Villard de Honnecourt

The author includes sections on technical procedures, mechanical devices, suggestions for making human and animal figures, and notes on the buildings and monuments he had seen.

And his writings offer insights into the variety of interests and work of the 13th-century master mason in addition to providing an explanation for the spread of Gothic architecture in Europe.

Villard tells us, with pride, that he had been in many lands (Jai este en m[u]lt de tieres) and that he made a trip to Hungary where he remained many days (maint ior), but he does not say why he went there or who sent him.

Because the drawings and captions are oriented in many different directions, the album appears to have been assembled in an ad hoc fashion, as if the individual sheets were not originally intended to be bound together into book form.

These include architectural designs (plans, elevations, and details, often of identifiable buildings), a great variety of human and animal subjects, ensembles of religious and secular figures perhaps derived from or intended as sculptural groups, ecclesiastical objects, mechanical devices (including a perpetual-motion machine), engineering constructions such as lifting devices and a water-driven saw, a number of automata, designs for war engines such as a trebuchet, and many other subjects.