The Plan of Saint Gall is a medieval architectural drawing of a monastic compound dating from β AD. According to calculations based on the manuscript's tituli the complex was meant to house about monks , lay visitors, and craftmen and agricultural workers. The Plan was never actually built. The planned church was intended to hold the relics of the monastery's founder and namesake, the hermit Saint Gall. The plan was stored in the library of the monastery, the famous Abbey library of Saint Gall , where it remains to this day indexed as Codex Sangallensis It is the only surviving major architectural drawing from the roughly year period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the 13th century.
It is considered a national treasure of Switzerland and remains a significant object of interest among modern scholars, architects, artists and draftspeople for its uniqueness, its beauty, and the insights it provides into medieval culture. There are two main theories concerning the motivations behind the drawing of the Plan.
The dispute between scholars centres around the assertion put forward by Horn and Born in their work The Plan of Saint Gall , [ 4 ] that the Plan in the Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen was a copy of an original drawing issued by the court of Louis the Pious [ 5 ] after the synods held at Aachen in and The purpose of the synods was to establish Benedictine monasteries throughout the Carolingian Empire as a bulwark against renewed activity by the Hiberno-Scottish missions from Britain and Ireland who, although now Benedictine, were bringing some elements of Celtic monasticism to the Continent.
Horn and Born argued that the Plan was a "paradigmatic" drawing of how a Benedictine monastery should look if the Benedictine Rule was to be strictly followed; a guide for the construction of future monastic ensembles. Other scholars, particularly Werner Jacobsen, Norbert Stachura [ 7 ] and Lawrence Nees [ 6 ] have, on the contrary, argued that the Plan is an original drawing made at Reichenau Abbey for the abbot of Saint Gall, Gozbert, [ 6 ] who decided to build a new abbey church in the s.
It is drawn with red ink lines for the buildings, and brown ink for lettered inscriptions. The sequence in which the parchment was joined is the following: the first parchment consisted of the drawing of the abbey church and cloister ; the second and third parchments were added to the bottom and right side of the original vellum , and here the abbey church was enlarged; buildings were added around the cloister; and the abbot's house, outer school, guest house and pilgrim 's house were drawn.
