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From Romanesque to Gothic
Lucía Chacón Ledesma, Francisco de Paula Montes Tubío* and Lucía Bajo Chacón
Department of Engineering Graphics and Geomatics, University of Cordoba, Spain
Submission:June 07, 2022; Published: June 27, 2022
*Corresponding author: Francisco de Paula Montes Tubío, Department of Engineering Graphics and Geomatics, University of Cordoba, Campus Rabanales, Edificio Gregor Mendel, C-5, Carretera Nacional IV Km. 396. 14071-Córdoba, Spain
How to cite this article: Lucía C L, Francisco d P M T, Lucía B C. From Romanesque to Gothic. Glob J Arch & Anthropol. 2022; 12(2): 555835. DOI: 10.19080/GJAA.2022.12.555835
Introduction
One of the oldest guilds documented in Spain is that of stonemasons and masons, established in Barcelona in the year 1211 and quickly spread to other towns, so that, by the end of the High Middle Ages, the guilds had become powerful groups of pressure both in Aragon and in the Kingdom of Castile.
Master was the highest degree within the guild and the title allowed him to have his own workshop, teach apprentices, project, sign contracts and direct works with organizations officials and with individuals. The master builders will build the splendid cathedrals Romanesque and Gothic and the sumptuous Renaissance palaces until they were replaced and relegated to end of the 18th century by architects trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Ferdinand of Madrid.
In this paper we intend to understand the method used by master builders medieval to design and calculate these impressive buildings, knowing that at that time they lacked knowledge of resistance of materials and calculation of structures; method of which they left scarce data, due to the secrecy imposed by the guilds.
Romanesque architecture was the first great architectural style created in the Middle Ages in Europe after the decline of the Greco-Roman civilization. It begins in the French region of Burgundy, at the end of the 10th century as a way of building for the Benedictine Order, which has its mother house in the abbey of Cluny (France). This new style spread through the pilgrimage routes, especially the road to Rome and the Camino de Santiago. The Monastic Order of Cluny (created in 910) is a follower of the Rules of Saint Benedict of Nursia (529) (Figure 1).
The disciples of Saint Benedict, from the abbeys of Montecassino and Saint-Gall, translated the Greek and Alexandrian mathematical texts, including the work of Euclid and Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture. These texts provide them with the geometrical knowledge known up to that time, which will be essential for the design of monasteries and later of the great cathedrals(Figure 2).
Later than the Cluniacs, the Cistercian Order was born in 1098 as a reaction to the relaxation of the Benedictine Order of Cluny, wishing to return to the original spirit of the Rule of Saint Benedict (from 529).
The Cistercian Monasteries have some of their parts built in Romanesque style, however, Gothic is the prevailing style in most of them.
The existing documentary and graphic information from the Romanesque period is quite scarce, one of the oldest graphic documents is a plan from the Carolingian period of the Monastery of Saint Gall (Switzerland) drawn around 820, which represents the plan for the construction of new monasteries for the Order of Cluny, which must have been of relatively widespread use in the Romanesque period (Figure 3)[1].
Among the oldest Romanesque constructions is the Abbey of San Benigno de Dijon (France).
The origin of this great Abbey is a small chapel dedicated to St. Benigno of Smyrna, built in the year 511 and restored by Guillermo Volpaino in 1001 to its present form. Volpiano, who became abbot, reformed many Cluniac monasteries and brought them back to the observance of the Rules of St. Benedict of Nursia (Figure 4).
Characteristics of the Romanesque:
Three are the essential architectural characteristics of the Romanesque:
The use of the semicircular arch, the use of barrel or groin vaults and a pronounced aspect of solidity (Figure 5). Semicircular arches were widely used in classical Rome and can function without the need for their voussoirs to be joined by mortar or mortar. The stability of the arch is based on the elements touching each other, so that the friction forces act. The image in the figure shows in a very graphic way the way semicircular arches work. Medieval master builders concluded that if the pillars or side walls were strong enough not to deform, then the arch would be stable (Figure 6).
Barrel vaults and groin vaults had already been used in classical Roman architecture. The barrel vault is nothing more than a succession of semicircular arches one after the other (Figure 7). The groin vault is formed by the perpendicular crossing of two barrel vaults (Figure 8).
The Roman emperor Diocletian in the 2nd century AD built a baths in the capital of the empire on the ruins of which, in the 16th century, Michelangelo built a Renaissance church known as the Basilica of Santa María de Los Ángeles. Here we can see sections of Roman groin vaults restored by Michelangelo himself, with windows in the lateral openings, which already existed in the baths (Figure 9).
Similarly, the cellar of the abbey of Saint Benigno of Dijon in France, built at the beginning of the 11th century, one of the oldest Romanesque constructions, will also have its naves covered with Roman-style groin vaults. Both the vaults and the columns are made of ashlar, an early Romanesque material (Figure 10). The figure above shows the groin vaults without the reinforcing arches, which will be discussed below (Figure 11).
The Romanesque cathedrals and the planning of the works:
The rise of the great medieval cities was to transform Europe from the 12th century onwards and cathedrals were born in the heart of these great burgs. The cathedral is a building for collective use, it will not only be used for religious worship, they are buildings in which the guilds meet to discuss their affairs and the pilgrims will spend the night in them resting from the hardness of the road, it is the building of the city, religious and profane, which will exist in the capital cities of each diocese. Unlike the cathedrals, the monasteries in which the Romanesque style was born were designed for the exclusive use of the religious community (Figure 12).
The Directors of the works:
The builders of the cathedrals were the Master Builders, framed in the builders guilds, in force in Spain from the beginning of the 13th century until the arrival of the Enlightenment and the creation of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Before reaching the highest category of Master Builder, equivalent to the architect and engineer of the time, the applicant had to follow a long trajectory as an apprentice and journeyman, being examined to move from one category to a higher one by a court of Masters Builders of the guild. Some authors such as Robert Branner maintain that the medieval architect does not draw the project plans, but conceives the drawing in his mind and restores it to scale 1:1 on the site (Figure 13).
In any case, the master builders did not use detailed plans of the building to be constructed. They were much simpler, often reduced to drawings of the different parts of the building. Another reason for the scarcity of documentation on the subject is the secrecy of the guilds. The Regensburg Statutes (1498) of the Association of Stone Cutters and Masons, in Article 44 state: “No Master or Fellow who does not belong to the corporation should receive the least kind of teaching.
Machinery used
The construction of cathedrals required stones of considerable size and weight to be lifted to great heights. These stones or ashlars could not be lifted by hand, so medieval builders used wheel cranes. The Greeks and Romans had already used these human-powered wooden cranes in their constructions (Figure 14).
The crane consisted of one or two wooden wheels, inside which an individual was placed, who ,when walking, activated a rope connected to a pulley, which was wound around the axis of rotation of the crane, allowing a block of stone or any other building material to be raised or lowered.
Construction materials
The basic materials used in the construction of monasteries and cathedrals were of three types:
In the noble area, ashlar was usually used, a stone of considerable size, carved on its visible faces, the weight of which made it necessary to handle it with machinery
The ashlar was a smaller ashlar stone that was not very polished or carved.
The third building material used was masonry, which was laid by hand, as its name indicates, and was made of unworked and unregularized stone (Figures 15,16).
The walls are built using the technique known as the composite or three-leaf wall, formed by a core of masonry made with lime mortar, and finished on both sides with ashlar or ashlar stone (Figure 17). But what knowledge did the medieval Master Builders have of how buildings worked, from the point of view of their resistance? The Masters Builders knew how the porticoes of the cathedrals were deformed, but they were not clear about the concept of force, which Newton explained in his laws of physics in the 17th century (Figure 18).
What was clear to the master builders was that the arches and vaults exerted a pressure on the walls that tended to open them up, so the walls had to be strong enough to prevent this from happening, otherwise the building would collapse (Figure 19). The practical solutions applied by the master builders to prevent the walls from opening were very varied, but all of them consisted of increasing the resistance of the walls. One of these solutions was to add to the groin vault some arches called torales arches or fajones arches in the Romanesque style and that in the Gothic style would take the name of transverse arches (Figure 20).
The transverse or toral arch is placed transversally to the vault in order to support it as a reinforcement element, but its mission is not to reinforce the vault but to reinforce the walls, bracing them (Figure 21). In the case of the previous figure, the transverse arches rest on the pillars attached to the walls, but they could also rest directly on the wall, as in the upper room of the palace of Santa María del Naranco. Oviedo, 9th century (Figure 22).
The reinforcement of the walls can also be carried out by means of external unloading stirrups, as can be seen in the following figure, corresponding to the same building, on whose side facade the stirrups that contribute to improving the stability of the wall can be seen (Figure 23). The placement of braces in the arches has also been used to counteract the thrusts transmitted by the arches to the abutments. For them to work properly, they must be well embedded in the masonry (Figure 24).
Design and calculation
The calculations of building structures using the theories of elasticity and strength of materials are relatively modern, so that it was not until the 18th century that we find reference to structural calculation, so that mechanical relationships were not taken into account by the medieval master builders.
To make up for this lack, the builders used very low working stresses, giving priority to the correct shape and proportions of the structure to ensure its stability [2].
“In this way the structural problem became a problem of geometry. With an optimal use of the relevant geometrical relations, designers were able to make their constructions come to fruition”[3].
But what were the geometric criteria on which medieval master builders based their designs?
According to Santiago Huerta, professor at the Madrid School of Architecture, medieval designs were based on three hypotheses:
(a) “The masonry has an infinite compressive strength.
b) The masonry has zero tensile strength;
(c) Sliding failure is impossible”.
“ Hypothesis (1) is slightly against security.
Assumption (2) is obviously in favor of security.
Finally, hypothesis (3) is again against security, but cases of sliding between stones are extremely rare (they are usually associated with seismic movements)”.
There seems to be a consensus among medieval building researchers that walls and vaults were designed in the Middle Ages according to empirical geometrical criteria, based on the three classical hypotheses mentioned above, which were first explained by Jacques Heyman in a 1966 article “The Stone Skeleton” (later expanded into a book in 1999)[4]:
But what about the arch and vault calculations?: they are simply not calculated.
-The master builders considered that the thickness of the vaults was more a constructive factor than a calculation factor, so it was dimensioned at the discretion of the builders according to the span [5]. These medieval architects did not begin to calculate the wall thickness that would prevent the vault from opening, very late in the Gothic period,using rules of proportion, a kind of abacus, among which the rules of proportion of DERAND, L.P., in his book: L’Architecture des Voûtes ou L’Art des Traits et Coupes de Voûtes, Paris, 1643, stand out (Figures 25, 26)[6,7].
In Spain, García, Simón (fl. 1651-1681); Gil de Hontañón, Rodrigo (1500-1577) also proposed their geometrical rules for calculating the thickness of walls and the latter proposed his own rules of Gothic proportion for stirrups, collected in the manuscript entitled Compendium of architecture and symmetry of the temples written by Simón García, an architect from Salamanca (Figure 27). Professor Pérez Valcárcel [8] defines the following three basic medieval principles followed by master builders:
a) A masonry structure will be stable if the walls do not deform.
b) Small movements of the foundations cannot cause the structure to collapse.
c) If a masonry structure can withstand 5 minutes, it will withstand 500 years.
Graphic statics was born as a science in 1885 with the work of the Swiss professor Culmann. By applying the calculation methods of graphic statics, the stability of an arch or vault can be checked, verifying that the line of pressures resulting from loads is contained within the central nucleus of the section, as shown in the following figure. In it, the forces to which the arch segments are subjected are represented, as well as their funicular polygon, from which the line of pressures of the arch is represented. But for the medieval builders the most important thing was that the wall should be stable. The arch was not usually a problem (Figure 28).
The problems of the third hypothesis
The third hypothesis accepted by the medieval builders: Failure by sliding is impossible could, however, cause problems, even if only in specific cases, especially if it was built on very steep terrain. This is what happened in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, since in the longitudinal direction of the temple the ground descended from the presbytery to the entrance with a considerable slope and more than twelve metres of unevenness between the two areas (Figure 29).
Before the extension work undertaken in the 12th century by Bishop Gelmirez was completed, the cathedral began to suffer structural problems and was in danger of collapse. It was Master Mateo who solved the problem by demolishing the old facade at the entrance to the cathedral and replacing it with a new facade with the artistic Portico of Glory, placing the whole on top of the crypt. The great portico, the access staircase and the two towers acted as buttresses, preventing the building from sliding (Figure 30).
Master Mateo also made the Portico d
e la Gloria, completed in 1180. It is one of the most remarkable sculptural works of Romanesque art. This facade will be reformed in the Baroque period, extending the height of the portico and the towers (Figure 31).
Other structural systems:
The roofs of the so-called Fernandine Churches of Cordoba (Spain), built after the Reconquest of the capital in 1236 by Ferdinand III the Saint, are not vaulted but have roof coverings with pair and knuckle trusses of worked timber (Figure 32).
Pair and knuckle decks are so called because of the horizontal timber that reduces the span of the pair, which makes it easier for them to work in bending. The knuckle does not function as a brace (Figure 33).
The aforementioned church of Santa Marina has impressive buttresses on its front facade, as can be seen in the following image: (Figure 34)
Although the ground, as in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, also descends from the presbytery to the front entrance of the church, it is most likely that the buttresses were placed to support the thrust of the extreme formeros arches, which act on the front wall (Figure 35).
The Basílica Menor de San Pedro, another of the Ferdinandine churches in Córdoba, also has four buttresses on its facade, with the singularity that those at the ends are bent to reinforce the side walls of the church (Figure 36).
A completely different structural system, which was used in some Catalan Gothic buildings, was the use of diaphragm arches, which allowed the stone vaults to be replaced by wooden beams, which were easy to build and much cheaper (Figure 37).
The Gothic architectural style:
There are not many documents on Gothic architecture, although there are some more than on Romanesque, among which we can point out Villard de Honne-court’s Album of 1235 on the Gothic style, which although it has come down to us incomplete contains plates with constructive details and sketches that deal, albeit very obscurely with the solutions to some problems (Figures 38,39).
In Spain, what is perhaps the oldest scale plan of a monument in the country has recently been discovered. It corresponds to the ground plan of Seville Cathedral, drawn in 1496 and is kept in the monastery of Bidaurreta (Oñate) (Figure 40).
The essential characteristics of Gothic architecture can be reduced to three:
a) The use of the pointed or pointed arch.
b) The pointed pointed arch. Source: https://www. glosarioarquitectonico.com
c) The use of ribbed vaults.
d) The ribbed vault or ribbed vault, characteristic of Gothic architecture, is formed by the crossing, or intersection, of two barrel vaults with pointed arches (Figure 41).
e) It consists of two main elements: the arches, and the cloths or elements that cover the spaces between arches.
f) Slenderness and luminosity.
The two elements that are characteristic of Gothic art, the pointed arch and the ribbed vault, give rise to more vertical thrusts than the Romanesque elements. This allows a much more efficient distribution of the loads, achieving a greater height of the buildings, as well as transmitting the thrusts directly to the exterior buttresses by means of the flying buttresses, freeing the walls from most of these efforts, which will be entrusted to the pillars and buttresses (Figures 42,43). If we compare the forces that the pointed arch and the barrel arch, with the same span and the same load, transmit to the walls, we see that in the Gothic arch these horizontal forces EH are lower than those of the Romanesque arch due to its geometry (Figures 44,45).
The ribbed vaults are composed of ribs and plements, usually reinforced by several diagonal ribs that cross at the keystone. Normally these vaults are framed by the arches perpiaños or fajones in their transverse sense and by the arches formeros longitudinally (Figures 46,47).
The advantage of the ribbed vault over the Romanesque vault, as mentioned above, is that it transmits the forces to the pillars, freeing the walls from them. The stability of the building requires the reinforcement of the pillars with buttresses and buttresses (Figure 48).
But in the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic period, the master builders had to experiment with pillars of great height and which supported great thrusts. Some of these thrusts, as we have seen, are intended to open up the nave and others, as in the case of the figure, are non-compensated thrusts of the presbytery on some pillars, which are solved in this case with the so called arches of entibo or codal arches, which absorb these pressures, at the same time as they reduce the length of the buckling of the pillars. These arches, which work in compression and brace the various structural elements, are also known as fear arches (Figure 49).
On numerous occasions, the land on which the building is to be constructed has great unevenness that must be overcome, something we have already seen in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where in the longitudinal direction of the nave the land descended some twelve metres from the head at the foot of the church.
In the cathedral of Santa María de Burgos, built in Gothic style from 1221, there is an equivalent difference in level in the transversal direction, between the Sarmental and Coronelía gates (Figure 50). The Golden Staircase, which gives access to the Colonel’s Gate, with its 39 steps, bridges an eight-metre difference in height in a minimum of space (Figures 51,52). This type of situation requires the construction of an earth retaining wall, which in this case would be favored by the resistance of the impressive Golden staircase.
In any case, the earth in contact with the wall can cause dampness in the work, so it should be insulated. In the Middle Ages, there were no asphalt sheets like those that are currently used quite effectively in these cases, and drains were probably used on the face of the wall in contact with the groun, which were easy to construct with a stone and gravel compound.
A different solution was used in the Fernandine church of San Pablo, in the city of Cordoba, where it was preferred to excavate the front part of the church, in order to leave the ground at a level slightly higher than that of the nave (Figure 53). Frequently the foundations were built according to the ancient technique of three-leaf walls, with masonry or ashlar walls and an inner core of masonry taken up with abundant lime mortar and arranged in generally irregular courses without the need for formwork, just as in ancient Rome.
In the most careful and notable cases, these walls were of ashlar masonry, and the stepped foundations were frequently built, as this facilitated the balancing of thrusts and allowed a design almost exclusively based on geometry (Figures 54,55).
If the ground was really bad or waterlogged, the sheet piling system already described by Vitruvius was used. This staking system consisted of rot-resistant wooden piles whose resistance to subsidence was provided by the friction between the pile and the ground.
Conclusion
We can conclude that the Master Builders who built the great Cluniac and Cistercian monasteries and the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals had only a few basic materials at their disposal, such as stone, brick and lime mortar. These elements and their ingenuity were enough to build these monuments, which many centuries later continue to impress us, while today we need a cloud of auxiliary techniques, design and calculation programmes for all kinds of installations, as well as countless construction machinery.
References
- Benedicto Salas R (2015) The construction of Romanesque architecture. Institution Fernando el Cató Saragossa, UK.
- Huerta Fernandez S (2008) Report on the Stability and Consolidation of a Pillar of the Church of San Francisco. Santiago de Compostela. ETSA of Madrid, Spain.
- Pons Poblet JM, Simó Amezawa JM (2020) The binomial geometry tension in the works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cuadrenos de Historia de la Ingenierí UPC Publications, Spain.
- Jacques H (1999) The stone skeleton. Mechanics of factory architecture. Editorial Instituto Juan de Herrera, Spain.
- Kostof S (1984) The Architect: history of a profession. Cá Madrid, Spain, p.78.
- The old Statutes of the communities of builders in Alemani, possibly drawn up at the Masonic assembly of 1275 in Strasbourg, were revised on 25 April 1459 at the Assembly of Regensburg. In 1498 they were sanctioned by the emperor Maximilian and confirmed by Charles V (1520) and Ferdinand O I (1588), Spain.
- Mecias Carrizosa D (2014) Verification of the Stability of Máfrica structures by Means of Dynamic Geometry- Edita Cefalea, Spain.
- Perez Valcarcel J The Medieval structure. ETSA of La Coruña, Spain.
