NEW HAVEN — At first glance, the handsome galleries of a newly mounted exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art might seem to portray a contemplative world of measure, calm and consistency. There is an enormous 18th-century compass — a drawing instrument familiar to high school geometry students (though this one seems designed for a standing adult rather than a sitting child). There is also Queen Elizabeth’s decorously refined astrolabe from 1559, along which a visitor may align a gaze (though without the hope, indoors, that this star-sighting instrument might provide any information about time and place).
An alabaster pillar at Yale Center for British Art, part of the exhibition “Compass & Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750”
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A silver microscope designed for King George III, circa 1763.
You can examine a 28-inch-high alabaster pillar from 1620 that pays homage to the glories of Platonic solids while offering tribute to the five “orders” of classical design. Throughout the galleries are finely wrought folding rules, velvet-encased calipers and compasses, delicately etched protractors and angled “architectonic sectors.”
Tools of a trade, no doubt, and the exhibition’s unfortunately leaden title reinforces that narrow, introspective idea: “Compass & Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500-1750.” No doubt, too, you can look at this show as a collection of extraordinary objects related to the craft of building, unusual artifacts gathered by the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford (where its curators are the architectural historian Anthony Gerbino and the museum’s assistant keeper, Stephen Johnston) and supplemented by material from the Yale Center for British Art’s own collection, where the organizing curator is Elisabeth Fairman. (A catalog from Yale University Press is also available.)
You can also see an extraordinarily rare plan for the court and kitchen of Winchester College from 1394, “the earliest pre-1500 drawing of an English building in existence,” we are told, preserved only because it was used in the binding of a list of student diners from 1415 (which seems to bear six-century-old stains of food and drink). Or you can admire an elaborate silver microscope designed for King George III in the 1760s and then turn to look at that monarch’s student exercises in architectural drawing, which, without their princely provenance, would not have survived a decade.
But for all their calm preoccupation with measure and proportion, these documents, drawings, tools and models outline a dramatic revolution. The exhibition’s argument is difficult and sometimes too allusively made, but the impact is considerable. We come to see how the human cosmos might seem unchanged moment to moment, yet still reflect a radical transformation. There is a before and an after in this narrative; we live in the after, and it has come to seem so natural to us, we may not even be aware of its difference from the before.
You glimpse that earlier world in the size of that compass that appears at the beginning of the show, an instrument familiar from the medieval traditions of the mason. What was it for? Its size tells us plainly that it was not used to draw plans; a circle several feet in diameter is not generally required on any kind of blueprint. It was, instead, an instrument of construction: it was used on site, we are told, “to draw details at full scale directly onto the ground or a tracing floor, where the component stones could then be assembled.”
There is also a piece of stone here discovered during a 19th-century demolition of a 13th-century chapel in Cambridge. Arcs and arches are traced in the stone, apparently by just such a compass, sketching the windows about to be mounted in the walls. Paper or parchment was expensive, the show points out, and at any rate, the very idea of finely detailed plans was alien to the age. The plan and the building evolved together.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that highly sophisticated designs weren’t executed. We see here drawings of an elaborate chapel planned for Winchester Cathedral in the early 16th century. But we learn that such drawings were not carefully wrought proportional diagrams: mainly they were guides for the artisan, the builder.