Le Stryge de Notre-Dame: Some Aspects of Meryon's Symbolism

Abstract

Among the copious products of the Gothic Revival in the graphic arts, Charles Meryon's major work, the Eaux-fortes sur Paris (1852–54), enjoys a special distinction in its unity of imaginative and topographical content. Beyond his native country, Meryon's imagery had perhaps its closest parallel in the painting of Caspar David Friedrich in the symbolic prominence it gives to Gothic forms; in France, certainly, Meryon was without near rivals in his line. Of the etchings in which he sought to preserve the likeness of the mediaeval remains of Paris, the image that most completely epitomizes the subject and sense of his oeuvre is Le Stryge (Fig. 1). That it has become the most memorable emblem of the Gothic era as rediscovered by the nineteenth century is attested, to cite only recent examples, by photographs of the original of Meryon's subject on the covers of such diverse publications as Sitwell's Gothic Europe (1969) and the April, 1970 issue of Boys' Life, and among examples of French Gothic sculpture in Roos' Illustrated Handbook of Art History,1 while the etching itself is reproduced on the title-page of the 1969 edition of Bridaham's Gargoyles, Chimères and the Grotesque in French Gothic Sculpture.