Noah’s Ark — Really?

I love the way that the pre-modern mind turned the exotic into the familiar, blithely unconstrained by the (modern) dictates of realism. Their needleworkers happily put Old Testament figures into contemporary dress, and here the building of Noah’s Ark (there he is, in the center, directing operations) is rendered as building a timber framed house. Only the solidly planked walls hint that the structure was meant to float. (I have to hope that there were vents in the roof, what with all those animals in there….)
The Illumination is from the Bedford Hours, between 1414 and 1423, but the housewrights were using the same tools and techniques as seventeenth-century joiners. Workmen are adzing, drilling, planing, sawing, driving a peg into a joint, and nailing the roof (note his nail box cunningly hooked over the ridge.) The enlarged detail shows a band-saw, a mortise chisel, and a drill that is similar to the one that I used as a boy and called a “brace and bit.” The man with a plane is working on enormously wide boards – think of the size of the trees in those first-growth forests! The only thing a seventeenth-century joiner would not do, is drill the hole for the peg after the mortise and tenon had been assembled, for that would not allow him to use the peg to tighten the joint. (See Acorns Fall 2006 at www.fiskeandfreeman.com for an account of the “draw bore” technique.)
What a beautiful record of wood workers on the job!
PS. Didn’t workmen dress colorfully then! Or was it more important for the illumination to look bright and beautiful than to be realistic? Probably the latter, don’t you think?