Villard de Honnecourt

Villard de Honnecourt is known only through a portfolio of 33 parchment leaves containing approximately 250 drawings preserved in Paris (Bibl. nat. de France, MS. Fr. 19093). There is no record of him in any known contract, guild register, inscription, payment receipt, tax record, or any other type of evidence from which the names of medieval artisans are learnt. Villard's fame is due to the uniqueness of his drawings and 19th-century inventiveness in crediting him with having "erected churches throughout the length and breadth of Christendom" without any documentary evidence that he designed or built any church anywhere, or that he was in fact an architect.

Who Villard was, and what he did, must be postulated from his drawings and the textual addenda to them on 26 of the 66 surfaces of the 33 leaves remaining in his portfolio. In these sometimes enigmatic inscriptions Villard gave his name twice (Wilars dehonecort [fol. 1v]; Vilars dehoncort [fol. 15r]), but said nothing of his occupation and claimed not a single artistic creation or monument of any type. He addressed his portfolio, which he termed a "book," to no one in particular, saying (fol. 1v) that it contained "sound advice on the techniques of masonry and on the devices of carpentry . . . and the techniques of representation, its features as the discipline of geometry commands and instructs it."