Recreating a Medieval Church in SketchUp with David Greenspan
By David Greenspan
David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence (Driftwood Press) and the chapbook Nervous System with Dramamine (The Offending Adam). He’s a PhD candidate in English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Recent work appears in Denver Quarterly, Fence, and Narrative. Find him online at davidgreenspanwriter.com.
As a summer Graduate Assistant at the Center for Digital Humanities, I helped Dr. Courtney Luckhardt create a historically accurate model of an early medieval church. The church of the monastery of Aniane, ca. 785, located in what is now southern France, isn’t quite as grand as the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Nevertheless, its creation, history, and recreation in 3D modelling software remain important to understanding medieval religious practices. Building the church of the monastery of Aniane began as part of Dr. Luckhardt’s Spring 2023 Humanities 402/502 course. Also known as the Digital Humanities Practicum, I worked alongside other student-scholars, like Paige Mason, to help bring a church lost to time back to life. Our class created an ArcGIS StoryMap of our work, titled after one of Dr. Luckhardt’s larger project – Immersive Global Middle Ages: Envisioning medieval cultures and places in the digital age, an NEH grant-funded Digital Humanities Advancement Institute.
We noted in our StoryMap that “[w]ith an emphasis on the regions of medieval Septimania and Catalonia, now known as southern France and northern Spain, our virtual reconstruction of the Monastery of Aniane combine historical data and contemporary digital storytelling to create an immersive glimpse into a world that otherwise might feel distant and detached from our own.” We modelled the exterior and interior of the church, along with some interior elements medieval visitors would have seen, including a hanging metal lamp and the Great Altar of Aniane. Getting to give modern day folks this glimpse into early medieval Septimanian religious life was a privilege, but there was still work to complete!
Dr. Luckhardt translated an article by French archaeologist Prof. Laurent Schneider that uncovered new details of the monastery of Aniane. The article noted that the roof of the earliest church structure was thatched rather than tile. In fact, St. Benedict of Aniane specified that he wanted future churches in the monastery to have red tile roofs, but the first church roof was thatch. This discovery contradicts the saint’s life about St. Benedict, which states that "[i]n the year 782, the 14th of Charlemagne, Benedict, with dukes and counts aiding him, undertook to construct another large church in honor of our lord and savior, but differently. He no longer covered the houses with thatch, but with tiles and and adorned the cloisters with as many marble columns as possible placed in the porches,” (Ardo, Life of Benedict, Ch. 17, trans. Cabaniss). The medieval contradictions abounded! We chose to use Schneider’s work, as his 2015 excavations unearthed two new stone churches and helped paint a fuller picture of the monastery of Aniane’s history.
I used the model I created for Dr. Luckhardt’s Humanities 402/502 course, but changed the roof to thatch. We used SketchUp, a powerful drafting and interior design tool, to create the model. Changing the material of the roof was as simple as swapping out textures. However, making sure the church’s three semi-circular apses were historically accurate, as well as navigable from the inside and outside, proved a bit harder. While walls and roofs are created through making two dimensional rectangles, connecting them, and using SketchUp’s “push/pull” tool to raise them into three dimensions, making circular planes required a more delicate hand. I used SketchUp tools like “follow me” to create semicircles and “intersect faces” to connect the planes of the apses to the back transept. Then I had to make sure the interior planes conformed to real-world physics. You’d be surprised how easy it is to make something that looks fine on the exterior but isn’t physically accurate inside. After trial and error (and more trial and more error), I was able to create and connect the apses, transept, and long nave.
There were other, smaller challenges throughout the building process, for example how to cut out windows or what to do with the hollow interior of the transept roof. The form of the transept itself remains up in the air. Some Carolingian churches have staggered transepts with multiple roofs and walls. The Germigny-des-Pres church is a great example of this complicated transept architecture. We chose to use a simple, “house-style” roof for the church of the monastery of Aniane.
The final step was finding and correctly sizing stone textures. We had the roof thatch texture, but what type of stones were likely to be used by medieval builders in Septimania and Catalonia? Luckily, Dr. Luckhardt traveled to Aniane this summer to take LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scans of what remains of the monastery and the surrounding, surviving medieval buildings. She recommended interior and exterior stones based on the scans and her knowledge of building from this period. Thankfully SketchUp has an extensive texture library, so we were able to find appropriate textures and resize them for the church.
Greenspan’s re-creation of St. Mary’s Church, Aniane Monastery (southern France) before 780 CE
Here I’ll step back for a minute and note that while our model is as historically accurate as it can be, there exists some disconnect between modern day drafting software and medieval architecture. One particular form this disconnect took is that medieval builders were not working with plans detailed to the millimeter, which led to certain walls or surfaces being longer or thicker than others. While this may not have presented a problem for stonemasons in the eighth century, it does for SketchUp. Joining planes that aren’t aligned is tough. However, it also offers a unique opportunity for digital humanists. We get to flex our imagination to bring ancient floor plans to modern day life. We also get to practice critical thinking when deciding on what to do in the face of uncertainty. Choosing a simple transept roof that feels in line with St. Benedict of Aniane’s vision for the first church of the monastery of Aniane is one example of this critical thinking, though there were countless other, smaller moments throughout the building process.
The combination of historical fidelity and imaginative creation the Aniane church project required reminded me of the act of writing. I’m a poet by temperament and training. Working with Dr. Luckhardt felt strangely similar to writing a poem. We referenced medieval floor plans and created walls. We referenced medieval texts and created roofs. We referenced modern day scans and created textures. While none of these things on their own bear any similarity to crafting a metaphor, for example, the cumulative process felt very much like how a poem is formed. The process and product of imaginative creation are similar whatever form they take. Creating a church in a 3D digital environment is similar to writing with a pen on paper. Plumbing archives in search of a manuscript is similar to sorting through study or survey data. This connection between disciplines is central to a digital humanities mindset. It’s one reason we see so many cross-discipline projects like distance reading literary texts to arrive at anthropological conclusions. So, perhaps more than anything else, the connection between previously siloed academic fields is what I’m taking away from my time working with Dr. Luckhardt.
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