One Cubit at a Time

When Noah built his ark, he was working from divine instructions. They were clear and direct—if incomplete, especially to someone who had never built a ship before. In Genesis God tells Noah to

make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high. Make a roof for it, leaving below the roof an opening one cubit high all around. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle, and upper decks.

The cubit, an ancient unit of measurement, was roughly the length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and thus not really standardizable. But it’s generally accepted today that God wanted an ark approximately 515 feet long, 86 feet wide, and 51 feet high. (The trireme, an ancient ship, was about 120 feet long.) On the Internet, there is much interest in this design, both technical (what did the ark look like?) and theological (why didn’t God build the ark himself?). Discussions on online forums speculate about how long it would’ve taken to build and how many animals would’ve been able to fit comfortably. Charts compare its size to those of the Queen Mary and Santa Maria.

The problem of building the ark was no less of a preoccupation for Origen and Augustine, early Christian philosophers who attacked it head-on with their particular knack for metaphor. In The City of God, written in the fifth century, Augustine theorizes, in a typically Augustinian way, that the ark’s dimensions represent the human body, because God became man in Christ and “the door which [the ark] was given on its side surely represents the wound made when the side of the crucified was pierced with the spear.” It would take a “twisted mind,” he writes, to accept only the text’s literal meaning. But he also tips his hat to Origen’s more literal solution that you wouldn’t need to worry about fitting all of the animals if you were using the Egyptian cubit, six times longer, as Moses would have done. (Origen ultimately concluded that the ark had been shaped like a pyramid.)

The question would remain a live one into the twelfth century, when the theologian Hugh of Saint Victor puzzled over how an ark with rectangular dimensions could float. (According to an apocryphal anecdote, the dilemma occurred to him while walking along the Seine one morning, contemplating the curved hulls of boats on the water.) He was a likely candidate to take up this puzzle. Saint Victor was the name of an Augustinian abbey founded in Paris by William of Champeaux in the early twelfth century. It soon acquired a rich endowment, and the theological writings produced by its priors, such as Hugh, quickly became influential; Hugh’s contemporaries called him a “second Augustine.”

A monk named Richard joined the Victorines at some point in the twelfth century. Hugh died in 1141; the two may or may not have met. Richard became prior of Saint Victor in 1162, and was as revered as his predecessor. Dante placed him in the Paradiso—a man “in contemplation more than human”—on the same plane as the Venerable Saint Bede and Saint Isidore, the “last scholar of the ancient world.” And yet today Richard’s writing, like Hugh’s, is obscure, and much of it has not been translated into English from the Latin. Perhaps readers have found it technical and academic, unlike that of Augustine or Aquinas, whose writing is often artful and alive to the emotional resonance of religion; or perhaps this work has been overlooked because it lives in the shadow of the Renaissance for which it laid the foundation. Whatever the reason, we’ve largely left behind a potent and experimental theology that rigorously engaged with the humanistic arts and, like a mandala, rendered the divine with ornate mathematical precision.

Among Richard’s untranslated writing is In visionem Ezechielis (“On Ezekiel’s vision”), a commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, in which God appears to the prophet and once again lays out instructions for man to follow, this time for “something like the structure of a city.” Over long passages recounted by Ezekiel in the first person, God conveys him, equipped with a measuring reed, through a series of designs and says: “look carefully and listen closely and pay attention to everything I am going to show you, for that is why you have been brought here. Tell the people of Israel everything you see.” Richard accompanied his commentary with thirteen plans and elevations, five representing the entire complex and the other eight rendering such details as the gatehouse, the temple, and the central altar.

The plans, which are rendered from a top-down, aerial perspective, are done in pleasantly exact linework, as are the calligraphic labels on their different elements. The elevations—vertical, two-dimensional views of a building’s façade—are colored in, with reds, blues, and greens differentiating among structural elements. One, typical of the set, represents a hillside structure near the temple. In the copy of the manuscript at the Bibliothèque nationale, the building’s three stories are demarcated by rows of what appear to be arched red doorways, their black hinges delicately dotted with nails, set in blue brickwork traced with white. The uppermost structure is supported by three columns with what look like basic Doric capitals. The multicolored columns propping it all up slot neatly into the angle of the hillside: green, pale blue, rosy pink, yellow, and green again. A roofed balcony is jauntily set on one side.

Richard’s commentary and drawings are the subjects of Karl Kinsella’s careful study God’s Own Language: Architectural Drawing in the Twelfth Century. A scholar of medieval art and architectural history, Kinsella sets out to make the case for reappraising Richard not just as a theologian but as a proto-architect. He does not suggest that In visionem Ezechielis was anything other than a work of theology: Richard’s drawings of the buildings described by Ezekiel, he writes, were “a consequence of the exegetical process” rather than “a systematic attempt to create new visual forms.” But along the way, Kinsella argues, Richard produced manuscripts that bring architectural drawing closer to the workable designs of centuries to follow, particularly in his application of geometry. 

Kinsella delights in close-reading these illustrations as architectural objects; among his goals is to trace how the practice of architectural drawing developed during the period. “Richard’s cloistered life has obscured him from the gaze of architectural historians,” Kinsella writes, “and his theologically oriented objectives seem to place him outside the silo of our discipline.” And yet, studied with the right kind of attention, “his work might tell us something about how we came to have architectural drawings” as we know them.

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It is generally accepted that the oldest cathedral still standing today is the Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Armenia, which was constructed at the very start of the fourth century, pointedly built over a pagan temple. Though the original, down to its foundation, has been transfigured over time by destructions and reconstructions, it was in all likelihood at first a relatively simple structure: a rectangular space supported by four pillars, perhaps with a vaulted ceiling.

During the Middle Ages construction projects in the West were typically led by a “master builder” who executed them along with a team of craftsmen and laborers. These nameless master masons are responsible for the elaborate grandeur of Gothic architecture, developing rib vaults and buttresses, we have to assume, largely through trial and error, combining their command of the material—stone—with on-the-ground problem-solving. How and to what extent master builders used mathematics to these ends is effectively lost, along with any account of personal attachment to their work.

There is a broader textual silence, too. Representations of “buildings, monasteries, or entire cities” have survived, Kinsella writes, but “there is no synthesis of how artists and readers interpreted such drawings from late antiquity to the twelfth century.” But the period between Vitruvius and Alberti was not completely barren. Kinsella stresses the contributions of religious orders, where “the underlying interest in architecture” was preserved “by monks and canons who had a highly developed sense of spatial representation both in their imaginations and on the surface of the page.”

One of the earliest—and among the best-known and most studied— extant medieval architectural drawings is known as “the Saint Gall Plan,” a ninth-century layout, anonymously completed, for what is believed to be a Benedictine monastery in Switzerland, comprising a large cathedral, a monastic cloister, and all the attendant facilities for farming, housing guests, and generally sustaining monastic life (including two rows of ovular casks for aging wine). The monastery at Saint Gall was never built, but the plan—done on a single sheet of paper thirty inches wide and forty-four inches long—has important implications for our understanding of architectural drawing in this period. Some architectural historians have, for instance, suggested that it operates by the 1:200 ratio—the standard scaling in use today.

“Scholarship is divided over the plan’s purpose,” Kinsella writes. In 1979 the scholars Ernest Born and Walter Horn published The Plan of St. Gall: A Study of the Architecture and Economy of, and Life in a Paradigmatic Carolingian Monastery, a towering monograph in which they argued that there was never any intention to build the abbey at Saint Gall—the plan represented the ideal of an abbey.¹ If Saint Gall was indeed a vision of an abbey never intended to be built, a meditation on what the holiest possible monastery might look like, then it would stand as another example—like Augustine’s writings on the ark before it and Richard’s drawings after—of putting architecture to theological ends.

It isn’t until the twelfth century that we have records of an architect staking a creative and intellectual claim on a structure, in addition to a mechanical one. The Frenchman Abbot Suger, who was responsible in the 1130s and 1140s for renovating and redesigning the abbey at Saint-Denis, wrote a long treatise, De administratione, or “On What Was Done under His Administration,” the aim of which was to “save for the memory of posterity” that which “Almighty God had bestowed upon this church, in the time of our prelacy, in the acquisition of new assets…in the construction of buildings, and in the accumulation of gold, silver, most precious gems and very good textiles.” He writes eloquently and at length about how he and his colleagues searched for the most precious materials and skilled artisans to craft new bronze doors and a crucifix, for which they required “hyacinths, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topazes…a great and expensive supply of other gems and large pearls,” and “about eighty marks of refined gold.” In Suger’s writing about material concerns, the divine begins to come down to earth.

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By the twelfth century the developing money-based economy had fueled—among much else—the growth of religious institutions into hubs of education and philosophical, theological, and humanistic innovation. So significant was this expansion that scholars today refer to the period as the “twelfth-century renaissance,” a name that also captures the era’s renewed interest in the ancient world, insofar as it was accessible. There are copies of Vitruvius’s De architectura from as early as the eighth century, though its reintroduction to broader intellectual culture is generally dated to the early fifteenth. Kinsella is unable to locate one of those copies in circulation in Richard’s library, but is unwilling to say for sure that the abbot would have been ignorant of it.

Hugh and Richard wrote widely on matters of theology in general and scriptural exegesis in particular. More than a thousand years on, the immediacy of Christianity’s foundational narrative could well have been starting to fade. Victorines and other medievals went in search of a method not just to understand the word of God but to feel its relevance. They developed a highly systematic approach consisting of four basic levels: literal, allegorical, tropological (moral), and anagogical (spiritual).

In his lively book The Theology of Hugh of St. Victor: An Interpretation, the scholar Boyd Taylor Coolman points out that, when writing at the allegorical level, Hugh again and again used the language of architecture.² Of the soul, Hugh wrote that “providence lays a foundation, builds up the edifice, and brings it to completion.” The example of the ark is frequently invoked. To account for this Coolman stresses the influence of societal change on these thinkers, who lived in Paris at a time when, due to marine trade, the city was rapidly urbanizing and Gothic cathedrals were under construction or freshly built.

“In Richard’s approach to literal exegesis,” Kinsella writes, “the present was brought to bear on the past in visual and material ways.” Though the design in In visionem Ezechielis is for an ancient Jewish temple, Kinsella argues, Richard’s elevations are done with the flourishes of the architectural style that prevailed in medieval France: articulated voussoirs, crenelated parapets. A similar trick of outfitting characters from a biblical scene in contemporary dress, or setting a biblical scene in a contemporary room, would in the ensuing centuries become fairly typical in European painting: the French artist Jean Fouquet, to use just one example, bent time in a number of his paintings, notably Building of the Temple of Jerusalem (circa 1470), in which the temple is busily ornamented with the façade of a Gothic church. For Richard, Hugh, and other medievals, this technique was a way to impress upon the laity and students at the abbey the sacred weight—what Kinsella calls the “fleshly reality”—of the created world.

Victorine exegesis was also deliberately mathematical. For Hugh and Victor, it was an essential aspect of divine intention that everything should fit together. It wasn’t a coincidence, for instance, that the basic dimensions at the foundation of built things—height, width, and length—were a trinity. Victorines were keen early humanists, excited to be working with the seven liberal arts, both the trivium (the language arts) and the quadrivium (the mathematical disciplines). Richard’s drawings synthesize them all. Compared with much illustration from the medieval period, particularly its illuminated manuscripts, they now seem more practical, less fantastic, whimisical, and adorned by gold foil, but they apply themselves no less urgently to the project of comprehending the divine.  

In Kinsella’s account, this polymathic approach led Richard to technical advancements in architectural drawing. “At least two sectional elevations,” he argues, are “the first of their kind,” representing the interaction between a structure’s interior and exterior elements in a matter without precedent in the period. This can be attributed to an innovation, Kinsella observes, that might seem minor. It’s not an elevation or a plan but a diagram of a right-angled triangle inside a circle, meant to “demonstrate the relationship between the plans and the three-dimensional structure that the prophet saw and walked on.” The gatehouse of Ezekiel’s vision wasn’t flat: it stood on “seven steps carved into a mountainside.” A top-down, two-dimensional view of the structure wouldn’t be able to take “the slope of the mountain” into account—but by comparing the lengths of the triangle’s base and its hypotenuse, one can determine the structure’s three-dimensional measurements. This “geometrical diagram demonstrates Richard’s careful and proto-scientific approach to the representation of architecture,” Kinsella argues. Nothing else “like it, from an architectural context, exists in medieval Europe.”

Early Christianity was shaped by thinkers who believed they could find a complete, systematically sound structure in the word of God. It follows, then, that they would want to represent those words as technically and precisely as possible. Their representations of divinely conceived structures only partially capture the fullness of the thing itself, but they emerge from something of the same yearning these scholars felt to make sense of the mysteries they believed had been revealed to them. They are in that sense not only beautiful, rare objects but also artifacts of a new society trying to understand its relationship to the eternal—a small group of people in a monastery trying to pull something out of the pages of Scripture and, maybe, make it real.

In Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, set in the fifteenth century, Claude Frollo looks up at the titular French cathedral and declares that “the book will kill the building.” Architecture and writing may seem unlikely competitors, but for centuries it was predominately the place of buildings—the temple, the cathedral—to communicate to the people inside them what they were meant to feel about God. This was spiritually, morally urgent: the illiterate laity came to the liturgy on Sunday equipped theologically with only the space they were in—this cruciform structure fitted with stained glass. Frollo was right; three centuries after Richard the invention of movable type would set into motion the long shift from building to book. Before then, there was Hugh and Richard, and a God who gave incomplete instructions.