From the editor: A Duke art historian reflects on Notre-Dame

Writing in this magazine five years ago, Caroline Bruzelius, now a professor emerita of art and art history, called herself “essentially a detective for the places and spaces of the past, for the way the world as we know it was shaped.” When, earlier this spring, a fire engulfed Notre- Dame, Bruzelius found a new role— an expert source for media, ranging from NPR to Foreign Policy.

Bruzelius fell in love with medieval architecture as a Wellesley undergraduate, went on to Yale for a Ph.D., and for many years worked on French Gothic architecture in and around Paris. That led her to the abbey of St.-Denis, where Gothic architecture had been introduced in the 1140s and where the kings of France are buried.

While she was writing a book on St.-Denis, work was under way to clean the interior of Notre-Dame. She recognized—and grabbed—the once-in-acentury opportunity to go up the scaffolding as it moved slowly, over five to six years, from east to west.When the scaffolding was repositioned, every few months, Bruzelius would teach at Duke Friday morning, take the evening Raleigh-Durham Airport flight to Paris, work in the cathedral all day Saturday, see some local friends that evening, and fly home on Sunday for her Monday classes. She could “read the walls,” as she puts it, by measuring the stones and recording the details: “In the absence of written texts about the history of the construction of the building, the walls themselves were the documents.”

The last time she went up, when the scaffolding had arrived near the west towers, she had some accompaniment—her baby. “In order to do the work, I popped him in the Snugli and up we went the full height of the building, 108 feet.”

At its inception, around the year 1163, Notre-Dame would be inserted into the densely packed city of Paris over the locations of two older churches, a baptistery, and various other properties, both ecclesiastical and private. “Consider the logistics of clearing the land, setting out the foundations, and assembling a large work force that consisted of quarries, masons, carpenters, and manual laborers, not to mention sculptors and glaziers.”

Symbolically, the building would assert the importance of Paris by being wider, longer, and taller than any cathedral before it. It also came to incorporate many new features for the first time on this scale, notably the flying buttress.

“One thing that many people don’t know—but generations of my Duke students do!—is that over the long course of constructing a cathedral, often as long as one hundred years or more, buildings rapidly became out of date as structural and stylistic innovations were introduced in newer buildings,” she notes. Notre-Dame was updated as it went up, a process she describes as a structure “in dialogue” with itself—preserving a sense of internal and external unity, while incorporating newer aesthetic ideas and structural innovations.

Post-construction, events have brought other changes. Most of the sculpture was violently torn off during the French Revolution; Duke’s Nasher Museum has at least one, and quite possibly three, of the sculpted heads. In the nineteenth century, the cathedral was restored, a project largely stimulated by Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which Notre-Dame is, in effect, the central character.

And how to characterize Notre-Dame’s fate, post-fire? Bruzelius is “somewhat alarmed” by President Macron’s vow to rebuild within five years. “It would be nice if there were a way to create a community around the restoration, and use the opportunity of this disaster for a thoughtful and careful process, as well as general reflection on the role of historic architecture in the twenty-first century and the challenges of maintaining this patrimony.”