Plan of Saint Gall

240px|thumb|right|Plan of Saint Gall. Reichenau, early 9th century (ca.820–830). Ms. 1092. Parchment, 1 folio, ca. 112cm x 77.5 cm. Latin.

The Plan of Saint Gall is a medieval architectural drawing of a monastic compound dating from 820–830 AD. It depicts an entire Benedictine monastic compound, including church, houses, stables, kitchens, workshops, brewery, infirmary, and a special building for bloodletting. According to calculations based on the manuscript's tituli the complex was meant to house about 110 monks, 115 lay visitors, and 150 craftmen and agricultural workers.

The Plan was never actually built. It was so named because it is dedicated to Gozbert, abbot of the Abbey of Saint Gall. The planned church was intended to hold the relics of the monastery's founder and namesake, the hermit Saint Gall. The plan was stored in the library of the monastery, the famous Abbey library of Saint Gall, where it remains to this day (indexed as Codex Sangallensis 1092).

It is the only surviving major architectural drawing from the roughly 700-year period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the 13th century. It is considered a national treasure of Switzerland and remains a significant object of interest among modern scholars, architects, artists and draftspeople for its uniqueness, its beauty, and the insights it provides into medieval culture.

Motivations behind the Plan

There are two main theories concerning the motivations behind the drawing of the Plan. The dispute between scholars centres around the assertion put forward by Horn and Born in their 1979 work The Plan of Saint Gall, that the Plan in the Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen was a copy of an original drawing issued by the court of Louis the Pious after the synods held at Aachen in 816 and 817. The purpose of the synods was to establish Benedictine monasteries throughout the Carolingian Empire as a bulwark against renewed activity by the Hiberno-Scottish missions from Britain and Ireland who, although now Benedictine, were bringing some elements of Celtic monasticism to the Continent. Horn and Born argued that the Plan was a "paradigmatic" drawing of how a Benedictine monastery should look if the Benedictine Rule was to be strictly followed; a guide for the construction of future monastic ensembles.

Other scholars, particularly Werner Jacobsen, Norbert Stachura and Lawrence Nees have, on the contrary, argued that the Plan is an original drawing made at Reichenau Abbey for the abbot of Saint Gall, Gozbert, who decided to build a new abbey church in the 820s. This argument is based on Jacobsen's observations of marks left by pairs of compasses in the parchment, as well as alterations and changes undertaken during its drawing. Lawrence Nees has also argued that the fact that the manuscript was drawn and written by two scribes, a younger one and an elder who acted as a supervisor "filling in and completing where the knowledge of the main scribe ended", can only be explained if the drawing is an original.

About 333 inscriptions, forty of them in meter, in the handwritings of two different scribes, describe the functions of the buildings. It has been possible to attribute the handwriting of these scribes to the monastery of Reichenau and one of them has been identified as monk Reginbert.

The scale to which the Plan was drawn has also been a subject of dispute. Horn and Born, for example, argue that a single scale was used while others, such as Reinle and Jacobsen, argue that multiple scales were applied for different elements.

The reverse of the Plan was inscribed in the 12th century, after it had been folded into book form, with the Life of Saint Martin by Sulpicius Severus.

The Dedication

It is widely held that the Plan was dedicated to Gozbertus, the Abbot of St Gall from 816–36.

The text reads [as translated by Horn into English]:

The Latin reads:

Architectural design and structures

alt=Plan of Saint Gall|thumb|Plan of Saint Gall. Simplified view showing different structures.

As mentioned above the Plan represents a Benedictine monastery and it is possible to see the Benedictine Rule being applied in the architectural design. One of the main aspects of the Rule was the ascetic life of the monks who had to dedicate themselves to prayer, meditation and study, and not worry about worldly matters. For this purpose, the Benedictine Rule required a monastery which was self-sufficient, and which provided for the monks all the necessary facilities, food, and water. The Plan thus depicts 40 ground plans which include not only the properly monastic buildings (basilica, cloister, abbot's house and cemetery) but also secular buildings for the use of lay workers and visitors.

Lynda Coon has identified five distinct "spatial-units":

Sacred: basilica, round towers, hostel for visiting monks, abbot's house, cemetery and cloister complex.
Lay: elite guest houses, servant quarters, hospice for pilgrims and the poor.
Educational: novitiate and outer school for the elite.
Medicinal: infirmary, physician's house, bloodletting house, herb garden.
Agricultural and artisanal: workshops, animal pens, houses for agrarian workers and gardens.

She has also identified a status differentiation in the structures which follow the cardinal points. Accordingly, she argues that the northwest is reserved for the secular elite while the southwest is for the secular lower classes. Regarding the sacred spaces, the northeast and southeast is reserved for the monastic elite, and the far east and far south for what she calls "the liminal", that is to say in between lay and monastic.

Alfons Zettler has recently identified another criterion that the authors of the Plan may have followed for the layout of the structures, which does not follow the cardinal points but is determined by a clockwise direction starting and ending at the abbot's house. He argues that the basis of the organisation would have been a division of public/private and lay/monastic which is represented in the Plan by an increasing lay presence in each sector of the monastery when moving around the cloister clockwise from the infirmary.

The monk's cloister

alt=Monk's cloister. Plan of Saint Gall.|thumb|Monk's cloister. Plan of Saint Gall. Buildings surrounding the cloister clockwise from the top: warming room and dormitory, refectory, vestiary and kitchen, cellar and larder (bottom of the picture). The basilica can be seen to the left of the picture.

The monastic cloister occupies the centre of the Plan. It is placed in the southeast aligning itself both with the sacred east and with the poor – the accommodation for pilgrims and the poor is placed in the east just beneath the cloister – far from the worldly commodities and pleasures of the secular elite.

The structure of the cloister is highly symbolic. Firstly, it is a closed space looking inwards to its own centre where a savin tree is placed – – illustrating the ideal of a monk's experience removed from the world. Secondly, it is foursquare and four paths lead from its covered galleries to the centre – – symbolising Jerusalem and its four rivers.

Models

The Plan has inspired a tradition of model making. In 1965 Ernest Born and others created a scale model of the plan for the Age of Charlemagne exhibition in Aachen, Germany. This became the inspiration for the book he co-authored in 1979 with Walter Horn, but was also the first in a tradition of modeling the plan. More recently the plan has been modeled on computers using CAD software. It is possible to see the different models in the Saint Gall Project website.

St. Gall Project

The St. Gall Project was founded to produce a digital online presence for the plan including models and an extensive online database on early medieval monastic culture. The project is directed by Patrick Geary (UCLA) and Bernard Frischer (University of Virginia) with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The website was released to the public in December 2007. Future resources will include intellectual and textual aspects of the plan and monasticism; space for publication of new papers and research, lesson plans and teaching aides, blogs and chat rooms. By 2023, the once-useful site was no longer available.

References

Bibliography

McClendon, C (2005). The origins of Medieval Architecture. London.
"The Plan of St.Gall" www.stgallplan.org. Retrieved 2019-02-24.

External links

Manuscript online via e-codices.
Edward A. Segal (1989). "Monastery and Plan of St. Gall". Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Volume 10. .
Campus Galli – Karolingische Klosterstadt Meßkirch Website of the project, building the plan in full-scale.
Jacobsen, W (1992). Der Klosterplan con St. Gallen und die Karolingische Architektur. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag für Kunstwissenschaft.