Medieval working drawings

Quoted text begins.Thanks for the leads, they have given me plenty to follow up. I guess
detailed information like working drawings would not be interesting to a
huge number of people, so they are not promoted like other aspects of
Cathedrals.
End of quote.

Supposedly a large number of medieval drawings and sketches survive in
the German lodges such as Ulm, Strasbourg and Vienna from the late middle
ages. Scarce from before the 13th century, architectural drawings became
more numerous from the 14th, when complex designs of mouldings, vault
patterns and tracery made them more desirable, and the gradual substitution
of paper for parchment made them cheaper to produce. The very durability of
parchment contributed to the disappearance of drawings, as it can be
palimpsested (scraped down and reused).

Before the 16th century they were neither scaled nor annotated, and they are
clearly several steps away from a working drawing. Ironically, the only ones
that even hint at three dimensionality are in the Portfolio of Villard, who
was probably not an architect; otherwise the drawings consist of orthogonal
projections in two dimensions, with no indication of depth, and some show
several levels of the building superimposed. A medieval mason, however
would have had no difficulty in interpreting its meaning. Led by the
intuitive spark, a drawing would become an internal vision, the finalized
pieces formulated in large tracery rooms. This was meditational zen stuff,
very interesting.

Marc