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Gothic Architecture in France
 
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Notre-Dame de Paris | The Problem of the Upper Superstructure
Professor Murray

At a point of time that is unknown, the clerestory windows of the metropolitan cathedral were modified.

We have no written sources for this work—only the evidence of the windows themselves which have been equipped with new-fangled bar tracery (c. 1220–30) and extended downwards. The existing three-story elevation (arcade; gallery; clerestory) is the result of this thirteenth-century modification. Originally there were four levels: aracede, gallery, triforium and small upper window. The third level, the triforium, was made up of circular openings (oculi) into the space between the gallery vaults and the lean-to roof. Viollet-le-Duc, who found considerable numbers of the stones of the original oculi used as ballast for the vaults, was the first to realize that the superstructure had been transformed in such a radical way. (1.) He rebuilt the bays adjacent to the crossing with a slightly garbled version of the original four-story disposition not only as a demonstration of his discovery, but also to brace the crossing piers against the weight of the new central steeple.

Viollet-le-Duc's observations on the transformation of the clerestory at Notre-Dame are easily verifiable and are substantially correct. On the other hand, his suggestion that the nave flying buttress system was entirely rebuilt at this time is unfounded.

He was ambiguous about the original structure of the upper choir; but for the nave he proposed double-rank flying buttresses with an intermediary upright placed over the piers dividing the double aisles. He speculatively sketched double flyers bridging the gaps between the outer upright and the intermediary and between the intermediary and the upper edifice. Viollet-le-Duc was the first to emphasize the importance of the enormous outer uprights that predicted a powerfully conceived buttressing system for a central vessel of unprecedented height. He suggested that this scheme had been replaced by the present single-rank flyers only as the clerestory windows were reworked, beginning in the 1230s. The theories of Viollet-le-Duc, although proposed tentatively, provided the canonic understanding of the building until challenged some forty years ago by Bony and Branner; and more recently by Clark and Mark.

Two of the greatest twentieth-century masters of Gothic, Robert Branner and Jean Bony, simultaneously reached the same conclusion regarding the structural system of the twelfth-century cathedral. Unready to believe that the powerful system of external supports could possibly have been conceived at the start of work, they proposed a much more timid system in which the external uprights had only half the projection of the existing units and where a low quadrant arch hopped over the outer aisle to butt against an intermediary upright that projected another low quadrant arch across to the main vessel. Branner claimed to have found archaeological evidence for his reconstruction in sutures that marked the original edge of the nave buttresses which were only brought to their actual projection when the chapels were added in the thirteenth century. Branner and Bony both concurred with almost all previous authorities on the cathedral in affirming the choir had no flying buttresses at all. (2.) But we will see that the history of Notre-Dame may be a great deal less complicated than its interpreters have believed, and the structural system of the cathedral as originally built may actually have closely resembled the present building. Bony and Branner were both wrong.


France, Paris, Notre-Dame, nave vault and clerestory



France, Paris, Notre-Dame, nave showing restored four-story elevation in the last bay



France, Paris, Notre-Dame, nave buttresses



France, Paris, Notre-Dame, nave buttresses
   
1.   C. Hardy, "Les roses dans lÍélévation de Notre-Dame de Paris," Bulletin monumental, 149, 1991, 154–99.

2.   This tradition of denial has been continued in the most recent book on the cathedral by A. Erlande-Brandenburg, Notre-Dame de Paris, Paris, 1991.

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