Second Life: Villard de Honnecourt in the 1850s and 60s

Nicholas Roquet

This paper will examine the fascination which the portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt exerted on three nineteenth-century architects: Jean-Baptiste Lassus, Viollet-le-Duc, and William Burges. The approach I have taken to their successive readings of Villard has been to view them as overlapping representations, erected one upon the other, and whose combined significance was continually shifting.

Though Villard, as Carl Barnes pointed out in 1989, is frequently referred to as a medieval architect, there is in fact little evidence that he was a master mason, or indeed a master of any craft connected with medieval buildings: though Villard identified himself by name and commended his drawings to posterity, nowhere did he state his trade, the reason for his travels, or the works with which he was connected.[1]

In my view, the enigmatic nature of Villard’s portfolio constitutes the key to its enthusiastic reception in the mid nineteenth century, because it allowed Villard to function as something of a blank screen. Successive interpretations of medieval practice were projected onto the portfolio’s professed author; in turn, these imaginary Villards were projected back, as possible models, onto the practice of the nineteenth-century architect. To examine the reception of Villard’s portfolio between 1857 and 1867 is to examine the interplay between archaeology, imagination and practice in the project of a Gothic revival, at a time when its very legitimacy was being challenged from new quarters.

If there is one consistent image running through the writings on Villard at mid century, it is that of a new style coming into being. This image was crafted by Jules Quicherat, a historian and archaeologist at the École des Chartes in Paris, who in 1849 contributed the first extended assessment of Villard’s portfolio, in the Revue archéologique.[2] Quicherat dated the portfolio to between 1243 and 1251, placing its author at the time of Gothic’s genesis in Northern France (V72: Q1).[3] His reading of Villard was shaped by an evolutionary conception of architecture, according to which each historical style contained within it both the memory of its predecessors and the seeds of future change. Architectural styles, Quicherat argued, were the product of an organizing principle, which shaped from within the fundamental disposition of buildings. In this, they were similar to languages, and they should be differentiated by their intrinsic grammatical rules, rather than by the vocabulary they had inherited or imported from earlier idioms.[4] The coming into being of a new style, however, was a chaotic process: driven by a new cultural temper, and compelled to operate outside established canons, artists were liable to make false starts, to commit excesses, or to awkwardly repeat older formulas.[5]

Lassus’s project of a printed facsimile of Villard’s portfolio was published posthumously in 1858. It drew heavily on Quicherat’s ideas, but it was also filled with a new sense of grievance and anxiety. By the early 1850s, as Barry Bergdoll has argued, the project of a Gothic revival in France was coming under threat from a younger generation of architects, who saw stylistic eclecticism as a means to express their sense of historical change, progress, and modernity.[6] In response, Lassus preceded his commentaries on Villard’s drawings by a polemical essay entitled “Considérations sur la renaissance de l’art français au XIXe siècle,”[7] which described the state of architecture in modern France as one of anarchy: though the teaching of the École des Beaux-Arts had been shaken by the generation of 1830, he wrote, no new foundation for architecture had emerged from the ensuing chaos. Instead, architecture in France had become a tower of Babel, fought over by three distinct camps: those of “pagan” rationalism, eclecticism, and the traditional Gothic school.[8] This period of anarchy was more obscure, and more dangerous, than any previous revolution in art, because the chain of cultural transmission had been broken at the time of the Renaissance. “Style,” as Lassus understood it, was a gift which one generation passed onto the next—a body of gestures and forms which might undergo gradual transformation, but which at a deeper level retained its intrinsic identity.[9]

Lassus’s most eloquent formulation of this idea was his commentary to folio X of Villard’s portfolio, a drawing of a Roman mausoleum. Villard, he claimed, had seen the classical monument entirely through the lens of an inward “sentiment gothique,” giving the central figure the pose of a sceptred and crowned king, clothing him in Byzantine drapery, and transforming the classical urns into Christian cruets and ciboria.[10] In contrast to modern eclecticism, such imitation was truthful because it was transformative: just as the French language had assimilated earlier linguistic strata, the possession of a single, inherited language of form allowed Villard to transform the remains of the classical past into something new.

Since a new style could not be invented, the only way out of the crisis of eclecticism was to retrieve earlier, national traditions. It was in this sense that Lassus understood Villard’s portfolio as a book of instruction: in studying it, a young architect might learn to build from first principles, in the same way as an apprentice in a medieval guild. I think Lassus conceived of this process as akin to relearning a forgotten mother-tongue: the anxieties of an uncertain present and its conflicting languages would be resolved in a restored chain of generations.

Lassus’s interpretation of Villard’s portfolio was contested at the time of its publication, even by sympathetic observers. Prosper Mérimée dismissed the facsimile’s polemical contents as belonging to an outworn debate: the production of architecture in France had ceased to be ruled by any “exclusive taste,” and so there was no longer any need for an impassioned defence of Gothic architecture.[11] Viollet-le-Duc submitted Lassus’s facsimile to a more radical criticism: in a review published in 1859, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, he argued that the portfolio was a mere sketchbook, “of the kind we [architects] leave lying on our desks…,” and in which the trivial jostled with the sacred and the symbolic.[12] The understanding of Gothic architecture, he claimed, would have been better served by an illustrated volume on the cathedrals of Paris or Rheims.

Though the portfolio’s contents proved, in Viollet-le-Duc’s words, a disappointment,[13] the figure of a forgotten, then rediscovered, medieval architect took hold of his imagination. The real interest of the portfolio lay precisely in the fact that it was not a treatise: “it reveals,” he wrote, “the intimate life, the daily labours of those lay architects who founded the great school of the thirteenth century. And though nowadays artists must labour for the living, they must also live with the dead. For only those can teach.”[14]

The fictionalized “apparitions” of an elderly Villard in Viollet-le-Duc’s writings—materializing in his study late in the evening, to discuss the current state of architecture—were more than a rhetorical device. Villard personified a living tradition of building, which survived in the restorations of medieval monuments carried out under the aegis of the Commission des monuments historiques. For all the deficiencies of Villard’s drawings, Viollet-le-Duc claimed, the curiosity and practical spirit they expressed were those of a layman, a realist, and a freethinker, a man steadfastly independent of stylistic allegiances and of his aristocratic or ecclesiastical patrons.[15] What the past could teach the present was not a repertoire of forms, but an intellectual attitude to practice: one of patient experimentation, improvement and innovation. It was only out of such constant searching that the new would be born.

For Viollet-le-Duc, the retrieval of medieval tradition implied a break with existing professional structures. The architect had to labour as an independent artist, free of the “caprice” of wealthy dilettantes, because only then could architecture once again become a rational and progressive enterprise. Moreover, in order to regain control over his means of expression, the architect had to sacrifice some of his autonomy vis-à-vis painters and sculptors, as well as his elevated status vis-à-vis the craftsman. To be an architect was to be an “ordonnateur général”[16]—a coordinator of the works—but it was also to meld into a society of equals who gathered on the building site.[17]

It is for this reason that Viollet-le-Duc portrayed Villard as one among many “good and modest masters”,[18] the friend of “Pierre de Corbie, Robert de Luzarches, Pierre de Montereau … and so many others”:[19] this was a man without individuality, practising a popular and collaborative art, and completely immersed in the needs and aspirations of his place, his time, and his race.[20]

Like Viollet-le-Duc, William Burges published several reviews and essays discussing Villard in the immediate aftermath of Lassus’s facsimile,[21] but my analysis will bear on another, later artefact: the so-called “vellum sketchbook,” which Burges crafted over a period of eight years, between 1860 and 1867.[22] The sketchbook represents something of a closure to the story of Villard’s reception at mid-century, because it was the first instance in which the fictional nature of the interpretative act was made explicit. The Vellum Sketchbook was not a historical study of Villard or of thirteenth-century architecture, but a graphic exercise “in the manner of” Villard—an instance of one architect staging himself as another, and proposing his own designs as the product of another age.

When Burges set to work on the Vellum Sketchbook, his library already contained several hundred loose-leaf studies of medieval work, which he had trimmed and pasted into large, bound albums. In contrast, the Vellum Sketchbook was conceived from the outset as a book. It consists of 33 folios of thick vellum, sewn into a green, weatherproof leather pouch. The drawings themselves cover a wide range of subjects (animal and human figures; plants and flowers; costumes and scenes; buildings, furnishings, and public monuments), which are often juxtaposed within the same page;[23] and even the purely architectural drawings frequently mix views with schematic plans or sections and details of ornament. None of the drawings are dated; nearly all are monochromatic; and many are accompanied by hand-written annotations, in a fine lower-case script that is reminiscent of Villard’s. Though seemingly haphazard, the arrangement of the drawings follows in fact the logic of an itinerary: that of Burges’s lengthy trips to Continental Europe in the early 1860s.[24] These material details suggest that Burges self-consciously set out to imitate the outward form of Villard’s portfolio. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that his travels during these years were conceived in a spirit of imitating Villard’s peregrinations, and that their primary aim was the production of a completed album.

Because of its careful execution, I suspect the sketchbook was intended for public circulation among a limited audience of patrons, fellow architects, and possibly painters and craftsmen whom Burges employed or frequented at the time. As such, it may have served a variety of purposes: that of a professional advertisement, or that of a manifesto asserting Burges’s vision of the architectural discipline—a fusion of the fine and decorative arts, from which precisely those elements were excluded that Quicherat and Lassus had found so compelling in the original portfolio: stereometry, mechanical devices, and geometry applied to figures. But I will focus here on what I believe was a more speculative purpose: that of articulating a consistent and authentic mode of expression in a context of cosmopolitanism.

In England, by 1860, the idea of “development”as a unifying metaphor for Victorian religion, science and art[25] was on the wane. The notion that the natural sciences constituted a progressive revelation of God’s creation was undermined by the discovery of biological and geological processes on an unthinkably long timescale.[26] In parallel, the hope that the modern synthesis and development of historical styles might bring about a new style, specific to the age, had ended in what Charles Eastlake called a “morbid love of change, the restless striving after effect and originality of treatment.”[27] For Burges, cosmopolitanism had become a problem: though he would no doubt have agreed with Lassus that the Gothic of thirteenth-century northern France constituted a kind of language, it was one with which he himself had no organic connection. Moreover, it was impossible to cut oneself off from the store of historical knowledge which had accrued over the previous century:[28] all historical styles had been made available for use, and the question of which style to employ could only be answered arbitrarily.

In Burges’s eyes, Villard represented nothing as intimate and determining as a master or ancestor. He had, however, an individual manner: a way of drawing that reduced the architectural body to essential outlines and elemental structures, and an ornamental libido that drew on nature, religious symbols, and classical learning. This manner provided the modern architect with a vehicle through which he might “de-nationalize” himself, and project himself into the historical circumstances of another, more authentic self. This act of borrowing a language from another architect was understood, I believe, as having creative potential: just as Villard had transformed the remains of antiquity through the mediation of drawing, so Burges hoped to assimilate the phenomena of the modern world by means of a double mediation: that of drawing, and that of seeing through the eyes of another.

The paradoxical results of this process can be seen in the Vellum Sketchbook. In addition to drawings of real medieval works, Burges inserted several of his own designs into the sketchbook, presenting them as curious antiquities or works of art that had been “found,” rather than made, by its author.[29] The implied temporality was a flattened space, in which the products of the past and the present were all equally unreal: the truthfulness of the former called into question by the outrageous legends related in their accompanying annotations; that of the latter by simultaneous and contradictory representations of the selfsame work. Thus, Burges’s design of a crosier for the archbishop of Dunedin appeared in the Vellum Sketchbook as a curiosity from the “isles where they eat one another,” in the French art magazine L’art pour tous as a recently-discovered thirteenth-century artwork, and in Burges’s own albums of designs as the photograph of a modern manufactured object. The works Burges imagined in the skin of Villard were only true at a remove: they required that their user imagine himself as another, and so they could only be understood as fictions.

In November 1858, one week after the publication of Burges’s first essay on Villard in the pages of The Builder, his confrere Robert Kerr responded with a prescient satire of anachronism as a heroic posture.[30] Kerr commended to the readers’ attention the manifesto of a young architect who, inspired by Villard’s sketches, had adopted the biblical prosody of Thomas Carlyle, rechristened himself “John de Camden Town, Master of ye Works,” and dedicated himself to redesigning London shops in a crooked style, more congruent with the heroic spirit of the Scandinavian sagas.

Burges might have retorted that what Villard lost in reality and imaginative presence was compensated by the creative freedom which his persona allowed, and that, until such a time as all styles were once again forgotten, there was perhaps little else that an architect could hope for. But who would be willing to pay for the construction of stone cathedrals or stone fortresses in modern London, if they embodied symbolic practices that were no longer actual? In one respect, I think Kerr was right: the future of medievalism did not lie in the public realm, as Burges envisioned, but in the London shops: here history would be bought and sold in the shape of draperies, wallpapers and upholstery, out of which a home-owner might fashion for himself an alternative personality. As William Morris’s contemporary painting of La belle Iseult (1858) suggested, the memory of the Middle Ages was fading into a visual pattern.

1

[1]Carl F. Barnes, Jr., “The ‘Problem’ of Villard de Honnecourt” [original English text of “Le ‘problème’ de Villard de Honnecourt,” Les bâtisseurs des cathédrales gothiques (Strasbourg, 1989): 209-23]; available from Internet; accessed September 1, 2007.

[2] Jules Quicherat, “Notice sur l’album de Villard de Honnecourt, architecte du XIIIe siècle,” Revue archéologique ser. 1, vol. 6 (1849): 65-80, 164-88, 209-26 + plates 116-8.

[3] Ibid., 72.

[4] Jules Quicherat, “De l’architecture romane,” Revue archéologique ser. 1, vol. 8 (1851): 145-58; ser.1, vol. 9 (1852): 525-40; ser. 1, vol. 10 (1853): 65-81; ser. 1, vol. 11 (1853): 668-90. See vol. 8: 148-9.

[5] Ibid., vol. 10: 76.

[6]Barry Bergdoll, “The Idea of a Cathedral in 1852,” Paul Atterbury (ed.), A.W.N. Pugin : master of Gothic revival (New Haven : Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts / Yale University Press, 1995): 104-20.

[7]J. B. A. Lassus, Album de Villard de Honnecourt, architecte du XIIIe siècle; manuscrit publié en fac-simile annoté, précédé de considérations sur la renaissance de l'art français au XIXe siècle et suivi d'un glossaire par J. B. A. Lassus; ouvrage mis au jour, après la mort de M. Lassus et conformément à ses manuscrits par Alfred Darcel (Paris: L. Laget, 1968, reprinted 1976; facsimile of the original edition of 1858): 1-41.

[8] Ibid., 33-4.

[9] Ibid., 39.

[10] Ibid., 69-70.

[11] Prosper Mérimée, “Album de Villard de Honnecourt” [1858], Études sur les arts du Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1967): 229-70.

[12] E. Viollet-le-Duc, “Première apparition de Villard de Honnecourt, architecte du XIIIe siècle,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts1 (1859): 286-95.

[13] E. Viollet-le-Duc, “Album de Villard de Honnecourt, architecte du XIIIe siècle,” Revue archéologique new ser. 7 (1863): 103-18, 184-93, 250-8, 361-70. See 103-4.

[14] Viollet-le-Duc, “Première apparition,” 295.

[15] Viollet-le-Duc, “Album de Villard,” 362, 364-5.

[16] Viollet-le-Duc, “Première apparition,” 292.

[17] E. Viollet-le-Duc, “Deuxième apparition de Villard de Honnecourt : à propos de la renaissance des arts en France,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 5 ( 1860): 24-31.

[18] Viollet-le-Duc, “Première apparition,” 287.

[19] Viollet-le-Duc, “Deuxième apparition,” 24.

[20] Viollet-le-Duc, “Deuxième apparition,” 31; also “Album de Villard,” 255.

[21]William Burges, “An Architect’s Sketchbook of the Thirteenth Century,” The Builder 16 (1858): 758, 770-2; “Fac-simile of the Sketch Book of Wilars de Honecort,” The Building News 5 (1859): 897-8; “Architectural Drawing,” Papers Read at the Royal Institute of British Architects (1860-61): 14-23.