The Plan of St. Gall a study of the architecture & economy of & life in a paradigmatic Carolingian monastery |
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| II. |
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| IV. |
| IV. 1. |
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| IV. 2. |
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| IV.7.7. | IV.7.7 |
 | The Plan of St. Gall |  |
IV.7.7
DEVELOPMENT OF NEW CONCEPTS
IN ARCHITECTURE
Our account of the monastery as a cultural institution
would widen into a panorama of kaleidoscopic complexity
were we to raise the question of the monastery's contribution
to the development of western architecture. Up to the
very close of the eleventh century all truly important architectural
innovations were made in the great monastic compounds.
Centula, Fulda, St.-Martin-du-Canigou, Tournus,
Jumièges, Cluny, Santiago, Canterbury and Durham, to
mention only some of the most obvious examples, are highlights
in a spectacular pageant of monastic churches. The
Church of the Plan of St. Gall with its modular schematism
pointing centuries ahead in the development of medieval
church construction—its apse and counter apse, its dual
system of crypts—bears favorably the test of comparison
with any of these great architectural innovations.
263.X CHRIST IN MAJESTY. DETAIL
GOSPEL BOOK OF GUNDOHINUS (A.D. 754). Autun, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS. 3, fol. 12v [after Porcher-Hubert-Volbach, 1970, fig. 62]
Made upon the order of a lady named Fausta and a monk, Fuculphus, this Gospel book was written by the scribe Gundohinus, in an unidentifiable monastery called
Vosevium. The book's historical position at the start of a new era of Western life, marked by the coronation at St.-Denis of Charlemagne's father Pepin by Pope
Stephen II, has been persuasively defined by Jean Porcher (op. cit., 71ff):
"The book was completed in 754, the third year of the reign of King Pepin, the very year in which by a remarkable coincidence the Carolingian dynasty officially
began. . . . Nothing like it had yet been seen on the continent north of the Alps. The history of the Carolingian book begins with Gundohinus, just as the Carolingian
dynasty begins with Pepin."
Drawn with a clumsy hand, in lines intoxicated with a naive sophistication, this sensitive head of Christ—whose frontal stare has distinguished antecedents in Imperial
Roman art—is, among other things, a reflection of the deep cultural shock to which the Northern barbarians, with their nonfigurative art, were exposed in this first
encounter with the anthropomorphic imagery of the Christian South.
MUSÉE D'HISTOIRE ET D'ART, LUXEMBOURG. FIFTH CENTURY A.D.
Two doves confront each other on either side of a vase. The engraved marble fragment from Ettelbrük bears an Early Christian
inscription commemorating a man who, dead at the age of 38, was mourned by his wife Dalmatia.
AN END OR A BEGINNING?
A symbol of expectation of eternal life awaiting the faithful who, as doves, pluck flowers from the fountain of life, the composition
is a fascinating link between Roman, Early Christian, and medieval art. In Roman times, the motif was primarily
decorative. But stripped of the sculptural plasticity and the pictorial realism which it then possessed, enriched with Christian
symbolism, and recast in the flat, linear style favored by the barbarian conquerors of Rome, the fragment displays a freshness
of spirit that heralds the ascendancy of a new cultural mood—a new feeling for life that, interacting with the heritage of
Antiquity, was to generate a cultural synthesis of rich and unprecedented sophistication. The Carolingian Renaissance
which among other great accomplishments produced the Plan to which these volumes are
dedicated, was one of the first great peaks of this cultural encounter.
AND VOLUME I
| The Plan of St. Gall | |