The only architectural drawing to survive from the early Middle Ages: a plan of an ideal Benedictine monastery, some forty buildings drawn in red ink on five sewn sheets of parchment and explained by over three hundred inscriptions, sent to Abbot Gozbert of St Gall (816–837).
The dedication tells Gozbert that this is a copy of the arrangement of monastic buildings, sent for him to study, and the plan is generally thought to have been drawn at the island monastery of Reichenau in the years after the Aachen reforms of 816–817. It survived because a twelfth-century monk turned the sheets over and wrote a life of St Martin on the back.
The plan is a diagram of the Rule. The church lies in the middle, with apses at both ends and two free-standing round towers at the west. South of it is the cloister, ringed by the dormitory, the refectory and the cellar. The abbot’s house, the outer school and the house for distinguished guests are on the north; the novitiate and the infirmary, each with its own small cloister and sharing a double chapel, on the east, with the physician’s house, the herb garden, the cemetery planted as an orchard, and the vegetable garden; the kitchens, bakehouses, brewhouses, workshops, mills, granary and animal houses on the south and west; and a hospice for pilgrims and the poor by the entrance.
An inscription gives the church a length of 200 feet, while the drawing itself, at its own grid, shows something larger; scholars still argue whether the plan was meant to be built as drawn or adapted. The abbey church that Gozbert began in 830 did not follow it closely. Its value lies in showing, in one drawing, how a Carolingian mind turned a monastic rule into a town.
The book, part by part
I The layout
Church in the centre; cloister to the south; guests, school and abbot to the north; novices and sick to the east; service and farm to the south and west.