Archaeologia Adriatica, Vol. 2 No. 2, 2008.
Original scientific paper
Architect – Builder – Mason
Željko Rapanić
Abstract
The skill of building and carving in the early Middle Ages was primarily based on practical experience and tried and tested knowledge. The laws of physics, statics, proportions, and symmetry meant that the importance of numbers was highly emphasized. The same was true of music, as evinced from classical Greek, through late Roman to Early Medieval theoreticians, but also for poetry, when the utilization of rhythmic series and systems can be perceived in structured musical and poetic themes. The builder also had a plan that was given to him by someone. In the early medieval period this was regularly a priest. The situation was somewhat different, naturally, if a builder was intervening in an existing, preserved or ruined church, to repair it and return it to function. Confirmation of this in fact exists in the numerous such orders given by ecclesiastic and civil dignitaries, bishops, and, for example, Frankish kings. In this early period there were not many occasions for someone to construct or even plan a new form by themselves. In the Romanesque and particularly in the Gothic period the considerations of learned men – architects develop slowly into a true scientia (knowledge, science), which was increasingly utilized by the builders of large architectural structures, such as cathedrals, in opposition to the concept of ars (i.e. experience or skill) that was offered by the first medieval crafstmen – artifices. This discussion only touches on technical-constructive and artisanal questions, and only in passing is the existence mentioned of multifarious sfumato ideas and aesthetic principles of a quite different nature that were set forth about the construction and decoration of churches by many prominent thinkers of the first centuries of Christianity, such as Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and many others. They critically expounded, from the standpoint of the time of indispensable humbleness, that first, general, and quite important Christian virtue, the necessity and justification fo a rich and luxurious decoration of churches with gold and marble, and the ethical validity of investing great wealth in the home for the prayers of the congregation, in the domus ecclesiae.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
37198
URI
Publication date:
23.5.2009.
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