In his book, Medieval Architectural Drawing, in the first chapter titled Stone-carvers: Identities and Drawings, Arnold Pacey ponders the possibilities of the impacts drawings might have had on the stone carvings in the cathedrals, and uses these ideas to interpret that various works comparatively. The extract included here shows an interesting analysis of the subject. The position is different in that it uses lived experience to assess the changes in the appearance of things, identifying how one might think, feel, see and act can change outcomes. The text acknowledges the presence of flesh and blood in the production of things rather than merely rely on ordinary abstract notions of intellectualism and academia: like Pevsner’s point on sketchbooks, as if these were simply so. Without ever knowing, he poetically and somewhat fancifully establishes the notion of stone-carvers: ‘returning with their sketchbooks full of . . . careful drawings of realistic French capitals, which they reproduced when they came back’ (p.17) - as if this was necessarily so (as Wittgenstein said of the often repeated scientific predictive boast of the new discovery in five or ten years’ time). The Pacey text describes how a hand drawing can inform the eye and vice versa; and how the process is selective. It is an important piece that needs thoughtful reverie.
The relevance for architects needs to be noted. Our era has
discarded drawing in favour of the pushing of buttons and the touching of
surfaces rather than involving a hand delineating what the eye sees and what
the body feels, with the use of some substance that can leave a mark on a
surface as guided by the body. What are we missing by this change? Did the
substance and surface, and the body, have an impact on outcomes? Does this
change start to explain why our architecture has become cold and intellectual,
rational in its limited approach to references and outcomes, even when extreme
and quirky? I am thinking of O. Gehry’s inspirational crumpled paper. Are we
burdened with the limitations of a copying-like process that extracts more and
more from the origins to become schematic versions of a schematic version of
some vague original concept? Pacey’s perceptions that use Givens’ inspired
subtle observations need to be reviewed in the context of how the architect
works today. Is drawing an essential part of the process - visual thinking?
What are the implications of this change? How can feeling best be incorporated
in this process and product?
Does Pacey’s analysis explain why copies of other
architect’s works, or buildings inspired by another’s idea, say, for an easy
example, the ‘Masters,’ Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe,
are always so poor, weak, a shell or fragment of the original source - hollow?
Does the copy problem - entropy - explain the demise of the International style
that became more and more copies of copies - shallow, thin, without any feeling
for person or place? Is this the problem that we have returned to today? The
text needs consideration and review. We must become aware of what our
technologies are doing to us, indeed, have done to us, if we are to produce
work that embodies substance and quality, depth and life, or else we are just
walking, working, in the dark.
Pacey has shown us something else too: our feeling and our
response to things can be used to gauge outcomes of other eras; can help us
understand other times and processes because we are no different to these folk.
Our manipulations, the sense and feeling for and of chalk, stone and chisel
give the same response to the question, ‘what must I do?’ as others experienced
some hundreds of years ago. While we like to gloss over things with our world
view that sees our time as the most progressive, the best ever, the cleverest
ever, the smartest ever - that sees ourselves as uniquely different - we fail
to ever contemplate that in their unique context, other times may have been
richer and more complicated and advanced than ours - without any qualifications
or ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. We may be less; worse off. Just look at the work of the
mediaeval carvers and masons and ask the question: could we do this today? Look
at Chartres. Does our work hold such depth, relevance and substance? It is not
a matter of reconstructing or reproducing these things of other eras. It is not
about copying these things. It has to do with finer, more delicate issues of
art: feeling and form. Our arrogance, like that expressed most blatantly by our
politicians, seems to know no bounds or shame. It knows no limits: we are the
greatest ever: I am. We stride out blindly as we trample on others and on other
times with our total, bold, digital disregard: with the finger in the air.
We really have much to learn, the most basic aspect of which
is humility, honesty and a trust in our feelings, for we can use these to sense
those of others, to be aware of their being, both in the present and past: to
be responsible - able to respond. It will surely improve our architecture, and
our wellbeing too.
Arnold Pacey, Medieval Architectural Drawing, Tempus
Publishing, Gloucestershire, 2007.
p.17-18
It is certainly possible that English craftsmen had
travelled and had sketched carvings at Reims (and perhaps at the Sainte
Chapelle in Paris). However, Jean Givens makes the important point that no
matter how much carvers copied work by colleagues, there is a considerable
difference between a carver copying a sculpture and copying a living plant.
Looking at a living plant, a sculptor starts with an immense amount of visual information
from which to select details for making an image in stone. The leaves of the
plant will be traversed by more veins than can be shown in stone, while the
different textures of the top and underside of a leaf may have to be merely
implied. Copying a sculpted plant, though, the carver is presented with
pre-selected information. Somebody else has already made decisions about what
can be represented in stone and what has to be ignored.
Thus, Givens concludes, the results of different craftsmen
studying nature will be much more varied than if they were studying other
craftsmen’s carvings. If carvers always copy other carvings (or drawings of
carvings) there is a loss of accuracy and detail each time. Yet, as Givens
observes, the Southwell carvings are often more accurate than those at Reims,
and are ‘more descriptive’. This ‘suggest the observation of life rather than
exclusively the copying of images.’ Plant species can more often be identified
in the carvings at Southwell than at Reims or Westminster.
This conclusion can seem to imply that the Southwell carvers
worked directly from plant specimens. However, ‘observation of life’ by artists
is not a matter of one-off inspection. Repeated attempts are usually made to
draw or model the object of interest, and in each attempt the detail of the
object will be better understood and different decisions will be made about
what to illustrate and what to ignore. Therefore, in addition to drawings made
at other buildings where similar carving was done, the Southwell carvings
definitely show evidence of drawing or carving from life.
Examples of masons’ drawings that survive on the continent
are often drawn using a stylus or leadpoint, to be inked in later, and may be
on poor quality parchment, much reused. But because parchment was expensive, it
is possible that a stone-carver would go through the preliminary sketching
phase using other media, perhaps working in chalk on a board or slate. Thus
although drawings on parchment were certainly used at this time, there is a
likelihood that other media also were used for rough sketches.
NOTE: 29 October 2014
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