The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame
October 09, 2024 at 08:41PMIn 2019, a fire nearly destroyed the crown jewel of France—and the nation set a breakneck five-year deadline to bring it back from the ashes. This is the story of how an army of artisans turned back centuries to restore Notre-Dame by hand, and wound up reviving something even greater than the cathedral itself:
[Fromont] believed that the roof’s charpente could be rebuilt exactly as the medieval carpenters had done it. The approach was not without risks—Fromont had told me, “Wood burns. I’m not going to say the opposite”—but certain measures could be put into place to mitigate its vulnerability. In fact, the architect had a particular gift that might be the key to the cathedral’s resurrection.
Notre-Dame’s medieval artisans—the blacksmiths who forged the axes, hewers who squared the timber, joiners who connected the timbers without nails or screws—represented a savoir-faire, or expertise, that has all but died out in the age of Ikea. Masons cut limestone from quarries near Paris and transported blocks by horse cart to the capital. Foresters searched dense woodlands for the straightest and sturdiest oak trees and felled them with steel-tipped axes. They used ropes and scaffolding made of branches to hoist the timber and stone.
The roof’s charpente was perhaps their greatest creation. Yet Fromont told me that, until recently, it had never been the subject of serious scholarly study. Hidden from view and difficult to access, it appears to have been largely overlooked by academics, who preferred to focus on Notre-Dame’s gargoyles, limestone arches, flying buttresses, and other more tangible glories. There were 19th-century sketches of the charpente, Fromont explained, including from Viollet-le-Duc, but they were “incoherent” and “did not represent reality.” A century and a half later, dendrochronologists—scientists who study tree rings—analyzed some of the medieval timbers.
In 2012, Fromont, then a 35-year-old scholar at Paris’s École de Chaillot, decided to address that absence. For his advanced degree, Fromont proposed spending a year surveying every inch of the charpente. When they were at last granted permission, he and his partner on the project, Cédric Trentesaux, entered the cathedral’s south transept and climbed a winding staircase into the triangular south gable. There they squeezed through an aperture and entered a medieval realm barely visited in over 800 years.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/09/the-miraculous-resurrection-of-notre-dame/
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