Villard de Honnecourt steps forward from thirteenth-century France to appear before us in the twenty-first with an irresistible combination of brio and individuality. The words that he penned or dictated along with the drawings, created between ca. 1220 and 1240, that fill the thirty-three folios of his "book" are the unique compilation of an active brain, an observant eye, and a practiced hand. When he introduces himself with a hearty "Wilars dehonnecourt vos salve," we can almost feel a hand extend in amiable greeting; he mentions (fol. 9v) that he has "been in many lands" and has traveled as far afield as Hungary (fol. 15v). Above all, there are the drawings that record what he saw--the tomb of a Saracen, the tower of Laon Cathedral--and what he admired: "See here one of the windows of Reims...I drew it because I liked it best" (fol. 10v). Variously dubbed a notebook, a shop manual, a sketchbook, or a pattern book, Villard's manuscript continually tugs at the reader's sleeve exhorting him to "see here," "think about this," "use this one." No wonder Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, leafing through these pages in his study late one night, could summon a visit from Villard, imagined as a fellow architect, one old colleague chatting with another. But is this the Villard we meet today?
As his surname suggests, Villard apparently hailed from Honnecourt- sur-Escaut, a village in the diocese of Cambrai in the Picardy region of northern France. Oddly enough, he does not identify his profession, but the salutation (fol. 1v) tantalizingly hints at a connection to the building crafts: "For in this book you are able to find sound advice on the great techniques of masonry and on the devices of carpentry. Likewise, you are able to find the technique of representation as the discipline of geometry requires and instructs." This intimation seems to materialize in the drawings of church plans and elevations, pier sections, window patterns, tracery components, roof structures, furniture, gadgets, and machinery that appear on twenty-nine of the pages, convincing many scholars that he must have been an architect, a master mason, or an engineer. Since Villard's rediscovery in the 1840s and 1850s, a busy career has been fashioned for him on the basis of his words and the visual references of his renderings. Viollet-le-Duc himself wrote that he "possibly directed construction of the choir of the cathedral of Cambrai," while others have added the Cistercian abbey church of Vaucelles, the collegiate church of Saint-Quentin, seven buildings in Hungary, and the choir stalls at Lausanne Cathedral to his working vita . A recent study, noting his fluency in roof structures and attention to such details as lap joints, proposed that Villard was a carpenter. [1] The current Wikipedia entry is accompanied by a self-portrait (?) of Villard the soldier, outfitted in chain mail, an iron helmet, shield, and sword. [2]
During the past thirty years, Carl F. Barnes, Jr. has painstakingly re-examined the parchment pages of ms franais 19093 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris in order to take apart then rebuild Villard, as far as possible, on the direct evidence left by his hand and contained in his words. The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt presents a less protean, more enigmatic figure of indeterminate profession, yet a man whose graphic gestures are revealed stroke by stroke as he drew now freehand, now with ruler and compass, a light graphite sketch followed by layers of light then darker ink, with occasional highlighting and infilling. This methodical rendering technique led Barnes to argue in a 1981 study that Villard was trained not as an architect but as a metal worker. [3] Although cogently reasoned, this claim, like those connecting him to other métiers, collided with the range and subjects of the portfolio drawings. If Villard was a metal worker, why did he include the elevation of Reims Cathedral or the plan of Cambrai? If a carpenter, why draw apostles, bishops, and wrestlers? If a mason why cats, crayfish, and a hand warmer?
Turning to comparanda does not answer these riddles. Villard's leaves do not offer the detailed instructions for working in glass, metal, paint, stone, or wood, found in De Diversis Artibus , penned by the German monk Theophilus in the early twelfth century, or Cennino Cennini's Il Libro dell'Arte , written at the end of the fourteenth century, neither of which was illustrated. On the other hand, the surviving fragments of pattern books, used by artists and their workshops, rarely contain the range of subjects found in the portfolio, although an early thirteenth-century manuscript from the Cistercian Abbey of Rein in Austria (Vienna, sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 507) includes scenes of daily activities, animal illustrations, capital letters, bird and leaf ornaments, and abstract strapwork patterns organized by subject and apparently connected to historical texts that follow. [4] Barnes reconstructs the birth of the portfolio, recognizing in the clues of folding, sewing, cutting, and gluing (5-6) Villard's belated efforts to recast what began as a fistful of separate sheets, aptly described as a personal aide-mémoire, into "a bound book of instructional value." [5] For a half-century after the book left Villard's hands, three more men added a few inscriptions, erased and redrew most of the "figures de l'art de iometrie" on both sides of folio 20. However, they did not expand the visual contents of the portfolio.
No medieval documents reveal that thirteenth-century craftsmen traveled from site to site toting leather portfolios stuffed with designs for churches and siege engines, liturgical furniture, Biblical figures, lion-training tips, and medicinal recipes. In the end, Barnes admits (224, 229-230) that Villard remains "wrapped in uncertainty," although he cannot quite resist the temptation to suggest gingerly that he may have been a lay representative or agent of the chapter at Cambrai where his graphic talents and interests in architecture, carpentry, machinery, and sculpture were put to use for the cathedral building project. Whatever Villard's vocation, one of the admirable accomplishments of this book, its color reproductions, and Barnes's meticulous descriptions of the portfolio's pages, re-focuses appreciative attention on his "extraordinary skill" as a draftsman, seen, for example in the figure of Humility on folio 3v, the seated Christ of 16v, or the sleeping apostle on 23v. Time and again, Villard dresses his figures in garments that fall in luscious patterns of Muldenfaltenstil , the soft tubular and shallow hairpin folds in vogue throughout northern French ateliers and in contemporary fashion. He tackled difficult poses, aware of the body as a three-dimensional form. As Barnes points out (105), Villard's figures appear to sit on their benches rather than to hover in front of them; Pride (3v) pitches headlong from his horse, limbs flailing; apostles with only the tops of their heads visible (17r, 23v) are seen curled in sleep or wrapped tightly in their cloaks; gamblers twist and turn in the heat of the game (9r); soldiers hoist themselves aboard their mounts (23v); acrobats somersault (1v). Scanning these pages, one is also struck by his subjects' expressive energy. Rarely passive, they fight, play, or work in groups and engage one another (and the viewer) through gesture, an exchange of gazes as in the seated couple (14r), or words whispered into an ear (13r). While tracking the sources of the imagery to Chartres and elsewhere usefully establishes the geographical parameters of his movements, it is Villard's interest in the potential of representation to capture the physical and emotional vitality of life that invests his drawings with their magnetic character.
Villard also wielded a different mode of drawing as in the wheel of fortune on folio 21v, inhabited by seated, stumbling, tumbling figures composed of triangular limbs, torsos and heads sporting rectangular caps. The two techniques are juxtaposed on folio 18r--detailed and naturalistic in the bearded male head, schematic and geometric in the remaining sketches of humans and animals--with the inscription added by Hand III, "Here begins the material of representation." They are combined in the buildings, figures, faces, birds, sheep, and lions on 18v-19r, captioned by Villard as "the techniques of representation as the discipline of geometry instructs them, for working easily." Rather than revealing arcane secrets of Gothic composition, the "discipline of geometry" seems to present a simple strategy for organizing and developing complex forms akin to the jointed wooden manikins that artists still use to study poses. It is not a prescriptive formulae: a five-pointed star does not have to be an eagle; it can also be employed to structure a human face; the same triangle can serve as the starting point for the head of a horse or the head of a man. The famous lion of folio 24v lays bare the strata of the process as the body and head are developed out of four circles struck from centers that define an isosceles triangle whose base is half its height. This geometric matrix then disappears as legs, mane, ears, and that infectious smile are added to create a beast "contrefais al vif," which Barnes convincingly translates (168-169) as "drawn in a lifelike manner."
A similar range of graphic techniques as well as the sense of personal reception invests Villard's architectural sketches. On folio 14v, the plan of a "church of squares" for the Order of Cteaux is laid out as a minimalist grid of lines while immediately to its right, the precisely executed chevet of Cambrai Cathedral, made with a compass and straightedge, has all of the earmarks of a working blueprint. Drawings etched onto the walls and pavements of buildings and surviving at Reims, Soissons, or Clermont-Ferrand likewise show that thirteenth-century masons used quick diagrammatic sketches to plot out the basic features of a design along with full-scale detailed plans that could guide the production of templates and the carving of building stones. On the facing page of folio 15r, the choir plan that "Villard de Honnecourt and Pierre de Corbie devised through discussion," which Erwin Panofsky in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism read as evidence of the age's shared dialectical habit of mind, combines elements of the square plan, Cambrai, Saint- Etienne, the cathedral of Meaux figured below, and the abbey of Vaucelles depicted on folio 17r. The eccentric result has been universally panned by architectural historians, but reminds us that design is a process of experimental possibilities and options. It is worth remembering that the sophisticated Strasbourg lodge collected the very different plans of Orléans and Paris as they perhaps considered a new cathedral choir and in the late fourteenth century, the chapter at Troyes sent its master mason, Bleuet, on a trip to study Reims, Amiens, and Paris in preparation for the design of the western block. And as William Clark persuasively argues, the suite of drawings of Reims Cathedral merges selective interpretation that reflects Villard's particular interests in the cathedral's innovative constructional techniques and its linearity, alterations that he added to improve the design, and even his perceptual experience of the building. [6] His insights echo Roland Barthes' remarks that the drawing (as opposed to the photograph) must be seen as a code, obeying rule-governed transpositions and necessitating divisions between the significant and the insignificant, that does not merely denote objects but also connotes a message. [7] If, as Clark advises, Villard is accorded a measure of artistic license and his drawings are freed from their shackles as transparent records of objects, we then liberate new avenues of inquiry into the portfolio.
So intent have we been to decipher the portfolio as a biographical document or a purposeful mirror of reality that we have largely overlooked its value as a work of artistic imagination, one that opens a unique window into the wider landscape of later medieval visual culture. For example, a cursory glance at folio 7v might suggest that Villard simply filled the page with a random assortment of bugs, animals, and a labyrinth. Perhaps so. Yet the longer one looks, the more one suspects that a conceptual or visual logic informs the selection and arrangement of subjects: the grasshopper and cat at the top of the page crouch in profile; the crayfish, fly, and dragonfly, seen from above and pinned to the parchment like laboratory specimens, hint at a common biological connection; the circular form of the lithe cat that turns to lick its behind repeats in the labyrinth. What does this curious collection say about the way in which the worlds of nature and human creation were seen, organized, and understood by a thirteenth-century observer? By emphatically retiring Villard de Honnecourt as a professional builder and through a disciplined pruning of the thickets of speculation to insist that, at present, Villard is unknowable, Carl Barnes leaves no alternative but to follow his lead and turn afresh to the portfolio itself. Ironically, by reconnecting with the portfolio, we may yet establish a deeper bond with Villard and his world that has survived to become part of our own. As W.G. Sebald wrote so movingly, "What matters is...the autonomous existence of things to which, like blindly furious working animals, we stand in a subordinate and dependent relationship. Because (in principle) things outlast us, they know more about us than we know about them; they carry the experiences they have had with us inside them and are-- in fact--the book of our history opened before us." [8]
Notes:
1. George Brooks, "Villard de Honnecourt: Gothic Carpenter," AVISTA Forum Journal , 18 (2008), 8-23.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villard_de_Honnecourt (accessed February 27, 2010). In identifying the foot soldier who appears on folio 2 recto as Villard, the author evidently takes at face value the inscription "de honnecour (sic) cil qui fut en hongrie" (De Honnecourt, he who was in Hungary) that was likely added in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
3. Carl F. Barnes, Jr., "The Drapery-Rendering Technique of Villard de Honnecourt," Gesta , 20 (1981), 199-206.
4. Robert W. Scheller, Exemplum: Model Book Drawings and the Practice of Artistic Transmission in the Middle Ages (ca. 900-ca. 1470) (Amsterdam, 1995), 149-154.
5. Roland Bechmann, Villard de Honnecourt, La pensée technique au XIIIe siècle et sa communication (Paris, 1991); Melanie Holcomb, "Strokes of Genius: The Draftsman's Art in the Middle Ages," Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages , (New York, 2009), 28.
6. William W. Clark, "Reims Cathedral in the Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt," Villard's Legacy: Studies in Medieval Technology, Science and Art in Memory of Jean Gimpel , ed. Marie-Thérèse Zenner (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT, 2004), 23-51.
7. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image," Image, Music, Text , trans. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), 43.
8. W.G. Sebald, Unrecounted , trans. Michael Hamburger (New York, 2004), 86.