“The wonderful cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, one of the greatest achievements of European civilization, was on fire. The sight dazed and disturbed us profoundly. I was on the edge of tears. Something priceless was dying in front of our eyes. The feeling was bewildering as if the earth was shaking.” Ken Follett
Notre Dame (angol) 1 csillagozás
Eredeti megjelenés éve: 2019
Enciklopédia 2
Szereplők népszerűség szerint
Charles de Gaulle · Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
Várólistára tette 2
Kívánságlistára tette 3
Népszerű idézetek
At the beginning of Book Three Hugo wrote:
The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still today a majestic and sublime building. But, beautifully though it has aged, we must sigh, and we must feel outraged at the degradation and mutilation that time and men have inflicted on this awesome monument . . .
Hugo was angry about this. Notre-Dame had been much abused during the French Revolution and afterwards, Its statuary had been damaged and its nave had been used as a grain store.
Both Hugo's eulogistic descriptions of the beauty of Notre-Dame and his outraged protests about its dereliction moved the readers of his book. A worldwide bestseller, it attracted tourists and pilgrims to the cathedral, and the half-ruined building they saw shamed the city of Paris. His indignation spread to others. The government decided to do something.
A competition was held to choose the expert who would supervise the renovation of the cathedral. Two young architects collaborated on the winning proposal. One of them died suddenly, but the other went on to do the work. His name was Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc.
He was thirty when he won the job, and he would be fifty before it was finished.
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He loved his job. Looking back, he said: ‘Work was the best part of our day’ He was obsessed with medieval architecture, and he adored the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. There was no one in the world better qualified to renovate Notre-Dame.
He began by meticulously making a colour-coded map showing the location and type of every stone in the areas needing repair.
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Viollet-le-Duc put together a team of skilled masons, carpenters, sculptors and glaziers to repair ot reproduce the impaired stonework.
His aim was to restore the church to its original look, but he was not sufficiently meticulous to satisfy the most conservative critics. His gargoyles were not very medieval, they complained, and the chimaeras that he created to decorate the roof were not like anything else in the church. The ambulatory and the chapels that radiate from it were said to be overdecorated, an unusual fault to find with a Gothic cathedral, a bit like saying that a party frock is too pretty.
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Ken Follett: Notre Dame (angol) A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals
The medieval cathedral had had a central tower with a spire. Victor Hugo described it as ‘this charming little bell tower’, although he never saw it: it was dismantled before he was born. He wrote angrily of the architect who removed it, but in all likelihood it had become weak and was in danger of being blown down. |
As far as I know, there is no reliable description of the original tower, just two sketches. In any event Viollet-le-Duc made no attempt to imitate a medieval tower in his design for the replacement, and this is the loudest complaint of his critics. Instead, he modelled the new spire on a similar one recently added to the cathedral at Orléans. At its base were images of three disciples, and it was said that the face of Saint Thomas staring up at the spire looked remarkably like that of Viollet-le-Duc himself.
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Ken Follett: Notre Dame (angol) A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals
When Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French on 2 December 1804, he did it at Notre-Dame. And de Gaulle knew that if he was going to make himself look like France’s new ruler, he needed to do it in Notre-Dame. His unilateral announcement of a victory parade infuriated the Allies. Paris was not yet secure.
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De Gaulle was impervious. He did not duck or take cover or even pause in his stately progress. He might easily have been killed, and clearly he was prepared to risk death at this crucial moment in his career and in the history of France. He climbed into the open car, ordered the driver on, and sat waving to the crowds, unprotected, all the way to the Ile de la Cité.
It was a masterpiece of political theatre. Fearless, dignified and strong-willed — and six foot five inches tall — he appeared exactly the man to drive France’s post-war recovery. Films and photographs of his performance were all over the world within hours.
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Understanding the groups of statuary over a doorway is very like deciphering a picture by Picasso. We say, ‘Ah, of course, that must be Saint Stephen, just as after studying a Picasso for a while we may say: ‘Of course, there is her elbow, sticking out of her head.
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Ken Follett: Notre Dame (angol) A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals
Readers sometimes ask: How do you know so much about the medieval builders? Some of our information comes from pictures. When medieval artists made illustrations for Bibles they often depicted the Tower of Babel. The story, in the Book of Genesis, is that men decided to build a tower up to heaven, and their arrogance displeased God, who made them all speak different languages, so that in the resulting confusion the project was abandoned. Those illustrations, showing stonemasons and mortar-makers, scaffolding and hoists, give us a lot of evidence about medieval building sites.
Other sources of information about cathedral builders include surviving contracts between the chapter and the builders, for example, and payroll records.
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I was not the first author to be inspired by cathedrals. Victor Hugo was the greatest, to my mind. Anthony Trollope made the fictional Barchester Cathedral the centre of a six-novel series, the Chronicles of Barsetshire. William Golding won the Nobel Prize for an oeuvre that included The Spire, a dizzying story of a priest's obsession with building a four-hundredfoot spire on top of a cathedral that has no proper foundations. T. S. Eliot wrote a verse play, Murder in the Cathedral, about the assassination in 1170 of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury. Raymond Carver wrote a story called Cathedral about a blind man drawing a cathedral, and Nelson de Mille wrote a thriller, also called Cathedral, about the IRA taking over St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York.
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Not long ago I was on the roof of Peterborough Cathedral. Some of the pinnacles had been replaced in the 1950s, and I noticed that the new ones were crude, lacking detail, by comparison with the highly decorated medieval features beside them. The difference was not visible from the ground, and evidently the craftsmen of the 1950s thought there was no point in carving details that no one could see. The medieval builders would have disagreed. They made the unseen parts just as carefully as those on public view because, after all, God could see them.
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Említett könyvek
- Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers
- Eugène Sue: Párizs rejtelmei
- Raymond Carver: Cathedral
- T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral
- Victor Hugo: Notre-Dame de Paris
- Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
- Walter Scott: Durward Quentin
- Walter Scott: Quentin Durward
- William Golding: The Spire
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Összehasonlítás - T. E. Lawrence: Crusader Castles ·
Összehasonlítás - Jack Guinness (szerk.): The Queer Bible ·
Összehasonlítás - Robert Macfarlane: Underland ·
Összehasonlítás - Ben Macintyre: Double Cross ·
Összehasonlítás - Stephen Fry: Troy ·
Összehasonlítás - Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life ·
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