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

Schlosser's misinterpretation of Vitruvius' and Varro's
definitions of the displuviate and testudinate Roman atrium
house was in itself conditioned by the faulty historical
assumption held by many leading classical archaeologists
at that time, that the Roman atrium was originally not a
court but the principal living room of the house which
gradually developed into an open yard.[14] This theory was
taken up and widely propagated by one of the greatest
connoisseurs of Roman house construction, August Mau.[15]
But, curiously enough, it had not originated from any
archaeological evidence, which in fact seemed to contradict
it, but from a questionable etymological speculation by
certain Roman authors who believed that atrium came from
ater ("black") and referred to the blackening of the atrium

[ILLUSTRATION]

266. PLAN OF ST. GALL. BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PLAN OF THE
MONASTERY

MADE FOR J. R. RAHN BY GEORG LASIUS (1876, fig. 12, 91)

This is the first, and for its period, truly outstanding attempt to show in an accurately constructed bird's-eye view, what the monastery might
have looked like had it actually been built. It formed the basis of the three-dimensional model reconstruction shown in figure 267. Rahn's
interpretation of the guest and service buildings as covered basilican structures with central hearths and openings in the roofs above, serving as
smoke escape and light inlet, was a great improvement over Keller's (fig. 264) and Lenoir's interpretation, but like theirs, suffers from being
modeled after Classical prototypes rather than those historically and archaeologically related to those of the era and location of the Plan of
St. Gall.

[ILLUSTRATION]

267. ST. GALL. HISTORICAL MUSEUM OF ST. GALL

ARCHITECTURAL MODEL. A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE BUILDINGS OF THE PLAN

The model was made by the sculptor Jules Leemann of Geneva, in 1877, on the basis of drawings furnished by Georg Lasius and has ever since
been on display in the Historical Museum of the city of St. Gall. It is a masterpiece of its kind, built to scale, and executed with supreme
craftsmanship. Length of base: 70¼ inches (1.78m). Width: 49½ inches (1.25m). The roofs of the houses, as well as the Church, can be lifted,
exposing the furniture on the ground floor levels. The second stories, the Refectory and the Cellar can be lifted out in their entirety. The
reconstruction of Church, Cloister, and Novitiate are essentially correct. The height of the Church (a little over twice the width of the nave) is
excessive for the period. The reconstruction makes no distinction between masonry and timber. Entirely unconvincing is the design of the majority
of the guest and service structures (see caption, figure 266).

walls by the smoke from its hearth.[16] Since the beginning
of this century, this view has been increasingly challenged
by a trend of thought that holds that, on the contrary,
the Roman atrium was originally an open yard, which
gradually developed into a covered court. The main exponents
of this theory are Antonio Sogliano,[17] Giovanni
Patroni,[18] and Axel Boethius,[19] who believe the Roman
atrium house to be the product of a gradual transformation
of an early Italic farmstead, whose individual buildings
had been scattered loosely around a central open yard, into
an organized architectural system under the hands of the
Etruscan conquerors.

They assume that the principal building of this Italic
farmyard was a prostyle farmhouse with hearth and bedstead.
Through a gradual process of axial co-ordination
of this main house with the subsidiary structures and the
yard enclosure, the Etruscans, according to this theory,
developed the irregular Italic farmstead into the aggregate
depicted in figure 268. Two further developments, in their
opinion, led from this hypothetical prototype form to the
emergence of the classical Roman atrium house, the
"Pompeian primehouse"; the coalescence, namely, of the
roofs of the subsidiary structures with that of the main
house on one hand, and the roofing-over of the courtyard
on the other. As this process unfolds itself, the hearth is
shifted from the original farmhouse (now tablinum) into
one of the adjacent smaller rooms.[20]

Whatever the merits of this theory may be, this much
appears to be certain: we do not know of a single Roman
atrium house, excavated or otherwise attested, that shows
in the center of its covered court either the traces of a
hearth[21] or any evidence in the roof above it for the existence
of a protective lantern (testudo). In the Roman atrium
house this spot is the traditional place for the catch basin
(impluvium) and directly above it, in the roof, for a rainhole
(compluvium), which also served as air or light source
(fig. 265). The hearth lay, as a rule, in one of the smaller
chambers to the side of the tablinum, or in one of the other
peripheral cubicles, but in any case entirely outside the
atrium space. The testudo of the Roman atrium house, then,
is an altogether different architectural entity from the
device that carries this name on the Plan of St. Gall. The
latter device called testu on the Plan of St. Gall is coextensive
with the hearth site (and could very well be interpreted,
as Rahn suggested, as a protective shield or lantern
that covers an opening in the roof above the hearth); the
testudo of the Roman atrium house by contrast is the designation
for a shielding roof which covers the Roman atrium,
either as a peripheral shed (as in the atrium Tuscanum) or
as a continuous roof (as in the smaller and rarer atrium
testudinatum).

[14]

This view, vigorously advanced in Ruge's article "Atrium," in
Pauly-Wissowa, II, 1896, col. 2146ff—"Der Mittelraum des altitalischen
Hauses, welcher ursprünglich den Herd enthielt, und als Speiseraum,
Arbeitsraum der Frauen, überhaupt als gemeinsamer Aufenthalt der
Hausgenossen diente"—became a commonplace in the subsequent
encyclopedic literature. It reappears in Fiechter's article "Römisches
Haus," in Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie, 2nd ser., 1A:1, 1914,
col. 983; in Wasmuth, I, 1929, 220; in Schmitt, I Stuttgart, 1937,
col. 1197; in Encyclopedia Britannica, II, 1957, 654; and many others.
A solitary exception is Antonio Sogliano's article "atrio," in Enciclopedia
Italiana, V (Milan-Rome, 1930), 255-56, which summarizes the more
recent views ("Il megaro e il tablino sono, rispettivamente, la vera casa
di cui l'aulé e l'atrio non sono que il cortile") with bibliography concerning
the discussion of this subject prior to 1930.

[15]

Mau's widely read and repeatedly reprinted account of Pompeian
life and art, published in an English translation even before it appeared
in German, is probably the primary reason for the tenacious survival in
encyclopedic literature of the superannuated view related above. Cf.
Mau, 1899, 247, and 1904, 253; and idem, 1900, 235-36, and 1908, 258.

[16]

The principal source is Servius' Commentaries on Vergil, ed. Thilo
and Hagen, I, 1922, 202: atrium enim erat ex fumo. The derivation of
atrium from ater is only one of several derivations current among Roman
etymologists. Others thought that it came from an Etruscan town, Atria,
where the style of building is supposed to have originated: "alii dicunt
Atriam Etrurii civitatem fuisse, quae domos amplis vestibulis habebant, quae
cum Romani imitarentur, `atria' appellaverant" (ibid.). In modern
etymological literature the term has been connected with Greek αἰθριος
or ὑπαιθρἰος ("under the open sky"), which is more compatible with the
available archaeological evidence, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, II:1,
1901, col. 1101. But even if it could be demonstrated that ater is the
correct root, we could not infer from this that in the early Roman house
the hearth stood in the atrium, since as long as the open space of the
atrium formed the principal means of escape for the smoke from the
kitchen, the walls and timbers of the court would be blackened even if
the kitchen were located in one of the peripheral chambers.

A great deal of confusion in the discussion of the Roman atrium and
its relation to the hearth has been created by a traditional misinterpretation
of verses 302-3 in book VI of Ovid's Fasti: "at focus a flammis et quod
fovet omnia, dictus; qui tamen in primis aedibus ante fuit." This passage can
under no circumstances be evidence, as Ruge suggests (above, p. 12 n.6),
for the assumption that the hearth stood in the center of the Roman
atrium, and that the latter was in the earlier days the central hearth or
living room of the house. The passage states, "The hearth (focus) is so
named after the flames, and because it warms (fovet) everything; formerly
it stood in the forward part of the house." What Ovid conveys with
this sentence is that, in contradistinction to his own days when the hearth
had no fixed position but could be found in any of the cubicles in the
immediate vicinity of the dining room (tablinum), in the early Roman
house the hearth lay always in the "forward part of the building"—a
statement that would be in full accord with the views expressed by
Sogliani, Patroni, and Boethius—if we were to assume that Ovid's
verses referred to a time in which the roof of the main house had as
yet not coalesced with that of the subsidiary structures into the complex
organism of the Roman atrium house. Cf. Ovidius, ed. Bömer,
I, 1957, 272; and Ovid's Fasti, ed. Frazer, 1951, 340.

That the Roman atrium was at that time thought of as a courtyard
and not as a room, is expressed with unequivocal clarity in Festus'
definition of "atrium": "Atrium proprie est genus aedificii ante aedem
continens aream, in qua collecta ex omni tecto pluvia descendit," i.e., "The
atrium strictly speaking is that part of the building which lies in front of
the dwelling, and contains in its center an area into which the rain
waters fall which are collected by the entire roof." Sexti Pompei Festi
De verborum significatu liber, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay (Leipzig, 1913), 12.

[17]

Sogliano, 1937, 61ff, and op. cit.

[18]

Patroni, 1941, 294ff.

[19]

Boethius, 1934.

[20]

The views of Axel Boethius (ibid.) differ slightly from those of
Sogliano and Patroni. The primary stimulus for the development of the
Roman atrium house, according to Boethius, came from the Orient,
from a type of Near Eastern atrium house of which E. Gjerstad excavated
an excellent specimen at Vouni, Cyprus (Gjerstad, II, 1932). It is from
this type, according to Boethius, that the Etruscans drew the organizing
idea that helped to crystallize the irregular Italic prime forms into an
axially co-ordinated establishment and which, in particular, is responsible
for the tripartite room partition at the head of the atrium, opposite
the entrance (with the tablinum in the center). In essence this arrangement
is identical with that of the Vouni palace, which had three cellae
at the upper end of an open courtyard.

Whatever the differences between Patroni's and Boethius' views may
be, both hold—contrary to the traditional assumption—that the atrium
is by origin an open court that was progressively roofed over, until it
eventually took on the semblance of a room. If this assumption is correct
—and it appears to command wider and wider assent—the rain catch
basin of the Roman atrium house could no longer be considered to be
developmentally the successor of the hearth site of its Italic antecedents.

[21]

Even Mau has to admit (1908, 259), "of a hearth in the atrium not
a trace," and from this fact infers that the hearth must have been
"banished from the atrium in a comparatively early date" (idem, 1899,
237; 1904, 254). Of an overwhelming number of excavated Roman
atrium houses only two show traces of a hearth in the inner court of the
house. In one of these the hearth is not part of the original structure
(Nissen, 1877, 448); in the other it stood in one of the corners, not in the
center of the court (ibid., 431).

University of Virginia Library

The Roman atrium: an open yard developing into a covered court

266. PLAN OF ST. GALL. BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PLAN OF THE MONASTERY

267. ST. GALL. HISTORICAL MUSEUM OF ST. GALL

The Roman atrium:
an open yard developing into a covered court

266. PLAN OF ST. GALL. BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PLAN OF THE
MONASTERY