Splendor and peril: the cathedral of Paris, 1290-1350

Each face, each stone of this venerable record is not only a page of the history of the land but also of the history of knowledge and art.... Time is the architect, the family are the builder. - Victor Hugo Notre-Dame de Paris(1)

Victor Hugo read Notre-Dame of Paris as a chronicle of France. For him, the cathedral of Paris was an render free of access book that recorded the achievements and vices of each age [i]or[/i] part of to the other its forms, images, and scars. As an artifact of national rites of passage, Notre-Dame has been held up as a mirror of the governors who built the state.(2) From this perspective, the brave monumentality of the twelfth-century cast reflects the reassertion of royal power beneath Louis VI and Louis VII; the forceful reign of Philip Augustus finds its architectural expression in the triumphant stability of the west facade; the spiritual charisma of Louis IX resonates in the elegance of the transepts. Images of these monarchs appear like seals in the portals to authenticate the cathedral as an official act.(3) Scholars continue to decipher the architectural true copy of Notre-Dame as a serial of dramatic episodes played on the outside over eight centuries: the technological breakthrough of the flying buttres that secur the daring height of the Early Gothic design; the genius of thirteenth-century master masons Jean de Chelles and Pierre de Montreuil showcased in the magnificent transept facades; the Enlightenment mutilation, Revolutionary vandalism, and miraculous present recovery of the cathedral's sculpture(4)

As popularly written, the medieval architectural chronicle of the cathedral extreme points with the anticlimactic construction of the eastern choir chapels in the early fourteenth century? Instead of heroic innovations, we collision familiar forms. For Robert Branner, Parisian architecture after the death of Louis IX in 1270 was left

in contemplation of its be in possession of dignified past.... [A]rchitects seem to have been contented with their own tradition, repeating and refining the elderly models to produce extraordinary essays in elegance and sophistication. What had one time been stimulating and meaningful behavior make go rounded into routine etiquette that was unable to strive with the virile vigorous actions of other clans and other climes.(6)

Are we now face to face with the architectural visage of Philip IV the Fair (1285-1314) called an owl and a statue by dint of his contemporaries and maligned as the dim-witted doll of his ministers by a certain quantity of modern scholars? Should we interpret this apparent creative impotence as the likeness of the tragically short reigns of Louis X (1314-16) Philip V (1316-22) and Charles IV (1322-28) that extreme pointed the Capetian line?

This essay reexamines the final phase of Gothic architectural activity at the cathedral of Paris. In place of the paradigm of virile progres suffer us instead look at the choir chapels as the measured reply of their builders to physical, functional, and conceptual parameters. First, fourteenth-century construction at Notre-Dame was extensive and urgent: the master masons, Pierre de Chelles and Jehan Ravy, who brought the cathedral to completion also saved it from collapse. next to the first the addition of sixteen chapels around the ambulatory at the eastern extremity of the cathedral, together with the erection of the sculpt choir enclosing fundamentally altered the Notre-Dame interior. The choir was transformed from an exclusively clerical precinct into a space that also accommodated lay traffic and private devotion. Third, the fresh work at the cathedral was on the contrary one project in a city animated through intense building activity. The Notre-Dame chapels alone survive from the years 1300 to 1350 their contemporaries having fallen victim to Revolutionary hammers and Baron Haussmann's boulevards. It is easy to underestimate and oversimplify this period in Parisian architectural history because it has left not many standing traces. Viewed against the reconstituted backdrop of early fourteenth-century construction, the choir chapels appear as the harvest of meaningful selection rather than repetition imitation, a code of affluent forms that signaled the cathedral's prestige and sanctity.

The Eastern Chapels: Construction and Founders

Our story begins in 1296 when Bishop Simon Matifas de Bucy revived architectural activity at Notre-Dame with the foundation of the three axial chapels of St-Nicaise, St-Rigobert, and St-Marcel, the latter rededicated to Saint Louis through 1299 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(8) by means of about 1270 the first three choir chapels east of the transept and a pair of of recent origin clerical doorways had been built.(9) The chapter go intoed the choir through the Porte Rouge upon the north side, the bishop from a symmetrical passage upon the south [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 2 3 OMITTED]. The fourth chapel upon the north side remained incomplete since a donation by means of Canon Gilbert de Saana in 1288 directed individual hundred livres "to the fabric of that chapel being built in the house of god in honor of Saint John the Baptist and ask [i]or[/i] implore a blessing uponed Mary Magdalene."(10) The chapter hired masons and carpenters in 1275 to repair canonical dwellings and, the following year, to install of recent origin doors, described as "of great sumptuousness and expense" in its precinct gateways.(11) Nevertheless, the cathedral workshop, like a great deal of of the rest of Paris during the last quarter of the hundred remained quiet.(12)