A roughly 5-by-4-inch portrait of German architect Mathes Roriczer, sketched in ink by Hans Holbein the Elder sometime in the late 15th century, marks the entrance to Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship, a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. “The reason I opened the show with this drawing is because I think if I were to challenge anyone to name a medieval architect, they would come up short,” explains curator Femke Speelberg. She has a point. The diminutive scale of the introductory portrait contrasts with the collection of enormous drawings inside the galleries—the largest is 11 feet tall—in a way that parallels the asymmetry of our knowledge of that era: their soaring Gothic cathedrals are well-known but not their names.

According to the predominant art historical understanding, it’s anachronistic to even call them Gothic “architects.” They were master masons or builders, skilled craftsmen working on-site drawing directly onto stones. This narrative places the origin of the profession during the Renaissance with the rediscovery of Vitruvius’s De architectura in a Swiss monastery, the reformulation of its ideas by Leon Battista Alberti, and the subsequent prioritization of drawing as the architect’s primary labor and means of communication. This story always required some hefty grains of salt—overlooking its Eurocentrism and narrow definition of what constitutes architecture, for example. “I’m hoping this exhibition will bend that canon,” Speelberg says modestly, but the show completely shatters it. The galleries are filled with examples of immaculately drawn and meticulously detailed ichnographia (plans), orthographia (elevations), and even a few scaenographia (perspectives) predating the rediscovery of Vitruvius’s terms for them.

In 2022, the Met acquired at auction a roughly 10½-foot-by-14-inch elevation of a sacrament house designed by German architect Loren Lechler in 1538. This was the precipitating event of Gothic by Design. “There are just over 600 Gothic drawings catalogued in the world,” explains Speelberg, who has been researching this rarefied field for years, “and, including this one, there are only four in the United States.” To mount this exhibition of more than 90 works, the Met had to borrow from 17 institutions, mostly in Europe, making this the largest collection—possibly ever—of Gothic drawings assembled in one location. The Met’s new acquisition is placed front and center in the main gallery, which is flanked by two rooms. Like several others throughout the exhibition, because this drawing is too tall to fit in the space upright, it is displayed on a raked pedestal in a glass vitrine. The effect of this installation choice is twofold. The first is cinematic. The tapering spire of the sacrament house leads the eye to the gallery’s back wall, where the vibrant 1490s oil painting Scenes from the Life of Saint Augustine of Hippo, borrowed from the Met Cloisters, is mounted, bringing its architectural details—the suggestions of section cuts through buildings, the subtle attempt at realistic one-point perspective in its depiction of tiles and vaults—into sharper focus. The second is tactile. The sloping surface of the pedestal is like that of an architect’s drafting table, turning the artwork into a working drawing. One can almost imagine delicately tracing a line in pen over its surface, feeling its tooth and grain, ever fearful of a splotch or stray mark.

The room to the right of the central gallery opens with a video showing a re-creation of this medieval drawing process, which began with the ink and parchment. Both materials were incredibly expensive in the Middle Ages, but especially parchment, which consists of animal skins that have been soaked in a lime solution, scraped, stretched, and smoothed. It can be inferred, then, that these large-scale drawings were not construction sets, which would have been drawn with cheaper materials, worn out through use on-site, and therefore mostly lost to time. These drawings were for presentations to clients and stakeholders.

For the tower of the Imperial Dome of Saint Bartholomew in Frankfurt am Main, the exhibition includes two versions of its elevation, presented side by side. The first, from circa 1434, is by Michael Kurtze, an apprentice of the city architect Madern Gerthener. It features an ornate dome, with layers of pinnacles and buttresses, capped with a spire. In the 1490s, after part of this design for the cathedral was completed, the project started running out of money. The officials called in the “internationally renowned” architect Nikolaus Quecke to see if he could salvage the church within the remaining budget. His drawing shows what had been built already, but the dome is scrapped and replaced with an elegant Gothic cornice. After deliberation, the city council decided not to proceed with the new, cheaper design, and Kurtze’s original is what stands in Frankfurt today. Both presentation drawings were archived by the city for centuries. If making the most of value engineering, redesigning from preexisting conditions, and trying to convince functionaries to approve your scheme isn’t the work of an “architect,” nothing is.