VI.1.2
THE CHURCH
The dedicatory inscription of the Plan and the general
historical context in which it was made leave no doubt that
the Plan was drawn upon the request of Abbot Gozbert
(816-836) of St. Gall for the purpose of giving him guidance
in rebuilding his monastery.[4]
Gozbert began this
project in 830 by demolishing the church which Abbot
Otmar had built toward the middle of the preceding
century.[5]
The work on the new church proceeded so
rapidly that it could be dedicated in 837.[6]
Gozbert's church was gutted by fires in 937, 1314, and
1418 but the bulk of the walls, the clerestories of the nave
and their supporting arcades apparently were not signally
affected by these events.[7]
By contrast, the transept and the
choir were completely rebuilt by the Abbots Eglolf and
Ulrich VIII, from 1439-83.[8]
It is in the form it had then
attained that the church is portrayed on the oldest bird's-eye
views of the city: in a woodcut dated 1545 by Heinrich
Vogtherr, in an etching on iron by Melchior Frank, dated
1596 (fig. 507), in an engraving of essentially the same
view by Matthaeus Merian, published in 1638 (fig. 509X),
as well as in several other drawings, the most important of
which are a pen drawing of 1666 and a large drawing on
parchment of 1671.[9]
In 1712 the abbey was ransacked by the Protestants and
the monks were expelled.[10]
When they returned a few
years later it was painfully clear that extensive restorations
would have to be undertaken. In anticipation of that event
some detailed architectural surveys were made. In 1717
architect Johannes Caspar Glattburger surveyed the church
and recorded its dimensions.[11]
Two years later Pater Gabriel
Hecht made a scale-drawn plan of the entire monastery
site, dated September 17, 1719 (fig. 510). In 1725-26 he
added to this a set of no less than fourteen architectural
drawings, in which he set forth how he thought the damaged
church and other monastic buildings should be renovated.[12]
Three of these drawings, reproduced in figures 511A-C,
render the condition of the still surviving parts of the
medieval church with great precision and show that what
Hecht had in mind was not so much a reconstruction as a
superficial modernization of the then existing work. Hecht
proposed that the gothic choir be retained in its entirety.
He added some baroque touches in surface treatment by
superimposing a new columnar order upon the exterior
elevation of the choir. In the interior he modernized the
Gothic supports but otherwise retained the structure as he
found it, leaving its Gothic vaults and windows wholly
untouched. In the nave, likewise, he does not appear to
have undertaken any radical changes. Hardegger is convinced
that the arcades and the superincumbent clerestories
of the nave which Hecht had before his eyes as he made his
drawings were in essence still those of Abbot Gozbert's
church (compare fig. 511A and B with fig. 512B and C).
He feels that Hecht proposed to retain the intercolumniation
of Gozbert's church and confined himself to simply
increasing the heights in this part of the building. The only
truly new feature in his proposal was the conversion of the
two nave bays lying next to the choir into a pseudotransept
surmounted by a dome, and the introduction on each of
the two long sides of the church of a continuous system of
chapels. For the rest he confined himself to superimposing
upon the existing work a decorative relief of surface
features, designed in the prevailing taste of the period.
This included in the the interior the complete encasing of
Gozbert's arcade columns in baroque shaped piers.
Although Hecht's design proposals had no effect on the
actual course of events, which took a radical turn a quarter
of a century later, they are of incomparable historical
value because they embody with amazing accuracy the
record of what was then still left, or could then be discerned,
of Gozbert's church. In analyzing this material, Hardegger
came to the following conclusions concerning Gozbert's
church and its relation to the Plan of St. Gall:
1. As stipulated in the explanatory legends of the Plan
of St. Gall, Abbot Gozbert assigned to the nave of his
church a width of 40 feet and to each of his aisles a width
of 20 feet—dimensions which also are in conformity with
the manner in which the Church is drawn on the Plan.
2. In full compliance with the intercolumnar titles of
the Plan, but in deviation from the drawing (in which the
columns are spaced at intervals of 20 feet) he assigns to the
arcades an intercolumnar span of 12 feet.
3. In full compliance with the great axial title of the
Church of the Plan, but again in deviation from the
drawing (where the church is shown to have a length of
more than 300 feet) he reduced the length of the church to
200 feet. He attained this goal by drastic changes in the
design of the nave of the church, but retained the layout of
transept and choir virtually in the form in which it was
shown on the Plan.
Hardegger's supporting evidence for these conclusions is
presented below.
CONCERNING THE WIDTH AND THE LENGTH
OF GOZBERT'S CHURCH
According to the scale-drawn plan made by Father Gabriel
Hecht, in 1725-26 the nave of the medieval church had a
length of 155 feet. Its clear inner width was 46 feet, that of
the aisles 23 feet. The two clerestories rested on sixteen
piers, each 3 feet square. They were placed at intervals of
17 feet (measured on center) and had between them a clear
arcade span of 14 feet.[13]
Hardegger could establish that
Gabriel Hecht, in measuring the medieval building as well
as in laying out his own drawings availed himself of the
so-called Württemberg foot[14]
which had a unit value of
28.6 cm., and consequently was considerably smaller than
the foot used in drafting the Plan of St. Gall. Hardegger
thought that the architect who drew the Plan of St. Gall
scaled his layout with a foot that formed an equivalent of
33.3 cm.[15]
Converted to this scale, the measurements
recorded by Gabriel Hecht would read as follows: length
of nave: 133 feet; clear width of nave: 40 feet; clear width
of aisles: 20 feet; clear span of the arcade openings: 12 feet.
This in complete harmony with the dimensions stipulated
in the explanatory titles of the Plan of St. Gall, with one
difference only: the builders of Gozbert's church interpreted
these dimensions as clear spans, whereas the designer
of the Plan worked with a 40-foot square, the corners of
which coincided with the center of every second arcade
support. Being composed of nine arcades of spans of 12
feet on center, the nave of the Plan of St. Gall would have
had a clear inner length of 108 feet. If one adds to this the
thickness of the eight piers, each of which was 3 feet square,
one arrives at a clear inner length of 132 feet, which corresponds
within a margin of error of only 1 foot to the layout
of the church measured by Gabriel Hecht. To place this
figure into proper historical perspective, the reader must
be reminded of the fact that Abbot Gozbert's church was
two bays shorter than the church which Father Gabriel
had before him. Before 1623 the two westernmost bays of
the church were taken up by an open porch, surmounted by
a chapel that was dedicated to St. Michael (fig. 513). This
chapel was built after Gozbert's death as a connecting link
between the main church and the church of St. Otmar.
Consecrated in 867, it was taken down to make room for
an enlargement of the monastery church by two additional
bays when the chapel of St. Otmar was rebuilt, between
1623 and 1626.
[16]
If one subtracts the length of these two
added bays (34 Württemberg feet or 23 Carolingian feet)
from the total length of the nave (155 Württemberg feet or
133 Carolingian feet) one arrives at an original length of
121 Württemberg feet or 105 Carolingian feet. This comes
as close to the 108 feet of the nave of the Plan as one could
expect, in absence of any more tangible archaeological
information. It left 95 more feet of the total length of 200
feet to accommodate the transept, the presbytery and the
apse.
[17]
CONCERNING THE LAYOUT OF THE TRANSEPT
AND THE CHOIR OF GOZBERT'S CHURCH
In examining the drawings of Gabriel Hecht, Hardegger
observed that the dimensions of the choir built by the
abbots Eglolf and Ulrich VIII between 1439 and 1483
corresponded almost precisely to the layout of the eastern
portion of the Church of the Plan.[18]
He felt convinced
that the masonry of Eglolf's choir followed the lines of the
Carolingian work (figure 512A-C). Eglolf apparently had
simply merged the space of the crossing of Gozbert's church
with that of its presbytery, converting them into the nave
of a choir whose aisles extended to the eastern end of the
church, but did not project laterally beyond the body of
Gozbert's church. The new choir absorbed in its mass
the subsidiary spaces which in the church of the Plan
accommodated Scriptorium and Library.
Hardegger's observations were keen and his argument
is persuasive. One fails to understand why he had so little
influence on the controversy generated by those who tried
to resolve, in retrospect, what a Carolingian architect might
have done had he redrawn the Church of the Plan in the
light of the corrective measurements given in its explanatory
titles.[19]
To leave choir and transept intact made sense
in functional terms: it was here that the monks were
stationed during their religious services for a total of four
hours each day.[20]
To effect the required reduction of
space by changing the dispositions of the nave also made
sense, for here the loss of space was incurred not by the
monks, but by the laymen, who attended only a fraction of
the total cycle of services held in the church, and even those
not on a regular schedule.
