Drawing on Walls: The Melancholic Medieval Masons of Rosslyn Chapel

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Caren Yglesias

University of Maryland

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Construction on Rosslyn Chapel, located seven miles south of Edinburgh, Scotland, commenced  in 1446, about forty years after the adjoining crypt was built. Today, incised drawings on the  crypt stone walls are clearly visible and depict a pointed arch, a vaulting rib with cusps, and a  pinnacle, all elements of the finished chapel. More drawings include several partial arches and  circles, a small hexagon star in a circle, a pentagon that is probably a mason’s mark, and other  unclear images. Surviving documentation notes that some master masons who built this chapel  were from Edinburgh, but most came from what is now France, Germany or Italy, and geometry  was their common design and construction language. The nature of their work can be imagined  as Dürer’s personified figure in Melancholia I, who is thoughtful and equipped with knowledge,  tools and skill, and who sits and wonders about architectural possibilities before her ideas can  take flight.  

 

This paper presents a detailed account of medieval masonry techniques that transferred design intent to stone elements using practical geometry known from traditional methods and  guild training, and possibly a rare surviving medieval lodge book. Then architects, not masons, were taught Euclid’s theoretical geometry as part of the classic quadrivium, but were not  involved in this project. 

 

Also, the paper asks why these geometric drawings were incised on stone walls and not  the floor, which was more typical at that time. It presents alternate drawing techniques, on walls and floors, that allowed master masons to make and change their designs more easily as  construction issues arose. Several surviving examples in other Gothic cathedrals throughout  Europe illustrate these techniques. Further sources for this investigation include a contemporary  site survey of Rosslyn Chapel’s crypt by the author and articles by local scholars published in the  nineteenth century that compare the incised representational drawings to built architectural  elements. 

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Curiously, different confirmation about the role of various medieval masonry techniques  was obtained from skilled stonecutters currently working on a new Gothic cathedral in  Washington, DC. The Washington National Cathedral, completed in 1990, suffered a magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook the East Coast twenty-one years later, causing over $34 million in  damage. Repairs required recalling masons out of retirement to replace fallen and cracked stones.  The masons use many traditional techniques to transfer their designs to stone although the  contemporary mechanical tools employed make the sound and smell, and thus the comradery of  the workshop fundamentally different from a medieval mason’s tracing house. 

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The paper concludes with comment about the significance of this relatively unknown  extant example of medieval masonry design and construction techniques, and the melancholic master masons who understood and used them.

Session Two – Geometry

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1:15-1:30 PM

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Friday, March 28, 2025