For now, the agency is vowing to help with the rebuilding. It could also be applied to Notre Dame, itself part of a UNESCO world heritage site. Its change of heart is tied to the destruction of architectural treasures due to war and cultural intolerance. UNESCO, the official curator of what’s worth preserving in the world, has been sanctioning more rebuilds. In recent years, the gatekeepers of restoration propriety have been loosening up standards.
SPIRE OF NOTRE DAME FULL
The entire cathedral is full of later additions like the bells, including part of the wooden structure that burned during this week’s fire, and some of the cathedral’s famous gargoyoles, or chimères. Had the bells been original, historic accuracy would have been preserved for the eye but not the ear: The bells would have fallen out of tune through age. (Bells, like light bulbs, don’t last forever.) For some Parisians, that was too much meddling with history, even though the bells were low-quality casts added in the 19th century, many hundreds of years after the cathedral was built. The goal was to recreate their 17th century sound. In 2011, a brouhaha erupted over the church’s plan to replace its bells.
Look no further than Notre Dame to see the predicaments that can arise from lack of clarity on those questions. Or what, if anything, are the stewards of historic buildings to do with non-authentic elements, or whether there are any circumstances that warrant reconstructing them. Still, the Venice charter didn’t settle the issue of what exactly is authentic and worth preserving. Hugo fell into what has been called the anti-restoration camp, which saw historic buildings as evolving structures and found beauty in the resulting pastiche, as conservator Jukka Jokilehto explains in his history of architectural restoration.ĪP Photo By the 1960s, Violllet-le-Duc’s rebuilding of the spire would have been unthinkable. They didn’t necessarily agree on the definition of restoration. Viollet-le-Duc rode it, getting a commission to restore Notre-Dame in 1844.īoth men wanted to save France’s medieval treasures. His ode to the cathedral, the era’s equivalent of a New York Times bestseller, spurred a preservation wave. Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, first published in 1831, was a powerful piece of marketing. Under the romantic lens of the time, Hugo and others rebranded it as a symbol of liberation from dogma and stiff hierarchies. Up to the early 19th century, the cathedral’s Gothic style had been considered somewhat barbaric. Its first spire disappeared sometime between 17. During that period, the stately cathedral was used for storage, its bells melted to make cannons. In 1548, the Protestant Huguenots had vandalized the building, and some 250 years later, French revolutionaries decapitated its stone kings. Nearly 700 years after its first stone was laid, the cathedral was in a sorry state.
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