Notre Dame Cathedral Research Articles

Rock, Paper, Scissors: On Media Revolution and the Death Penalty

Rock, Paper, Scissors: On Media Revolution and the Death Penalty Katie Chenoweth (bio) Ceci tuera cela. —Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris The words cited above are what I will be calling Victor Hugo’s formula, or law, of media revolution. They are pronounced by the archdeacon Claude Frollo in Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, a novel initially published in 1831 and set in the Paris of 1482, that is, twenty-seven years after the printing of the forty-two-line Gutenberg Bible and just twelve years after books were first produced in Paris using the new technology. The term ceci (this) is the new medium of the printed book; cela (that) refers to Notre-Dame Cathedral. For Hugo, the printing press arrives in a city where another medium has held sway: not the manuscript book, as more recent narratives of the printing revolution would lead us to anticipate, but rather the stone of architecture. The city of Paris appears as “a chronicle in stone,” while Notre-Dame operates as a monumental text (“each stone . . . is a page”1) in which, prior to mass literacy, human life gets externalized and recorded.2 The stone “book” would thus be the ancestor of the printed book but also its double: “mankind has two books, two records, two testaments: masonry and printing, the [End Page 3] stone Bible and the paper Bible.”3 Print and stone operate in Notre-Dame de Paris as historical rivals in a media revolution, the impact of which is, in Hugo’s reimagining, already being felt in 1482. This feeling presents itself as a presentiment of violence: the printed book is coming to “kill” Notre-Dame. This is what Frollo announces in Book Five: The archdeacon silently contemplated the gigantic building for a while, then sighed as he stretched out his right hand towards the printed book lying open on his table and his left hand towards Notre-Dame, and looked sadly from the book to the church. “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” [ceci tuera cela]. . . . “[T]he book will kill the building.”4 Media revolution in Frollo’s foretelling implies not only a succession of (technical, aesthetic, material) regimes but also an act of violence or even a calculated execution—albeit a strange kind of execution we have yet to understand, performed by one medium upon another. Indeed, the new medium would seem to possess the power—or perhaps even the sovereign right—to put the other to death. Hugo’s formula in which new media give death to the old, ceci tuera cela, is all the more striking given that the novel Notre-Dame de Paris prominently features the death sentence and ends on the dramatic execution of a central character, La Esmeralda. What’s more, Victor Hugo was an outspoken advocate for the abolition of capital punishment and had just two years earlier published the overtly anti–death penalty novel Le dernier jour d’un condamné. This backdrop of capital punishment invites us to take seriously—and literally, as it were—Hugo’s verb tuer (to kill) and its death-sentencing simple future tense, tuera. In what follows, this is precisely what I will be doing: tracking the relationship between, on the one hand, the life and death of media—particularly this strange killing of stone by the printed book—and, on the other hand, the logic of the death penalty. What would it mean to read the history of the death penalty as a history of mediation and media change and vice versa? This will be my central question, beginning in Paris with a coincidental story of stones that resurface during the twilight of the death penalty in 1977; I then return to Victor Hugo and his killer printing press of 1482, passing by way of 1793 and pausing on Jacques Derrida’s recently published Death Penalty seminar. This risks being a story that turns in circles, since I will be arguing (with Hugo but also against him) that both media change and the death penalty are best understood as phenomena in which substitution is violently at work and always already taking place. Ultimately, I [End Page 4] wish to argue...

Architecture that bows to the artist: Musée Soulages

This paper examines the museum dedicated to Pierre Soulages and its relationship with Soulages, the city of Rodez, the Forirail Garden (which is the site of the museum), and the ideas and practices realised by Catalan architects Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta (RCR). The Musée Soulages is defined by the colour black and the luminous fluidity of steel as designed by RCR Arquitectes; it is also aligned with an environmental ecology that literally and figuratively represents the town of Rodez with its Notre-Dame Cathedral. The central thesis is that the Musée Soulages inducts the visitor into a role of active participation and exchange in an atmosphere of transcendental logic, and, ultimately, a new way to experience black as a colour rather than the lack of one. A visitor to the Musée Soulages becomes part of a theatrical event in which two actors —one French abstract painter, three Catalan architects—communicate in physical terms about the metaphysical environment, and the relationship between the scenographic and the tectonic in architecture. The Musée Soulages is a fascinating metaphorical representation of not only Pierre Soulages's character and his work, but also of the role of the built environment and material culture that is intertwined with the body of Soulages's expressive works. This essay focuses on the material and symbolic gestures created by Pierre Soulages and RCR Arquitectes to maintain and promote their particular world views, and examines the ways in which their expressive mediums and ideas are by turn harmonious and contradictory.

Correction method for averaging slowly time-variant room impulse response measurements.

Various methods exist for room acoustic measurements. To increase the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), averaging of repeated room impulse responses (RIR) can be performed under the assumption of time-invariant systems. Associated with a study of the Paris Notre Dame cathedral, time-variances due to minute temperature changes were observed which confounded results of averaged RIRs, producing significantly shorter reverberation times. A correction method for such time-variance of the acoustic system is proposed, based on time-stretching. Following correction, reverberation times of averaged RIRs were comparable to expected tolerance ranges for measurements, well within one just noticeable difference, while also exhibiting a mid-frequency SNR gain of 8 dB.

Notre-Dame de Paris, 1163–2013: Actes du colloque scientifique tenu au Collège des Bernardins, à Paris, du 12 au 15 décembre 2012 ed. by Cédric Giraud (review)

Reviewed by: Notre-Dame de Paris, 1163–2013: Actes du colloque scientifique tenu au Collège des Bernardins, à Paris, du 12 au 15 décembre 2012 ed. by Cédric Giraud Yossi Maurey Notre-Dame de Paris, 1163–2013: Actes du colloque scientifique tenu au Collège des Bernardins, à Paris, du 12 au 15 décembre 2012. Edited by Cédric Giraud. (Turnhout: Brepols. 2014. Pp. 658. €118,49. ISBN 978-2-503-54937-8.) In 2013, 850 years after the foundation stone of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was laid, a conference celebrating this illustrious church took place in Paris. The book brings together papers by specialists of intellectual and institutional history, social and religious history, liturgy, paleography, musicology, and history of art. Throughout its history, the cathedral was associated with numerous individuals (poets, musicians, theologians, bishops, scholars), institutions (the Augustinian Abbey of Saint-Victor, the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Denis, the University of Paris), religious orders (Franciscans, Dominicans), and the French monarchy. The book provides readers with various perspectives on these themes, with articles grouped into five main sections. Notwithstanding their different methodologies, disciplines, and priorities—as can be expected in a volume exploring almost a millennium of history—most articles proceed from a thorough examination of primary sources, including a wide variety of service books and archival documents. The book covers two principal subject matters. One group of articles addresses the cathedral in relation to some of its illustrious episcopal and canonical authorities, from Bishop Maurice of Sully—under whose episcopate most of the construction took place in the twelfth century—and Jean Gerson (canon at Notre Dame, theologian, and chancellor of the University of Paris in the early-fifteenth century) to Jean-Marie Lustiger (archbishop of Paris from 1981 to 2005). A second group of articles is dedicated to broader themes that cut across centuries, including the frivolities sometimes associated with the Feast of Circumcision (the so-called Feast of Fools), music and liturgy, the relationship between the cathedral and other establishments (the university, the hospital, abbeys and churches), and political history. A closer examination of one of the book’s sections may illustrate the breadth of methodologies and perspectives offered therein. The fourth section of the book (“La cathédrale et la cité de Dieu”) comprises four articles, each dealing with a different aspect of the liturgy at medieval Notre Dame. The section opens with an archaeological excavation in the musical mound that is Notre Dame. Claire Maître sets out to discover archaic musical elements in the chant books of a church that, similarly to many other prominent churches, witnessed numerous changes, reforms, additions, and omissions in all that concerns its musical tradition. An [End Page 894] examination of the antiphons of the ferial office found in a service book copied c. 1300 reveals that eight of them exhibit traits of archaic modality. Moving from monophony to polyphony, Guillaume Gross examines the three- and four-part organa composed for the most solemn feast inscribed in the calendar of Notre Dame. He considers them to be instruments of propaganda in the service of the bishop, and brings to the fore questions of audience and patronage. Remaining in the thirteenth century but moving to Bari, in southern Italy, Maria Gurrado examines some of the service books housed at the archives of the Saint-Nicolas Basilica. The court of Charles I of Anjou (1226–85), the younger brother of Louis IX, adopted the liturgy of the Sainte-Chapelle for the collegiate church of Saint-Nicolas in Bari. In 1296, Charles II (1254–1309), son of Charles of Anjou, officially named the basilica a “Sainte-Chapelle” and endowed it with twenty-three manuscripts that followed the usage of Paris, which thus has relevance to the volume under discussion. Crowning the fourth section of the volume is Jean-Baptiste Lebigue’s article, which brings to light the original Ordo that served for the 1431 coronation of Henri VI of England as king of France at Notre Dame Cathedral, when he was only ten years of age. Lebigue concludes his insightful contribution with a masterful edition of the Ordo. Finally, a detailed catalog of Notre Dame sources exhibited at the...

Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey (review)

Reviewed by: Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey Jorge Carlos Arias Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2014) xii + 176 pp. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages is a valiant effort of scholarship in the current academic environment. The criticisms of the so-called linguistic turn, the complex history of the modern concept of race, and the weight of the idea of a clean break between the medieval and renaissance periods have made the study of “race” in a pre-modern setting a dangerous endeavor. Ramey’s goal is to point out that many important elements that would become much more explicit in “scientific racism” and nineteenth-century European colonialist discourses were already present in the Middle Ages. She supports this point armed with post-colonial and literary analyses of a wide variety of sources: medieval prose and verse, Classical ethnographies, medieval commentaries on the Bible, fifteenth-century colonial debates and, most surprisingly, modern films and nineteenth-century depictions of the Middle Ages. [End Page 289] Given that few scholars today would consent to the un-qualified use of the term race before the modern period, Ramey’s first task is to explain how she plans to use it and what she really intends to study. She settles on treating racism as “a form of xenophobia,” often utilizing the concept of “the Other” (1). She describes medieval culture not as “color blind” as many older studies of this topic have asserted but as “proto-racial” and containing a “cacophony of discourses” regarding race, before modern conceptions of phenotypic difference cemented a hegemonic idea of race (2). Ramey focuses on “prejudice against darker-skinned persons from non-Western cultures precisely because of their skin color and their usually imagined, always unfamiliar, cultural practices” (1). Lest there be some confusion, Ramey explicitly states that she is not arguing that racial consciousness was born in the Middle Ages, but that the medieval period did play an important role in its subsequent development (3). There are two central critiques in the book: first, of the scholarly tradition that asserted that a categorical rupture existed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; second, of the role of the nineteenth century in shaping not only our modern conceptions of race but also of the medieval period itself. The first tradition helped to isolate the study of race solely to the modern era and consequently resulted in the interpretation of the medieval period as a “golden age of cohabitation,” and erased “the history of prejudice that was present from what many consider to be the foundation of European civilization” (3). Writers of the nineteenth century displayed a particularly Romanticized view of the Middle Ages, for example evident in the development of professional history and its relationship to the creation of the modern nation-state based on supposed and Romanticized ties to medieval predecessors. This view became intertwined with a search for essentialist origins and a scientific racism that reflected certain nineteenth-century concerns on race back into the medieval period. Chapter 1 looks at various examples of this Romanticized view of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century. Washington Irving’s tales of medieval Spain in The Alhambra (1832) are imbued with a fear of “racially linked degeneration more appropriate to his own American culture” (9). For example, his praise of the Arab elite of Muslim Spain, which he portrays as white and worthy of intermarriage with the “Gothic” Christian elite, is contrasted with depictions of the decay of the monarchy of Granada through its intermarriage with Berber groups, characterized as dark and governed by emotion. Eugène-Emmanual Viollet-le-Duc, as the architect in charge of restoring many of France’s most famous medieval structures (Vézelay Abbey, Mont Saint-Michel, Notre Dame Cathedral) between 1838 and 1879, not only had an immense influence in the representation and re-interpretation of medieval architecture, but he also helped to strengthen the notion that “elementary characteristics of… race” and environment were linked to ethnically essentialist aesthetic and architectural choices (23). Chapter 2 is an overview of how race has...

Re-casting the Past: Re-instating Once Broken and Tuneless Bells and the Recalling of Past Urban Landscapes

This paper explores the perception of urban landscapes through sound, using two case studies of cities where bells played a significant role in the city, where a particular dramatic event silenced these bells, and where the act of remaking broken or tuneless bells re-creates an engagement with the lived places of the past. At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, newly cast bells recreate the melodious peal last heard before the French Revolution, and ChristChurch Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, bells damaged by destructive earthquakes of 2011 will eventually ring out their familiar tones in an urban landscape that is physically almost unrecognisable. Both case studies demonstrate the ways that the inadvertent and the deliberate transformation of soundscapes continually interacts with ideas of place and meaning within the constantly changing city.

Vietnam’s Second Revolution

Vietnam’s Second Revolution

Can High Speed Rail Foster the Choice of Destination for Tourism Purpose?

Marketing decisions and strategic planning of tourism provisions require knowledge of factors affecting this choice and type of trips and forecast of tourism flows in the short and long term. It is interesting to know how holidaymakers select their holiday destinations and investigate which factors are determining their choices. Indeed the objective of this paper is to analyze the role of High Speed Rail systems in this choice. A survey was carried out in Paris in October 2012, tourists were interviewed close to the Eiffel Tower, Paris Lyon Central Train Station and Notre-Dame Cathedral. The results will be compared with a previous survey employed in Rome in April 2012. The scope here is providing an answer to the questions: are tourists influenced by the presence of High Speed Rail in choosing Paris or Rome for their holidays? Does High Speed Rail influence the probability of visiting other served cities and returning to Paris or to Rome? The research suggests that several factors (the presence of architectural sites, the quality of promotion of the destination itself, the presence of events) influence the choice of a tourist. It also shows that the HSR system has affected the choice of Paris and Rome differently.

The Great War in Russian Memory by Karen Petrone (review)

Reviewed by: The Great War in Russian Memory by Karen Petrone Sam Johnson (bio) Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 385 pp. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-253-35617-8. In November 2008, I happened to be in Paris for a conference that coincided with Armistice Day, which remains a national holiday in France. A number of friends and colleagues attending the conference were from St. Petersburg, one of whom stumbled upon a service at Notre Dame Cathedral. It was, he told me with some astonishment, a ceremony devoted to World War I. Of course, coming from the UK, where the dead of the Great War still have well-kept spaces of remembrance in every village, town, and city, these events were of no surprise to me. Walking around Paris’s hushed streets, the impression was poignant and evocative, as I inevitably recalled my own ancestors’ part in that terrible conflict. As well as memorials, everyone in Britain has their own family tales to tell, passed through several generations. That my Russian colleague was startled to find this war so publicly and officially commemorated in the twenty-first century spoke volumes [End Page 444] about our differing paths in negotiating national memories of the past century. Nevertheless, while World War I may be less remembered today in the states of the former Soviet Union, in her well-researched and argued The Great War in Russian Memory, Karen Petrone shows that it was far from totally forgotten in the twentieth century. It has often been a convention to imagine that 1914−1917/18 was officially wiped from public discourse in the Soviet Union, its effect and meaning overshadowed by more grievous wars, not least the bitter fratricidal conflict that initially ran concurrent with the final months of Russia’s Great War. But, as Petrone observes, this approach is somewhat simplistic, for World War I did not suddenly or totally disappear from the Russian imagination. It retained a place, albeit for varying reasons, especially in the first two decades that followed its end. Focusing on public representation, Petrone analyzes a number of “contested” World War I discourses: religion, gender, violence, and patriotism. Divided in two parts (though this is only made evident in the introduction; it is not indicated in the contents), the study first looks at how the above themes were manifest in the Russian account and, in the second part, explores how they changed over time. Chapter 1 focuses on the Great War in Russian memory, starting with an insightful account of the origins and later fate of the Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery, which originally held 17,500 of the war’s dead, as well as 10,000 from the Civil War. In the 1930s, its church and grave markers were demolished, leaving a single monument, to Sergei Shlikhter, who died during the 1916 Brusilov Offensive. Chapter 2 considers the extent to which religion and spirituality featured in interwar accounts, while Chapter 3 looks at the paradoxes of gender, considering how the war was viewed as an arena for contested masculinities. Chapters 4 and 5 look at the extent to which war and violence were normalized in Soviet narratives, and how this, in turn, fed into definitions of Russianness. The final three chapters are concerned with the longer view of the war’s influence and legacy. Chapter 8 brings the fate of the Shlikhter memorial up to date, as Petrone considers memorialization in the post-Soviet era. Petrone’s purpose is not simply to examine the Great War’s resonance in Russia, but also to consider “the Soviet Union’s relation to interwar Europe and […] the rhythm of transformations in all Soviet discourse in the interwar period” (P. 20). For this reason, comparative Western European totems occasionally appear, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Wilfred Owen’s posthumous Dulce et Decorum est. [End Page 445] Most of the sources Petrone uses are literary and, for scholars of East European history, several familiar names recur: Il’ia Erenburg and Mikhail Sholokhov are the most well-known. The former, who wrote of his own experiences as a war...

An in situ corrosion study of Middle Ages wrought iron bar chains in the Amiens Cathedral

The corrosion behaviour of Middle Ages wrought iron bar chains exposed to indoor atmospheric corrosion for hundred of years in the Notre Dame Cathedral of Amiens (France) has been evaluated by means of Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS), a well-established electrochemical technique extensively used for testing anticorrosive properties of metal coatings. The measurements have been performed in situ with a portable EIS instrument designed to work as a standalone device, in six different areas of the wrought iron bar chains characterized by different aesthetical appearance. Moreover, a properly designed electrochemical cell has been employed to carry out the impedance measurements without affecting the artefacts surfaces. The wrought iron bar chains, as evidenced by μ-Raman and microscopic analyses, are covered by corrosion products constituted by iron oxides and oxyhydroxides, such as goethite, lepidocrocite, maghemite, akaganeite, organized in complex layered structures. In situ EIS allows one to investigate the phenomena involved at the electrochemical interfaces among the various corrosion products and to assess and predict their corrosion behaviour. From the analysis of the experimental findings of this monitoring campaign, EIS measurements can be proposed to restorers/conservators as a reliable indicator of dangerous situations on which they must act for the preservation of the iron artefacts.

Making, Breaking, Loving, and Hating Images: Prelude to a Theology of Iconoclasm

IT MAY WELL INDICATE WE ARE LOST in a dark wood of idolatries and iconoclasms when two sophisticated and much-lauded scholars sketch, in the same year, opposite cartographies of these landscapes. In historian James Simpson's book Under the Hammer (Oxford 2010), the way of iconoclasm inevitably begets further image breaking, while anthropologist Bruno Latour insists in his book On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Duke 2010) that the path of iconoclasm generates, despite itself, further image making. There are ways their stories converge, too, but such convergences occur largely over the ambiguities of iconoclasm. What makes iconoclasm so tangled and rough, so difficult to discern and describe? I suggest that, anesthetized for decades--centuries, even--to our own iconoclasm, we Westerners are still full of sleep as we grope toward a path through icons, images, and idols. My goal with this article is not to shine a beam of clarity onto iconoclasm. It is instead to do two things. First, I want to awaken us to the ways that it is more difficult than it may at first appear to identify iconoclasm. In doing this, I will dip briefly into historical and current events, not to offer definitive interpretations of them (should such a feat be possible), but to constellate them in ways that disturb prevailing notions of what and where iconoclasm is occurring. Second, I want to begin beating a path through this thicket by generating a typology of iconoclasms that distinguishes them by the kind of they entail. I will begin with descriptions of contemporary image controversies, review the importance and limits of Simpson and Latour's theses about iconoclasm, and then propose my non-exhaustive taxonomic approach. Along the way, I hope to demonstrate that iconoclasm is deeply embedded in modern Western society, not because the modern West hates images, but because iconoclasm is intrinsic to iconophilia. Such work, I hope, will clear the way to ask more nuanced theological questions about iconoclasm--not questions of whether we should be iconoclastic or how we might avoid being iconoclastic, but questions about what kind of iconoclasm we should practice and under what conditions such iconoclasm might help us learn to love certain images better. I hope to display the way hating and loving images, making and breaking them, no longer present themselves as two poles on a spectrum, competing options we can and must choose between. More than ever before, iconoclasm and iconophilia come to us knotted together, so that iconoclasm needs to be reinterpreted for a new age. I To understand the ambiguities of the image in contemporary society, I take us back to the end of the eighteenth century and across the Atlantic to France, image-maker extraordinaire of the Western world.The French Revolution was a decisive moment in the history of images. The revolution began, as revolutions often do, by breaking images of the former religiopolitical order. Following the revolutionaries' assembly vote to destroy signs of the old regime, the summer of 1793 was hot with iconoclastic fervor. Enraged mobs dug up the ornamented tombs of kings, pulled down royal statues, and vandalized Notre Dame Cathedral as they sought to instantiate a new order of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Not all revolutionaries enthused over the destruction of old masterpieces, though. Those troubled by their fellow revolutionaries' image breaking found in the suggestion of Pierre Cambon an alternative to destroying images. They transformed the Louvre Palace into a museum where such masterpieces could exist comfortably, having had their role as signs of the old regime's power safely curtailed. (1) Did, then, the museum prevent further acts of iconoclasm? Or was creating the museum itself an iconoclastic gesture, one that silenced images even as it left them intact? Ensconced in the museum, images were politically and religiously neutralized. …

Astronomical Organ Music

Music inspired by astronomical phenomena is familiar to INSAP participants. In this presentation, I will present two pieces of astronomy-inspired music composed specifically for the organ: Nebulae and Nova. The music will be accompanied by a slide show of astronomical images. Nebulae is my original work and is a musical narrative on the process of star formation. It has been performed throughout the United States, including at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in October 2010. Nova is by the American composer Myron Roberts, and is a depiction of a supernova explosion.

Raw materials used in ancient mortars from the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Tournai (Belgium)

Abstract: Mortar samples from the Notre-Dame Cathedral at Tournai in Belgium have been investigated as part of a broader studyconsidering the transition of ancient cities and their rural territories from Roman to late Roman society and the transformation to theearly Middle Ages. Masonry mortars and mortars used for flooring have been studied from the Imperial Roman period, theCarolingian style period and the Romanesque style period (4th–11th century AD).A selected set of samples has been characterised using a combination of mineralogical, chemical and microscopical techniques.This characterisation enabled us to refine our knowledge of the mortar composition, of the original materials and of their provenance.It appears that both chalk and ‘‘hard’’ Tournaisian limestone were used to produce the lime. Both locally available materials can yieldeither hydraulic or non-hydraulic lime. The aggregates have a local origin. Additionally, several microscopical techniques wereapplied to identify the nature of the overburnt particles. The low abundance of this type of Binder Related Particles in the Gallo-Roman and Palaeo-Christian mortars suggests that technological knowledge, be it empirical or theoretical, was available.Key-words: ancient mortars, raw materials, provenance, lime binder, lime burning, hydraulicity, archaeometry.

The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris

Buildings often employ visual and spatial rhetorics that both persuade us of their function and determine personal functionality. Architectural language is a defining feature of disability in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and a universally accessible language. In emphasizing the synecdochic relationship between gothic buildings and the disabled body, Hugo demonstrates that he is not only a pioneer in urban and architectural semantics, but that he also understands the complex symbolic relationship between architecture and the disabled body. Defining beauty as atypicality, through the gothic aesthetic, Hugo presents Notre Dame Cathedral as a uniquely drifting symbol (with its multiple meanings, its transitional status and its cultural miscegenation) with a revelatory function: it expresses disability as normative.

Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris France

Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris France

Orchids in politics and the public garden: the Untermyer Park in Yonkers, New York

The remarkable history of Untermyer Park, the garden of a luxurious private estate in upstate New York transferred into a public park, is currently muddled in city and architecture archives due to ...

Quantitative composition of ancient mortars from the Notre Dame Cathedral in Tournai (Belgium)

A combined micro- and macroscopical approach was implemented for the quantification of the main constituents in a set of 41 ancient mortar samples from Tournai (Belgium). The samples range in age from Roman to Romanesque. The microscopical study consisted of point counting on thin sections prepared from these mortars. If sufficiently large samples were available, Image Analysis on plane polished surfaces was used to quantify the larger objects (> 1 mm) as lime lumps or ceramics. In spite of possible uncertainties, general conclusions about these mortars could be drawn. The Roman and Palaeochristian mortars are all comparable in containing a considerable amount of ceramic fragments, whereas their presence was not systematic during later times. The binder/aggregate ratios varied from 0.4 to 2.3. Romanesque mortars seem to have a less variable binder to aggregate content compared to the older mortar samples.

Napoleon, David: The Image Enthroned (review)

Napoleon, David:The Image Enthroned Tony Osborne Napoleon, David: The Image Enthroned (2005) Written and directed by Patric Jean. Distributed by First Run / Icarus Films, www.frif.com 51 minutes. On December 2, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte endeavored to legitimate his claim to absolute power by stage-managing a magnificent pageant in Notre Dame Cathedral that transmogrified ancient myths, church rituals, and symbols of empire and monarchy. The five-hour ceremony, a disjointed pairing of a secular coronation with a pre-Revolutionary papal anointment, culminated in an act of audacious ritual usurpation: at the moment of consecration, Napoleon trampled papal sanctity and crowned himself Emperor, publicly humiliating Pope Pius VII, whose authority—toppled by the Revolution—Bonaparte had restored specifically for this unprecedented royal anointment. However, as Patric Jean reveals in Napoleon, David: the Image Enthroned (2005), this "surprise" denouement had been prearranged, capping four months of bitter papal negotiations. In return for an opportunity to proselytize in France, the Pope agreed to journey to Paris to play a supplicant role in a public spectacle that placed the Vatican beneath the Emperor of the French People. Looking down from a lavishly draped spectator's box, Jacques-Louis David, the premiere neo-classical painter of the age, sketched this epochal moment and filled his notebooks with impressions of the royal entourage. David set up his studio in the chapel, and guided by mock-ups and clay figurines, completed Napoleon's Coronation in two years. Upon inspecting the finished work—one of four that Napoleon had commissioned to commemorate his ascendancy—the Emperor exclaimed, "It is not a painting. There are people walking in this picture. Life is everywhere. David, I salute you. You have made me a French knight." Resplendent with 150 life-sized figures, this enormous canvas (some 660 square feet), which now hangs in the Louvre, is the organizing motif of Napoleon, David. The Coronation painting is on screen for nearly 15 minutes of Jean's 51-minute film about the ritual machinations of power and image. Jean explores the painting's terrain inch by inch—close enough to reveal canvas dimples beneath the paint. As the camera drinks in characters, colors, and gestures from multiple angles, Jean exposes the Coronation's distortions of fact, both delicate and gross. Originally, David had painted Napoleon crowning himself with a golden laurel wreath. However, to render the Emperor more chivalrous, David recast him crowning a kneeling Josephine. A close-up reveals the after-image of the original composition, a ghostly crown floating above an unsuspecting churchman. David gave 41-year-old Josephine a maiden's rosy, unlined face. Napoleon's mother, who loathed Josephine, snubbed the event, remaining in Rome. On Napoleon's orders, David conspicuously placed her in the main tribune. David had painted a passive Pope, hands in his lap. This displeased Napoleon: "I didn't have him travel this far to sit idly." Hence, for posterity, the pontiff is blessing the moment. Napoleon, David portrays the Emperor as a consummate propagandist who understood the primacy of image in sustaining power. In the 1799 Syrian campaign, Napoleon deserted the sick and wounded and ultimately lost half his army. To squelch rumors, Josephine commissioned Antoine-Jean Gros to reframe history. Thus, in Napoleon at the Penthouse at Jaffa (1804), impervious to infection, like some god, the benevolent leader comforts bubonic plague victims. In David, Napoleon found the perfect image maker, a republican whose allegorical paintings—such as The Oath of the Horatii (1784), commissioned [End Page 80] by Louis XVI—inculcated Roman virtue. In Napoleon, David found the ideal subject, a conqueror with the perfect visage and an imperious flair for grandiosity. "What a fine face he has," David said during a sitting in 1798. "It is pure. It is grand. Like antiquity." Napoleon sought to dissemble naked power in reverence for the past. Thus, his Coronation featured a pastiche of ritual objects and costumes, some invented—such as the ersatz crown of Charlemagne. Napoleon's white silk tunic, embroidered with bees, a symbol of empire, a hive with one leader, was genuinely emblematic of Charlemagne. The red velvet robes, the yards and yards of ermine and gold trim, recalled the...

General De Gaulle Under Sniper Fire In Notre Dame Cathedral, 26 August 1944: Robert Reid's Bbc Commentary

On Friday 25 August 1944, General Leclerc's 2nd French armoured division, together with elements of the United States First Army, liberated Paris. Later that day General de Gaulle, the iconic leade...

Knowing the East (review)

Reviewed by: Knowing the East Patti M. Marxsen Knowing the East. By Paul Claudel. Translated by James Lawler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 136 pp. Fifty years after his death, Paul Claudel (1868–1955) is remembered for many things. Not only was he a major twentieth-century poet and playwright, he was an astute observer of Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese art. Not only was he the brother of sculptor Camille Claudel, he was a diplomat who lived for nearly twenty years in Asia, including a stint as the French ambassador to Japan (1921–1927). When he was elected as a member of the Académie Française in 1946 at nearly 80 years of age he quipped, "For an academic, that is puberty." He died at 87, having lived large in two centuries and on three continents. Following an adolescence marked with indifference toward religion, Claudel experienced a profound conversion to Catholicism during a Christmas night service at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris at the age of 18. With Christianity at the center of his universe and under the influence of Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Mallarmé, he developed a response to the world that was at once poetic and spiritual. Through his poetry, plays, and essays, he insisted on a fundamental unity between matter and spirit, a harmonious and vast universe into which the human mind could enter. And, at least for him, the point of entry was the portal of the Church. He struggled at times, but never lost sight of his faith. For all this, he is often credited with the revival of French Catholicism in the wake of WWI. After all, if Paul Claudel could take religion seriously and find meaning in it, pourquoi pas the rest of us? The facts of his extraordinary biography form a peculiar background to the recent translation by James Lawler of Claudel's collection of prose poems titled Knowing [End Page 229] the East. First published in 1946 as Connaissance de l'est, these sixty-one texts were written between 1895 and 1905 during Claudel's first visits to China and Japan as a young vice-consul stationed in Shanghai. He was twenty-six and still finding his poetic voice. And though his stance in the world is decidedly Christian, the content of this intriguing work reveals an inner dialogue with Buddhist ideas of interconnection, harmony, the ongoing quest for a higher life condition, and the overwhelming impact of nature in the lives of mere humans. In "Pagoda," Claudel describes a seven-story Chinese pagoda as it "amplifies and multiplies the roof, exaggerates the horned corners that rise with an elegant surge, and turns their curves upward to the sky." This form that "does away with walls" and concentrates on the uplifting roof creates a space where "Buddha, Prince of Peace, dwells inside with all the gods." In this architecture he reads a structuring of physical and spiritual space, a kind of never ending upward movement divided into "the seven mystical heavens." The culminating effect is the heavenly achievement of the unknowable. And so, after going as far as he can go into the world of the spirit, he ends this prose poem with an abrupt return to temporal reality. "I have no more to say of the Pagoda. I do not know its name." Elsewhere, in "The Wanderer," he turns his sense of awe toward nature. "Every tree has its personality, every small beast its role, every voice its part in the symphony," he writes. "As one understands music, so I understand nature, like a detailed narrative of proper names; as my walk and the day advance, so does the elaboration of the doctrine." The "doctrine," it seems, is the idea of dependent origination, the interrelation of all life that springs from a single source. In the last line, he states, "I understand the world's harmony. When will I grasp its melody?" In "The Temple of Consciousness" Claudel climbs "the black rock's vertical wall, and only at this late afternoon hour do I know myself to be on the right track." Below, he observes golden rice fields. Ahead there is an "old stairway overlaid with hoary moss...