10:42 Jan 18, 2010 

After extensive research over the weekend, including reading Theophilus' text sent to me by my client on Friday, in which he talks about the tables used for designing stained glass, but not about the way they worked out the really large designs on the floor, I have come to the conclusion that unlike the French we do not really give a "name" as such to the floor space on which stone sculptors (or stained-glass makers) worked out their designs but rather we talk about it as a process or activity - often the way in English. So that is what I am going to do in my text. I felt that "layout floor" was a contender if a name for it had to be used, but it does not really seem appropriate for my context.

17:24 Jan 15, 2010 

Well, they weren't meant to be "permanent," but the architectural drawings which survive were scratched on a thin layer of plaster applied to the back wall of a "triforium" in a Gothic church (Strasbourg??). If my (dim) memory serves me rightly, Theophilus (writing c. 1100) talks about painting white (or plastering?) a large table or workbench top in order to draw the cartoons for a glass panel. A master sculptor, wanting to see what his mental vision of a portal might actually look like before he realized it in stone would have used a floor or, better still, a wall on which to lay out his geometry and figures --which, in the 11th-12th cc. were geometrically conceived. Of these three media, only examples of the architectural drawings survives. And, no, I don't know what term might have been used (in Latin or Old French) for what jlsjr's source calls a "layout floor" --but, as I said, that term sounds right to me and is about the best I can think of for your "plancher d'épure."

17:11 Jan 15, 2010 

of these practices precisely because they were not on any kind of permanent medium, just powder on a table or floor. Does anyone know of any reliable references for calling this a "layout floor" historically?

16:40 Jan 15, 2010 

[Wordeffect beat me to it]

We do know from written and other survivals that various sorts of "layout" surfaces were used in the middle ages:

Architects used walls or floors covered in a thin layer of plaster to work out difficult geometrical problems (one or two of these actually survive);

A c. 1100 treatise (by "Theophilus") talks about laying out the "cartoon" for a stained glass panel on a table --and one might imagine, for a really large window [like this: http://tinyurl.com/ygkbujl ], a floor being used for this purpose.

And, now that I think about it, a sculptor might use such a "layout floor" to "layout" a whole portal (or other large ensemble), so that he could get his geometry just right, and could see how the whole composition would look when completed.

Such a practice would seem to be imminently useful; though, to the best of my knowledge, no evidence survives for it.

16:36 Jan 15, 2010 

Masons would set out the lines and curves for stonework, like a full-scale working drawing, sometimes even working in sand. Remarkable what accuracy they could acheive using simple tools and basic geometry! For a large window, a full-size geometrical layout would be necessary.

16:07 Jan 15, 2010 

but the suggestion is that stained-glass window makers might have followed the example of sculptors who apparently used these "planchers d'épure" to design their sculptures - I too am having difficulty understanding exactly how! That is one of the reasons I have drawn a blank in my research...

15:47 Jan 15, 2010 

Just curious, Gila, how would sculptors use a "layout floor"?