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

Each face, each stone of this venerable monument is not only a page of the history of the country, but also of the history of knowledge and art.... Time is the architect, the people 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 open book that recorded the achievements and vices of each age through its forms, images, and scars. As an artifact of national rites of passage, Notre-Dame has been held up as a mirror of the rulers who built the state.(2) From this perspective, the bold monumentality of the twelfth-century project reflects the reassertion of royal power under 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 text of Notre-Dame as a serial of dramatic episodes played out over eight centuries: the technological breakthrough of the flying buttress that secured 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 modern recovery of the cathedral's sculpture.(4)

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

in contemplation of its own dignified past.... [A]rchitects seem to have been content with their own tradition, repeating and refining the old models to produce extraordinary essays in elegance and sophistication. What had once been stimulating and meaningful behavior turned into routine etiquette that was unable to contend with the virile vigorous actions of other peoples 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 his contemporaries and maligned as the dim-witted puppet of his ministers by some 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 ended 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 progress, let us instead look at the choir chapels as the measured response 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. Second, the addition of sixteen chapels around the ambulatory at the eastern extremity of the cathedral, together with the erection of the sculpted choir enclosure, 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 new work at the cathedral was but one project in a city animated by 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 few standing traces. Viewed against the reconstituted backdrop of early fourteenth-century construction, the choir chapels appear as the product of meaningful selection rather than rote imitation, a code of opulent 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 by 1299 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED].(8) By about 1270 the first three choir chapels east of the transept and a pair of new clerical doorways had been built.(9) The chapter entered the choir through the Porte Rouge on the north side, the bishop from a symmetrical passage on the south [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 2, 3 OMITTED]. The fourth chapel on the north side remained incomplete since a donation by Canon Gilbert de Saana in 1288 directed one hundred livres "to the fabric of that chapel being built in the church in honor of Saint John the Baptist and Blessed Mary Magdalene."(10) The chapter hired masons and carpenters in 1275 to repair canonical dwellings and, the following year, to install new doors, described as "of great sumptuousness and expense," in its precinct gateways.(11) Nevertheless, the cathedral workshop, like much of the rest of Paris during the last quarter of the century, remained quiet.(12)