https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/16/the-culture-inspired-by-notre-dame-paris

To understand the artistic wonder that is Notre Dame you have to accept it as a synthesis of medieval faith and modern fantasy. Viollet-le-Duc crowded the real Notre Dame with grinning, devilish gargoyles just as Hugo populated his fictional one with a deaf bell ringer and his tormentors. This intermixing of a genuine gothic cathedral with the 19th-century dream of what gothic should be has put Notre Dame at the heart of the modern imagination. It’s the artistic embodiment of Paris, the centre of medieval European thought and culture which in the 1800s became the birthplace of modern art.

For at least 300 years before Viollet-le-Duc saved Notre Dame, medieval cathedrals had been shunned. When London’s gothic cathedral St Paul’s was destroyed in the Great Fire of London it was replaced with a trendy new domed edifice by Christopher Wren. No-one this morning is calling for a new Notre Dame to be built by France’s contemporary architectural star Jean Nouvel. That’s because Viollet-le-Duc, who also restored churches across France and the lovely walled city Carcassonne, taught us what makes medieval architecture so magical.

Almost a thousand years after its original creation Notre Dame still speaks to us
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It is the human plenitude, the sense of hundreds of anonymous masons working in humble collectivism, and thousands of people across time sharing our awe for what they built, that gives Notre Dame its mystique. A great cathedral is a vast living organism. It’s like being inside a whale, the vaulting a sublime rib cage above you. Unlike a symmetrical classical building a gothic cathedral is not an image of order but living disorder where flying buttresses sprout, mighty columns soar, lofty galleries conceal prayers and plotters.

Viollet-le-Duc loved the monsters at the edge of medieval Christianity, basing the gargoyles and chimeras that cover his restored stonework on works in French museums. His macabre Notre Dame is the birthplace of French modern culture from Baudelaire’s poetry and Rodin’s Gates of Hell to Matisse’s painting of its unmistakable facade in pink morning light. Yet under all its accretions, the heart of Notre Dame is truly medieval. Gothic architecture was born in Paris. Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, on the French capital’s outskirts, invented this art style in the early 1100s to glorify God in a spectacular new way. To let in sacred light, gothic builders created stained glass windows – and to make space for those, they raised buildings higher than ever before. Flying buttresses and the pointed arch redistributed the structure’s weight so cunningly that huge areas of wall could be replaced with glass. If Notre Dame survives it will be because the flying buttresses did their job.


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