The Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, one of my very favorite buildings, is celebrating a landmark birthday these days. It’s the 850th and there’s reason enough to celebrate that it has survived centuries of wars, abuse, neglect, and busloads of tourists. But to me, there’s a key element to Notre Dame that should be recognized as we get ready to blow out candles and make a wish. It’s Gothic and that’s pretty amazing.
The idea of Gothic was not born at Notre Dame but rather at the core of its former rival, the Church of St. Denis, located near the edge of the current city of Paris. The abbot at St. Denis, the famous Abbot Suger, was able to coax his artisans into creating a subtle math-based point to the arches in the walkway that surrounds the altar. This simple pointed arch was the key element in reducing the weight of the buildings and allowing them to reach heights their earlier counterparts would never have dreamed. When Suger opened his new church, religious decision makers from all over Europe came and must have gone back to their home churches saying, “I have to get me one of those!”
The result was an explosion of church building that we now call Gothic. It was a means of establishing Paris as the center for artistic creation that carries over today. Workshops of stained glass and stone carving were built that would supply tons of decorated churches and at the same time, cement the notion of what it was to be French.
But here we are 850 years later and Gothic should be an antique notion, long gone, dissolved into the fog, pushed to the background. But it’s not. These buildings that went up during the 12th and 13th centuries are still here. They are still in use, they are still magnificent, and they are still influencing church building today. You can travel across Europe, and most of the United States, for that matter, looking for the biggest church or the most important church and it’s probably Gothic. Major cathedrals, like St. Patrick’s or St. John the Divine in Manhattan, are copies of medieval Gothic design programs and if you were to ask school children to describe these modern buildings on sight, they would probably say “It’s Gothic.”
It’s the way this design set has traveled that fascinates me. I visited Leon, Spain last year with my daughter and the first thing she said when we entered their cathedral was, “This is a French cathedral.” We were in Northern Spain, but we were standing in a French cathedral. There were beautiful stained glass windows, Gothic arches, carved stone foliage, and vaulted walkways.
I took my children to Bermuda a few years ago, where stone church building is not very popular as you might imagine. There was, not far from our hotel, what looked like a single story little yellow home with a simple roof and a small parking lot next to it. But I knew it was a church right away because of the shape of the windows. They were pointed and they were Gothic. That shape is the simple calling card, the iconic shape that says this is a church. You are looking at a church.
So, happy birthday, Notre Dame! Remarkably, and due in no small part to the literary genius of Victor Hugo, you are still standing. Hugo's passion for Notre Dame drew such attention to it that the building was renovated and reclaimed from decades of misuse for decades after "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" was published.
And I can't wait to hear your new bells! Quasimodo to the ready!
MORE INFO: http://www.lfpress.com/2012/12/07/notre-dame-cathedral-brushes-up-for-850th-birthday
The next time you visit Paris, visit the Musee de Cluny. It's on the Left Bank and worth a short visit. During the French Revolution, angry mobs lopped off the heads of the kings that decorated the facade of Notre Dame, mistakenly thinking they were images of French kings. Some wonderful Parisian or Parisians must have collected them all and buried them behind the Cathedral, because that's where they were discovered by accident in 1977. They are exhibited at the Cluny Museum. The heads you see, on what remains of the original 13th century facade, are 19th century best guesses.