Thirty-three parchment leaves of drawings, with notes in the Picard dialect, made by a traveller from northern France in the years when Chartres, Reims and Amiens were rising: towers, rose windows, elevations, plans, machines, figures built on geometry: the only large body of architectural drawing to survive from the High Gothic lodges.
Almost nothing is known of Villard except what his book tells us. He came from Honnecourt-sur-Escaut, near Cambrai, and addresses his reader directly, promising help with masonry, carpentry and the drawing of figures “as the art of geometry commands and teaches”. He had seen Laon, Reims, Chartres, Meaux, Cambrai and Lausanne, and says he travelled as far as Hungary. The leaves, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (MS fr. 19093), were bound together later; some drawings and notes were added by at least one other hand after him.
Whether Villard was himself a master mason is still argued. His drawings of buildings are selective and sometimes inaccurate (the Reims chapels are shown with details that were never built, the Laon tower is reimagined), and some historians see him as a well-travelled craftsman or a cleric with a taste for building rather than an architect. Others point to the technical pages (on cutting stones to templates, levelling, measuring and hoisting) as evidence of lodge training. Either way the book shows what a thirteenth-century observer thought worth recording: the logic of a tower’s setbacks, the pattern of a rose, the plan of a chevet with its ring of chapels.
Two features make the portfolio indispensable here. First, it records buildings in the drawing conventions of the lodges: plans, elevations, and a remarkable pair of interior and exterior elevations of a Reims nave bay that set the triforium and the flying buttresses side by side. Second, it shows the masons’ geometry at work: figures of men and animals set out on triangles and squares, methods for finding the centre of a circle or halving a square by rotating another inside it, and a plan of an ideal chevet worked out, the note says, by Villard and Pierre de Corbie “disputing together”.
The book, part by part
I Towers, roses and elevations
The west tower of Laon, which Villard calls the finest he has seen; the west rose of Chartres and the rose of Lausanne; the interior and exterior elevations of a nave bay and of the radiating chapels of Reims, with their bar tracery and flyers.
Rules: Bar tracery: windows drawn with compasses · The rose: a window turned about its centre
II Plans
The chevet of Cambrai, the east end of Meaux, a square-ended Cistercian church laid out on squares, and the ideal chevet with alternating square and round chapels designed “in dispute” with Pierre de Corbie.
III Geometry of the lodge
Practical constructions: halving a square by the square inscribed on its mid-points (to make a cloister whose court equals its walks), finding the thickness of an arch, cutting voussoirs, measuring an inaccessible width. Figures of people and animals drawn over triangles, squares and circles.
Rules: Halve a square by turning a square within it · Ad quadratum: a section as high as it is wide
IV Machines and carpentry
A water-powered saw, a screw jack for lifting heavy loads, a lectern eagle that turns its head, a perpetual-motion wheel, timber roof trusses and a bridge built of short timbers.