Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, which is due to gradually reopen its doors from the week of December 2, is a great book of stones: entering into the mystery of the place is learning to read. From 1163, when construction began, to its opening in 1345, hundreds of anonymous craftsmen worked on the site knowing that they would not see the monument completed. They left in the stone a symbolic message intended for us.
Art in the Middle Ages is not a pure aesthetic pleasure but an education opening the visitor to a spiritual reality. A cathedral is a guide, intended to transform us. Walking to meet it requires, in order to taste its depth, to become pilgrims. Because a cathedral is a sacred space. Like an antenna planted in the ground, it transmits the celestial language.
When we look at Notre-Dame de Paris, in front of the facade we are faced with an enigma. Dozens of statues populate its walls. Is there a link between them? Between the top and the bottom, do they respond to each other? What if this whole program had meaning? We want to know. Medieval men knew symbolic language. They saw in the trees of a forest a church vault, in the moving sea, a sign of the material world in which one can drown and in the water of springs an element of purification. The language of the cathedral was therefore understood and its words transformed the soul of the visitor.
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This language remains within our reach. And the new work, which was essentially a restoration of the place, invites us today to rediscover the message of Notre-Dame. Contacted, Pascal Prunet, one of the architects of the site, speaks with admiration of the “prowess of the builders of the Middle Ages, in particular for the elevation of the vaults, which the current team has endeavored to reconstruct identically”.
The large monument is vertical: symbolically, it rises, it shows a direction, that of the sky, calling us to turn our gaze upwards. The shape of a church or cathedral, in the Middle Ages, is an image of the body of Christ. The nave represents its legs and the entrance doors, its pierced feet. The transept (transverse nave which intersects the main nave at right angles) shows his arms outstretched. At the end, the semi-circular apse, with its star-shaped chapels, is its head, with the crown of thorns. And the choir is the sign of his sacred heart.
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