Upper Choir | Notre-Dame de Paris | Briefing

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Notre-Dame de Paris | Upper Choir
Professor Murray

First, look at the mass of the buttresses that now divide the choir chapels but which originally formed the external supports.

The choir buttresses have, indeed, been brought out to a greater depth (by about a meter and a half) with the fourteenth-century construction of the choir chapels. However, because of their greater thickness they have a total mass that is equivalent to the units in the nave. On top of these massive lower supports are uprights that until they were rebuilt by Viollet-le-Duc had a curious form with a massive core and much thinner projection toward the exterior of the cathedral. Bruzelius first suggested that these were a remnant of the 12th-century buttresses: she was right. We can see the original (pre-restoration) buttresses in a variety of graphic sources (photographs and drawings) as well as the famous wood-and-plaster model of the cathedral now in the Palais de Chaillot.

Even more important than this are the numerous written and graphic sources that tell us about several buttresses on the south side of the choir that, until entirely rebuilt, had forms that suggest a late twelfth-century date. The flat-topped flyers with chevron decoration on the south flank of the choir match the forms of the original lower flyers of Notre-Dame itself, as well as late-twelfth-century flyers at Domont and elsewhere. The twelfth-century choir of Notre-Dame clearly had long-reach flyers like the present ones. (1.) It is only with the support of such flyers that the very thin upper wall could have supported the high vaults.


France, Paris, Notre-Dame, choir		France, Paris, Notre-Dame, model of the choir (Palais de Chaillot)		France, Paris, Notre-Dame, choir showing flying buttresses


1.		There is not a single medieval flyer at Notre Dame. For the most part these are nineteenth-century rebuilt of units that were already rebuilt during the Middle Ages. Flyers do not hold up well in northern climates with the explosive combination of rainwater and frost

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