Why are people so upset about Notre Dame?

…the day after

…I mean, I’m a Catholic, and I have been lucky to have had a long experience of Notre Dame on a functional level and an aesthetic level. But why are so many other people, the secular non-believers, so genuinely upset?

I don’t doubt their sincerity at all. But….there are ruined churches everywhere in the European landscape, and we cope with it.

Here is the great and learned Victor Davis Hanson offering a spontaneous riff on the question:

…the front door

After 800 years, we were the steward of this iconic representation of western civilization, Catholicism, Christendom. And of all the years, 2019, at the height of our sophistication and technology, I’m not blaming the French or anybody, but we were found wanting and we didn’t protect this icon. And we don’t build them anymore.

There’s great churches and cathedrals that go up all over the world, but, Laura, they are in Poland. They are in Cairo. They are in the Ivory Coast, they’re in Brazil, they’re in India. It’s almost as if the places that are less affluent without the technology of western Europe and the United States are like we used to be. They still believe in transcendence.  They still believe in something other than this world.

And so it’s going to be very hard in our society to ever build a cathedral again, much less to repair them, because we don’t believe in what they represented. And it’s ironic, because we don’t like the past. We are at war with the past. We tear down monuments. We don’t build cathedrals. We erase names. We say to Father Serra or Christopher Columbus, you don’t live up to our standards of race, class, and gender, moral superiority. Shame on you…

…Because they (the 21st century citizens) feel something. They feel there is a spiritual loss, there’s a cultural loss. But they are too timid or cowardly to articulate it, because to articulate it would not be politically correct. But it’s such beauty that transcends things. They can feel it. They just don’t want to admit they feel it.

He has a point. It is not just a building. It never has been.

…back in 2010

Notre-Dame de nos jours

Amongst the most misused words in the English language, ‘miracle’ must come pretty high up the list. There are few miracles, but we’ve just seen one. Experienced fire crews and numerous amateur commentators, media pundits etc were all pretty sure that the Notre Dame conflagration would effectively destroy the building,leaving it at best a stone shell. Yet here we are, the morning after:

 

 

It could be a lot, lot worse. It is frankly amazing that the stone vaulted ceiling is still mostly there – a tribute to medieval masons and the laws of physics.

However it was caused – and the media did their very best to avoid even hinting at arson – the outpouring of genuine horror and sadness was actually very heartening. Lots of staunchly irreligious people could sense what a loss this could be – and nothing to do with ‘artworks’, ‘treasures’ and all that. Most visitors don’t go near that stuff, they’re there for the building and its implacable spiritual presence.

I spent time working in a Parisian hospital in the 80’s – free accommodation and free food. It is the only place that I’ve worked where I was asked how I wanted my steak done at lunch (it was always rare, whatever I asked for), and everyone had a glass or two of red wine before the afternoon’s work. Great days.

As such I went past Notre Dame frequently, and I often dropped in. It’s a curious mix of taking it for granted whilst ‘routinely marvelling’ at its wondrous features. Not unlike living in Manhattan or the Piazza Barberini, but with that added, yet incalculable supernatural dimension.

Despite the scrum of far eastern tourists snapping away at the back during mass, it is a profoundly spiritual building, as any church should be. The extra bit that the confirmed secularists get right is that it does represent the soul of France. The wider picture that affects all of us who embrace the concept (which is a real thing, whether you admit it or not), is that it is at the heart of Christendom, a word that the modern world tends to loathe. The French liked to style themselves as the ‘eldest daughter of the Church‘ (despite the vindictive behaviour of the French state over many years) and it’s reflected by the numerous comments on Twitter and elsewhere, in claiming that the apocalyptic images of the spire falling at the start of this Holy Week, constitute a message to the citizenry and to the Catholic Church in general. Maybe they do. It certainly felt that way.

The further miracle is the avowed determination to rebuild that was immediately evident. Good for Pinault and  Arnault. The misunderstanding is when people talk about the cathedral being irreplaceable. It’s handy that the shell – and more – is still standing, but if the building is considered in the context of its function and daily activity (not the tourism), then it is indeed replaceable. A vibrant church does not need 800 year old timber beams. That kind of thinking is in many ways unhelpful and a sideshow. To pretend it’s the same as the already ruined Palmyra, or that it’s all about the 800 year old stained glass (as various people that I know have been doing) is entirely missing the point.

I note that Peter Frankopan proposed to his wife in Notre Dame. I also proposed in Paris – in a less iconic setting, I admit. Everyone who has visited the cathedral remembers it in their own way.

La Descente du Saint-Esprit ~Heures d’Étienne Chevalier, by Jean Fouquet, c1450 (now at the Met in NYC)

I was there in Holy Week in 1986, and thought I’d go to confession. Many of the big churches have confessions in different languages. The sign above the confessional, somewhere down the south aisle, indicated that the priest was a typically brainy Jesuit – I think there were 11 or 12 languages offered by the one person. There were two people ahead of me, so I figured that it wouldn’t take terribly long. The first guy went in, half an hour passed. Another 10 minutes, then he came out looking somewhat worn by it. Had he committed murder perhaps? The next lady went in, this would be quicker. Forty minutes later she too virtually staggered out. In I went, with my modest list of offences. I was also given forty minutes of a mixture of soul baring, benign inquisition and almost psychoanalysis. This was nothing like what I was used to. I left the confessional as a cleansed soul and mind, if a little shaken.

I’ve been many times since. A few years ago I was at the first mass on Sunday – walking across the Pont des coeurs in a virtually empty cityscape. Mass was moderately busy and the tourists were few and far between. At the distribution of communion, two eucharistic ministers were assisting the priest, one on each side of the main aisle. A Japanese couple were queueing for communion, but it gradually became evident that they weren’t familiar with the process, and were almost certainly not Catholics. The girl was respectful, but the man attempted to take the host away, then reluctantly ate it as indicated by a plainly furious eucharistic minister. I thought he was going to punch him, he was so righteously angry. And he was right to be so, having been unwittingly dragged into a possible sacrilege. That was the spirit of Charles Martel, and I have to say was entirely appropriate and admirable. That is, I hope,the spirit which will be stirred by the events of the last 24 hours.

Both these vignettes are the real Notre-Dame in my mind. One of the greatest ever loci for focussing on man’s relationship with God. They are variations on themes that have been repeated over the last 800 years, from when the new cathedral was not far from open fields, and visible from tens of miles away across the plains.

The magnificent rivals such as the nearby Eglise Saint-Eustache will stand in perfectly well, while the reconstruction gets done properly. And just maybe some good will come from all this.

Paris in 1615. Notre-Dame dominating, yet no distance from open farmland

 

 

 

Great Landscapes: when near Rome..

Thomas Cole was an American painter of the famous Hudson River School, though slightly bizarrely, he was actually born in Bolton, Lancashire. Famous and successful in his day, he did the obligatory Grand Tour to Italy in 1842, six years before he died at the age of 47. He had the requisite technical skills, certainly, but if you had to pin down what made him special, it was, I think, a sense of grandeur and otherworldly numinosity. A kind of large scale American version of Caspar David Friedrich, with a touch of the classicism and ethereal light that Turner and Claude Lorrain had mastered.

To a degree he is the victim of the kind of snobbery that relegates him to second tier status in the art world. If you were to dilute him down to the most basic elements, you might end up with someone like the gifted commercial sentimentalist, Thomas Kinkade.

In any event his Italian paintings are terrific, and here’s one of them:

Thomas Cole, Ruins of Aqueducts in the Roman Campagna, 1843. The Wadsworth Athenaeum, Connecticut

Which came to mind when I stumbled upon a magnificent landscape by Edward Lear, ‘nonsense author’, of the pyramids at Giza. I had no idea what a great artist he was. Having explored his stuff a bit, I found this:

Edward Lear, In the Campagna Near Rome, 1844

I’m not sure where it’s held these days, but note that it’s almost contemporaneous with Cole’s work. Lear had a long life and spent about 5 decades travelling on and off, mainly in Europe, at a time when that was obviously a bit more arduous than today. Both paintings are magnificent.

Before them both though, in 1826, was Camille Corot, with a much simpler style, but the same magical effect:

Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot, The Roman Campagna with the Claudian Aqueduct, 1826. The National Gallery, London

 

You can of course still see this scene, at the Parco degli Acquedotti, only a few miles from the city centre. The Roman engineering of the Aqua Claudia and associated structures is astonishing, but the photographs can’t compete with painters.

The statue of Christ being transported in the opening scene of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita

The Porta Maggiore in 1896, the Aqua Claudia is the upper channel

The Aqua Claudia in the Campagna

 

Les Tres Riches Heures (12): December

When you’ve built the tallest medieval fortified structure in Europe, for its time, you would expect it to tower over the landscape and the trees. The Chateau de Vincennes does exactly that in the last of the twelve month cycle. It’s still there today, though without the many smaller towers you see in the painting (and in the model below).

That’s a proper walled garden

The chateau took a battering over the centuries, and housed a community of English nuns and the imprisoned Marquis de Sade, though not at the same time. It was further damaged by a rentamob once the French Revolution was well underway. The Duc de Berry’s interest in it is that he was born in the chateau, 676 years ago last week.

The remaining donjon, still pretty tall

Vincennes was a heavily forested area near Paris  – now part of the Parisian urban sprawl – and as you might expect, there was a lot of hunting, in this case a wild boar hunt, with dogs, a potentially risky business. Oddly enough, still no snow, that seemed to wait till after Christmas in medieval France, judging by the Tres Riches Heures. By this point in the series – about 1440 – the duke was dead, the Limbourg brothers were dead, and the probable artist was the Master of Shadows, which is a cool name, in real life Barthélemy d’Eyck, which is still not bad.

Decembre

Les Tres Riches Heures (10): October

October’s a busy month: ploughing (weighed down with a rock), sowing the next crop, archery, bird scaring, various people messing around by the river. They’re ploughing and sowing round here too, at the moment, in my corner of Nordeuropa.

The obvious unseasonal element in the picture though, is a huge badass castle, only this one wasn’t owned by Jean de Berry. It’s the original Louvre Palace in Paris, which did indeed stand where the current building stands, and it’s a remarkably accurate representation. Visitors to the lowest floor of the current Louvre might recognise the enormous rounded bases of the towers, which have been well preserved. The palace was built by Charles V, who happened to be Jean de Berry’s big brother, so it’s still a family affair. Amusingly, he was known as Charles the Wise, whose enemy in life was Charles the Bad, and who was succeeded as king by his son, Charles the Mad. We should bring back these handy adjectives for our own royals (Charles the Twit?).

Here’s one I made earlier

Octobre

 

 

Les Tres Riches Heures (9): September

Often there is a parallel between what the Limbourgs are depicting in their monthly cycle and what goes on in the countryside of my part of northern Europe. Not this month, due to our dearth of viniculture (actually there is a tiny bit). As always with Jean de Berry, he’s happy to show the rhythm of the seasons but what he really seems to like is showing off his real estate. In this case the Château de Saumur, which is satisyingly still with us.

Saumur is a big wine growing area on the Loire. The chateau sits more above the town the in the painting, but it depends a bit on the angle from which you’re viewing it. The building is remarkably unchanged, really

The Château de Saumur now

This is one painting in the series where the historians are pretty sure that given the stylistic differences, the upper two thirds was a Limbourg job, while the bottom third was completed much later by Colombe. It fits, to my untrained eye.  Art historian François Cali described this scene  as “These extravagant towers are a dream landscape with constellations of canopies, pinnacles, gables and arrows, with their crockets fluttering against the light”, but as you can see from the above picture, the painting is hardly exaggerated, the architects for Henry II of England and Philip II of France who  owned the building in the decades preceding the painting weren’t hanging back. It was actually begun more than 400 years earlier – built to last.

The painting has two nice further details: bottom left is an exhausted looking pregnant lady, and in the middle foreground is possibly the first depiction of that well known artistic motif, the ‘builder’s bum’.

Septembre

Barcelona

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Venice

Santa Maria della Salute

Les Tres Riches Heures (6): June

In a week when Paris is under a modest threat of major flooding given the water level in the Seine, it’s interesting to note that in 1689 – so slightly before climate change/extreme weather/global warming etc – the Île de la Cité was flooded by the effects of heavy rain, sweeping through the Palais de la Cité, and destroying the lowest levels of stained glass in the still amazing Sainte Chapelle. That was 327 years ago, and 273 years before that, the Limbourgs produced their detailed depiction of the buildings in the month of June. It’s a wonderful thing that the Saint Chapelle is still there, and really very little changed. You may note that if those figures are correct, this year is about the septcentennial of the Tres Riches Heures.

This is the great Viollet-le-Duc‘s  recreation of the Palais de la Cité

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and here is the Limbourg’s view. What’s interesting to speculate is that it was painted from the Duc de Berry’s residence on the river, the Hôtel de Nesle, featured in May.

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…and if you look at the Sainte Chapelle now, it’s pretty much the same. Its real glory though is the stained glass interior. Look it up on Google if you’re interested, but the photos don’t quite convey the extraordinary effect of just being inside it. Shame it’s not used as a church any more.

The rest of the June miniature is basic haymaking. It takes place in spring and early summer, in that window of opportunity when the leaves of the grasses are at their most developed. If you leave it too late, after the seeds and flower heads are evident then you lose a lot of the nutritional value. All this is well documented ‘scientifically’ now, but it’s the kind of country lore that was gained over centuries of experience. This miniature is actually one of many representations of medieval farming that shows this kind of “rhythm of the seasons“. The Tres Riches Heures are a companion of sorts to Virgil’s wonderful Georgics.

Juin

 

Les Tres Riches Heures (5): May

Well, Paris has changed a bit. Jean de Berry’s main Parisian residence was the famous but poorly archived Hôtel de Nesle, which sat on the left bank of the Seine in the Saint Germain area, opposite the Louvre. It fairly rapidly fell apart after the Duke died in 1416, with a contribution from the time honoured practice of stealing lead from the roof, although the distinctive tower on the river survived for quite a few centuries. I think that’s the bit on the left side of the building complex in the Limbourg’s painting. The Limbourg’s tower is square, and the actual tower was round, but a lot of these things are a bit unreliable in medieval art. The buildings have also been identified as the Conciergerie (which had a square tower) and associated buildings, but I’m not convinced. Jean de Berry clearly liked to have his own stuff in the paintings.

Mai

It’s another beauty which conveys the impression that the Duc de Berry spent most of his time hanging out with his friends in seasonal recreations, which is probably true. The mindblowing room of tapestries called the Hunts of Maximilian in the Louvre, from about two hundred years after the Limbourgs, demonstrates much the same sort of thing. The Hôtel de Nesle is fascinating, in part because so little is known for such an extraordinary building (it even had piped water). The following pictures convey a little of what happened to it.

A recreation of the building in its prime, done in 1894. The Seine is on the left

Mid 17th century, our building is on the far left

..also mid 17th century

The site is now where the Institut de France stands, and the small river you see in the pictures above must have been culverted centuries ago. See this view from Géoportail, France’s own terrific equivalent of Google Earth (for France)

The Institut de France is at the arrow