Welcome back to the Age of Cathedrals. In our last time together, we examined some of the technical innovations that went into the great high Gothic cathedrals, and which must have involved not only calculation according to the new techniques of geometry recently arrived in Western Europe, but a good deal of experimentation as well. With Notre-Dame in Paris however, the Gothic style can no longer be said to be experimental but to have hit its stride. The cathedral was at the center of the city building of the 12th and 13th centuries, and all around it, it transformed every area of economic, legal, social, intellectual, and cultural life. These are the centuries not only of building tall churches in stone but of writing, in which the written word comes to dominate many activities. But since the fall of the Carolingian empire, had been conducted without it or not at all. One thinks of the fixing of courts and of government in Paris, the establishment of the parliament in the royal palace which was not yet in The Louvre, but located next to the site of the present day Sainte-Chapelle. Cathedrals were an important part of state building in the High Middle Ages, and the cathedral of Paris in competition with Saint-Denis was to become the center of the Church of France. Napoleon had himself crowned Emperor there. Notre-Dame is used daily still for mass and for special liturgical occasions, like the ordination of priests, here seen lying face down on the floor. The French nation gathered in Notre-Dame after the liberation of Paris in 1944, and to mourn the victims of the Air France disaster in 2009. In the Middle Ages, Notre-Dame was at the center of the emerging capital, next to the city of government, but also next to markets and law courts in a relation as we saw in Saint-Denis between commerce and faith. Here we see in another example from Haase the image of a cloth merchant who has cheated a customer, being brought before the bishop to face the legal consequences of his misdeed. Though the narrative sculpture was damaged at the time of the French Revolution, we can still identify a first scene in which the merchant is dealing with a customer, with a hint of cheating suggested by what appears to be a boy hiding under the table on which the merchant's wares have been spread out. In a second scene, the dishonest merchant is apprehended as we glean from the hands of the large figure which seizes those of the cheater. Finally, the perpetrator is brought before what appears to be a statue of the Virgin, with the child on her lap, surrounded by ecclesiastical authorities. In addition to being a commercial center alongside the Hasse, cathedral towns were places of intellectual innovation. The University of Paris sprouted on Mount St. Genevieve, the hill just to the south of the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris's Latin Quarter or left bank. We should keep in mind that today's cathedral is not the 12th or even the 13th century building. Cathedrals were built in stages, sometimes referred to as programs. And in the building in Notre-Dame in Paris, the first matter at hand involved demolishing a series of buildings that had grown on the site between the 4th and the 11th century. These included a church dedicated to St. Stephen and another dedicated to the Virgin, from before the 9th century. And the first building campaign then between 1163 and 1182, materials were gathered from nearby stone quarries and forest belonging to the bishop, and hauled to the site either over land or by boat to the caves along the scene. The gathering of building materials was accompanied by an assembling of workers, cutters and haulers, of course, and mortar men, masons, stone cutters, carpenters, roofers, iron workers, all under the supervision not of an architect in the modern sense, but of a master builder, a head mason, referred to in documents as a magister cementarius, a master cement man. The eastern most part of the choir, the chevet was laid out according to a series of concentric circles from a fixed compass point. Smaller circles mark the placement of internal columns, and the diameter of the largest circle determined the diagonal sides of an isosceles triangle whose uppermost point demarcated the height of the roof wall. Then a foundation was dug and filled with extremely hard stones capped with some of the masonry recycled from the churches torn down on the spot in keeping with the Medieval proverb, a building destroyed is already half rebuilt. Here we see what the choir and the chevet might have looked like around the year 1170. And here is what it looks like outside from the south today. In a period of about 10 years, the flying buttresses and roof had been put into place for this most eastern part of the church. Once the roof with its elaborate forest of beams had been closed, it served as a scaffolding for the erection of the curved vault that we now see when we look up at the ceiling of Notre-Dame in Paris. The vaults in place, the high altar of Paris's central cathedral was consecrated by a legate of the Pope on May 19, 1182. And services began to be conducted there by the bishop and the canons who lived on the north side of Notre-Dame, and were responsible for maintaining the daily liturgy which was not yet open to the public. In a second and a third building campaign, which lasted from 1180-1220, the transepts which corresponded to the two branches of the cross, stretching to the north and to the south along the east-west axis of the cathedral were completed. Using many of the same techniques for the construction of the choir, the building of the nave extended to the west, terminating in the base of the west facade by which we still enter Notre-Dame today. By 1220, the cathedral of Notre-Dame was essentially complete, with the exception of the towers atop the western facade.
