Gothic architectural Drawings

The Vienna Academy of Fine Arts collection of mediaeval architectural drawings The Vienna Acacemy of Fine Arts owns a unique of 428 Gothic architectural drawings dating from the 14th and 15th centuries. There are no more than 500 such drawings in existence worldwide. The drawings were bequeathed to the Academy by the architect Franz Jäger in 1839. Throuhout the 19th century they were used extensively in the teaching of architecture. The Anton Pustet Verlag now plans a scholarly book (German text / English Summaries), designed to do just to the drawings, which have been restored and digitalised to the highest standard. The author, Professor Hans J. Böker of McGill University, Montreal, has already researched the architectural history of St. Stephens Cathedral in Vienna. Until now, the only published documentation of the collection has been the 60-page catalogue (1969) compiled by Hans Koepf. Here only a few drawings are expounded in some detail, otherwise information is scant. The extremely small-scale and heavily rastered illustrations are more hindrance than help for research into architectural history. Recent intensive study of the original drawings brought unexpected results concerning the execution and legibility of the plans, and provided a fresh starting-point for further research. Unlike Koepf or previous researchers, this study concentrated not on classifying individual drawings under specific architectural projects, but on examining the individual drawings themselves, in order to establish their significance in architectural history. The aim was to distinguish between descriptive registration of the drawings and a presentation as comprehensive as possible of the research literature and its interpretation. Proof was established that, contrary to previous opinion, the majority of the plans were drawn up to a fixed based on the duodecimal system (1:6, 1:12, 1:24, 1:48, 1:96) - a type hitherto unrecognised, used in the ground-plan of Augsburg Cathedral. It was possible to identify a number of the plans with specific buildings, and new insights were gained into the planning process of drawings already familiar - particularly those of the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague, which occupies a key position in architectural history. It had previously been assumed that the existing plans for this building were later copies of missing originals, but on the basis of the etching marks and intensive corrections it was possible to reconstruct the entire planning process of the drawings, which my now be regarded as Peter Parler s original designs. Significant results were archieved by the systematic registration of examination of the watermarks, which enabled precise datin of many of the drawings. One striking discovery was that a large number of drawings formerly ascribed to Hanns Puchsbaum, who died in 1454, turned out to date from the 1460s and 70s, and are thus unquestionably the work of his lesser-known successor, Laurenz Spenning. In the reconstruction of Spennings oeuvre, identification of the planning sequence for the Carthusian monastery in Gaming (Lower Austria) and the plans for the tower of the abbey church of Melk afforded valuable insights. Watermarks enabled the attribution of further projects to other previously obscure architects such as Gregor Hauser, and several new aspects emerged concerning the origins of the Prague architect Benedikt Ried. A further field of research dealt primarly with the late mediaeval network of guilds (Bauhütten), the link with Strasbourg assumings fresh significance.