Lhe world discovers, amazed, a Notre-Dame de Paris flooded with celestial clarity. It was not always this way. Throughout the centuries, the cathedral has oscillated between light and shadow. Story of an eventful and little-known history, with the historian Mathieu Lours, specialist in religious heritage, and author of the official book of the restoration Rebuilding Notre-Dame de Paris (ed. Tallandier).
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The Point: Has Notre-Dame de Paris always been bright?
Mathieu Lours: For its time, when it was built in 1163, Notre-Dame de Paris was a rather bright cathedral. But, at the beginning of the 13th centurye century, it is less so than the other buildings which were built at the time, such as Chartres and Bourges. With radiant Gothic art, the walls completely disappear to give a “glass cage effect”, modeled on the Sainte-Chapelle. Around 1250, the canons of Notre-Dame demolished the north and south walls of the transept, continuing the widening of the nave, where side chapels were built. They rebuilt them four meters further to the north and south, piercing them with bays decorated with stained glass and above all with two large rose windows measuring 13.5 m in diameter, on either side. The goal is to do better than the Saint-Denis basilica, whose two roses then measure 11.5 m in diameter even though they are barely 15 years older.
Is the Saint-Denis basilica brighter than Notre-Dame?
Between 1135 and 1144, the first phase of work on the Abbot Suger monument was concentrated on the facade and the ambulatory. Saint-Denis is then one of the three first Gothic buildings in the world. But the nave and the transfer of the Carolingian church remain. Around 1230-1260, the rest of the basilica, the nave, the transept, and the upper part of the choir were rebuilt. King Saint-Louis accompanied this reconstruction to give more space to the royal necropolis. Saint-Denis and the Sainte-Chapelle will be the first buildings of the radiant Gothic style. The Bishop of Paris cannot remain indifferent to this modernity. Notre-Dame, its cathedral, is becoming out of fashion. He therefore enlarged the windows and then, secondly, rebuilt the exterior walls by opening them with the two roses.
On this plane of light, what is theaction d’Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the great restorer of Notre-Dame in the 19th centurye century ?
It is a paradoxical action. Viollet-le-Duc returned the transept, the first bay of the nave and the choir to their state before 1230. He reduced the size of the windows, and restored the colored stained glass windows in place of the white stained glass windows installed in the 18th century.e century. It therefore obscures the central part. Viollet-le-Duc wanted to restore the supposed medieval darkness of the upper parts. When he completed his work in 1864, the cathedral was clean and light and shadow were well balanced. But the walls had not been cleaned since that time and had become dirty. So it no longer seemed bright at all.
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Answer
Would you say that today Notre-Dame de Paris has never been so clear?
The apogee of clarity in Notre-Dame is the 18th centurye century, when in 1740, the canons dismantled the colored stained glass windows and coated the walls in white. But their action betrays the medieval spirit, which strives to find a balance between shadow and light. The restoration of Viollet-le-Duc installed neo-Gothic stained glass windows, colored, in the upper parts and grisailles in the lower parts. For a year, since the nave appears in the state in which the general public discovered it a few days ago, clarity has returned to Notre-Dame.
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