the "disengaged crossing" or the "extended altar
square" many of the component parts of this system are
old. But the manner in which they were drawn together
into a system of homologous parts presaged a development
which, two to three centuries later, led to the accomplished
and intensely sophisticated metaphysical visions of scholastics.
They envisioned the universe as a triad of structurally
related hierarchies (fig. 187)—each being an identical image
of the other as well as of the system as a whole—that
possessed identical subdivisions into triads of ranks, and
in each of these triads each subordinate rank corresponded
in substance to its equivalent part in every other triad.[311]

[308]

I have dealt with a typical expression of this conflict between classical
corporeality and medieval abstraction in my article on the Baptistery
of Florence; see Horn, 1938, 126ff.

[309]

See the articles mentioned above in note 67.

[310]

Translation quoted after Odegaard, 1945, 20-21. For the original
text see Walafridi Strabonis libellus de exordiis et incrementis quarundam
in observationibus ecclesiasticis rebus, ed. Krause, in Mon. Germ. Hist.,
Legum II, Capit. II:2, 515-16; "Sicut augusti Romanorum totius orbis
monarchiam tenuisse feruntur, ita summus pontifex in sede Romana vicem
beati Petri gerens totius ecclesiae apice sublimatur . . . Deinde archiepiscopos
. . . regibus conferamus; metropolitanos autem ducibus comparemus . . . Quod
comites vel praefecti in seculo, hoc episcopi ceteri in ecclesia explent . . .
Quemadmodum sunt in palatiis praetores vel comites palatii, qui saecularium
causas ventilant, ita sunt et illi, quos summos capellanos Franci appellant,
clericorum causis praelati. Capellani minores ita sunt, sicut hi, quos vassos
dominicos Gallica consuetudine nominamus. Dicti sunt autem primitus
cappellani a cappa beati Martini, quam reges Francorum ob adiutorium
victoriae in proeliis solebant secum habere, quam ferentes et custodientes cum
ceteris sanctorum reliquiis clerici cappellani coeperunt vocari."

[311]

The diagram shown in fig. 187 is based on Berthold Vallentin's
analysis of William's Liber de Universo, in Gustav Schmoller, Grundrisse
und Bausteine zur Staats-und zur Geschichtslehre (Berlin, 1908, 41-120).
It was first published in Horn, 1958, 19, fig. 42.