When I was asked to think about these sort of this sort of project,
it got me thinking, how do you how do you represent a building on a piece of paper?
How do you if you wanted to give somebody an idea of what it's like to stand in a building such as this.
How would you go about doing that? And as were many of us are well aware, you know, will use plans.
This sort of view from the top and elevations to something like here on the side.
So we have some idea of what these buildings looked like.
But architectural drawing, this development of plans and elevations are technology like a lot of other things.
There was a time before they existed and a time when they were developing,
a time when some great bright spark had the great idea of, I know, I know how to do this.
I'll create is plan whatever he's called it or an elevation.
And I'm interested in the development of that. How do you go how do you think about that?
How does that come into fruition?
So today I'm going to talk a little bit about the author of these images.
These are from the 12th century, a guy called Richard of San Victor.
But before we go on to Richard's drawings, and I promise you that I've I've worked on them for about ten years now.
I'm still interested in them. So they are well worth this. Well, you can see afterwards, I hope you hopefully you'll agree with me.
But what if Richard was writing his work or doing his drawings in the 12th century?
What sort of drawings existed before that? And, well, the short answer is not very many.
As you know, the tough part of being a medievalist is quite frequently we have so few documents from which to work, but we do get hints.
We have there's a image of a plan and a Babylonian sculpture.
We get pretty detailed descriptions of plans and elevations and drawings and perspective from the first century B.C. and Vitruvius date architectural.
But in the Middle Ages, like a lot of things, this sort of technology, these ideas started to break down.
And just to give you some idea of what these sort of drawings Richard would may have known or something like this.
Now, if you can't make them out, you're not alone.
I spent very many hours looking at drawings like this, trying to figure out what the [INAUDIBLE] is going on.
And I'm not always successful. This is a mosaic in the in France, and it depicts the Holy Sepulchre Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
It's from the fourth century, so it was done not long after the sepulchre was actually built.
If you can figure out that the sepulchre is actually around building a rotunda and that's this bit here and I think.
Nobody's disagreed with me yet. But feel free to. That this is the church that would have been in front of this rotunda, this round building.
But you have to work very hard to figure that out. I think that's a fair comment.
If this is a return to this, this is a round building.
Why are there no openings between the walls?
This makes no sense whatsoever. He this is another type of architectural drawing is another plan.
This shows the celestial Jerusalem, the great temple, the complex that will arrive after the coming of Christ and described in the Book of Revelation.
It is it shows the walls of the celestial Jerusalem.
And these are the 12 gates through which you walk.
This is a bit clearer than this one. But let's face it, there's not that much detail in it.
There's more. The artist here is more interested in the declaration of the walls.
It has to look good instead of actually imparting all that much information.
And Richard comes along. Now, Richard was a Scottish author born at the beginning of the 12th century,
and he worked in Paris in the place called Sam Victor, and he decided to write a commentary on the book of Ezekiel.
Now, I'm not sure if you read the book of Ezekiel, but the last part of it is this highly detailed architectural vision.
The prophet Ezekiel is shown around this temple complex by a man with a brazen complexion.
And this man holds a measuring rod, and he measures all the different parts of this temple complex the buildings,
the courtyards, the pavements, the distance between the buildings, you name it.
Now, the problem is, if you read it, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
It's next to impossible to follow. So much so that earlier than than Richard, one author said, well,
we know it makes no sense that we can't read this literally because at one point the door
is just a door of a building is described as larger than the wall to which it's attached.
Well, there's something seriously wrong there. But Richard's being a good Victorian scholar that he is insisted that there had to be a
literal meaning for every part of the Bible and especially the things that you can measure.
So he created this commentary, and in this commentary he includes 14 architectural drawings, plans and elevations.
And this is shows the entire complex. This these are the gate houses.
This is the inner atrium here. So this is right at the centre. These are the gate houses.
This is the temple itself. And these are the buildings that surround the temple.
So he gives the reader a pretty good idea of how these buildings relate to each other.
This is this is not unique in the Middle Ages, but it is incredibly uncommon.
And this is probably one of the clearest examples. Here is my pathetic attempt to try and recreate the centre atrium.
So this part here. These are the gate houses that appear here, here and here.
And this is the temple here. But the sheer fact that you can do this, you can create a three dimensional image,
something that we are much more accustomed to by using Richard's text.
And his image is a huge development in the genre.
He's not finished. He the vast majority of these 14 architectural plans and elevations are of these gate houses.
It's not altogether clear why he includes so many drawings of the gate houses.
They're not the most important building in the entire complex, but they are do repeat.
So when you want to go through each of the courtyards, you had to go through a gatehouse like this.
So what Richard does, he wants to give you the clearest idea possible of what these buildings look like.
So he starts with this. He just gives you an overall general impression of what it would have looked like.
So it's a rectangular building with a great big hole running through the middle of it.
So you read that, you look at it and you have some ideas, okay, I know what I'm dealing with here.
Then he gives you even more information. This shows you one side here.
He wants to give you the entire interior composition of the walls and how they're laid out.
This is where the priests would have made sacrifices along here.
And this particular manuscript, he gives you the measurements for all the different parts as well.
That's, again, incredibly rare and almost unique.
This tells us that the threshold here is six cubits.
So that's a Cuban cubit is about a forearms and length, and the whole width of it is eight cubits.
He's not finished. He wants to give you even more information.
And so he provides this a great big plan of the entire gatehouse with all of these different measurements included again.
So. I suppose the most one of the most important developments here is the fact that he gives multiple drawings of the same building.
That doesn't happen that that definitely doesn't happen before this.
We don't have, I think, any extant examples. So we have a good idea of what's happening and it's relatively easy to follow.
I hope I hope I hope you think as well. But he's not finished.
He gives you elevations for this same gatehouse.
And for the first time we see as the Prophet Ezekiel describes, the gatehouse is on the side of a mountain.
And we can see that he's able to include these steps to in order to incorporate this side of the mountain.
And these drawings are incredible in this particular manuscript.
In the Bodleian you open, it's all on one opening.
And so you get in one entire glance exactly what this building would have looked like.
You can print out these. I've tried it. You can print out copies of these things,
put them on woods or some sort of block that's similar size and just sort of print them and put them on the side.
And it's extraordinary. Even today, you get such a clear idea of Richard Richard's vision for this.
I suppose I just want to go over one of the sort of important, more important developments that Richard gives for these drawings in his text.
He's how he describes the gatehouse is that he describes all the interior of it.
He doesn't describe the exterior all that much.
He's more interested in what the different floors do and what sizes they are and how the roofs that relate to the pavements and things like that.
So in order for the reader to get as much as possible out of these drawings, he has to include information about the interior.
And he struggles a little bit with this because if we think of this as a technology,
this is the sort of rubbish a Nokia phone from the late nineties that they're trying to figure out how it works,
what it can be used for and what's happening. Because in order to show the interior, he just includes a little bit of text.
So that's a this this is that bit here, a little bit of text.
And that text shows you how far the interior wall goes in its it's clear if you know to read it if you look closely.
But at one glance it's not all that clear what the interior looks like.
Just from the text alone, you have to look very, very carefully.
But he figures that out in the next drawing, we have something a little bit better,
a little bit of development in this technology that we can think of as architectural drawing.
As we look down here. We have the arches showing through and the text tells us that that's these parts here, these individual long rooms.
So that tells us that we can see the interior of this building.
So this is, in fact, a what we call a sectional elevation.
It's as if Richard has sliced off the front of the building just enough so that we can see inside it.
And this absolutely does not happen before this.
It's a true an incredible innovation for the development of architectural drawing,
but also the way in which we can show as much information as possible.
If the question at the beginning is, how do we represent a three dimensional structure, a monumental three dimensional structure, like a building?
And to give the reader, the viewer, as much information as possible, well, we can do something like this.
We can just chop off in our imagination or here on the page itself at the front of the building,
and to allow them to see inside, to see that interior.
And so we can relate this drawing to this drawing.
Richard forces the reader to look at his drawings and to think very carefully about what's going on in them.
And being a medievalist, one of the most frustrating things in the world,
because they're always concerned about very different things than we're concerned about, Richard says.
Doesn't say a lot of things I would love him to say.
But one of the things he does say is why he includes these drawings and he says that I include these drawings.
So that and I quote everybody, no matter how simple they might be, I can understand his particular recreation of Ezekiel's temple.
So if we think about that, what Richard is in fact doing is he's using these as as teaching tools so that people who Latin may not be fantastic.
Maybe some of your Latin is very good. Mine is middling sometimes.
But even 800 years after Richard has created these drawings, his sheer innovation,
sheer fact of him thinking very deeply about how you represent a three dimensional object still works.
We're still able to grasp and still able to understand his particular vision and his particular interpretation of Ezekiel's drawing.
And I think that's incredible.
And I think that's a particular, Leigh, important development in this way of thinking 3D to to copy the that that the creators of this exhibition.