The fire at Notre-Dame on April 15, 2019, was a horrifying shock to all who know and love Paris. Although the cathedral was saved, its restoration is enormously complex and may take much longer than the five years promised by President Macron. This is because Gothic structures exist in a delicate and precise equilibrium of parts, as well as the fact that work has been delayed by the need to remove an earlier scaffolding erected to restore the spire – a scaffolding that may have caused the fire in the first place, and that is now partially melted and welded together, hanging like the Sword of Damocles over the ruined vaults. Stabilizing the cathedral while removing the crumbling debris of this previous scaffolding presents extraordinary engineering challenges, a process still far from complete. Meanwhile, rain continues to fall into the interior.
At the same time that the site is being cleared and consolidated, a remarkable group of enterprising scholars has united to study all aspects of the cathedral, from the origins of the wood and stone to structural aspects of medieval construction. Utilizing a wide range of new analytical technologies, study of the cathedral promises to generate new knowledge and a new model of interdisciplinary and state-of-the art collaboration between experts in material science and historians.
Caroline Bruzelius
Caroline Bruzelius studies medieval architecture, urbanism, and sculpture. She has written extensively on religious architecture of the Middle Ages in France and Italy, publishing books and articles on French Gothic architecture (Notre-Dame in Paris, St.-Denis, for example) and on the late medieval buildings of Naples. Her most recent book (2014), Preaching, Building and Burying. Friars in the Medieval City (Yale University Press), focuses on how the religious practices introduced by the Franciscans and Dominicans (outdoor preaching, visiting laymen in homes, and burying townspeople in convents) transformed urban space and the design of churches.
Her work on the Cathedral of Notre-Dame took place during the protracted cleaning of the interior of the cathedral in the early 1980’s, and consisted of a close up study of the wall surfaces and molding profiles in order to understand as much as possible about the process of constructing the biggest building of its time.
She is a leader in Digital Art/Architectural History, exploring how new technologies can communicate narratives about art and the built environment in teaching, museums, and in research. She is a founding member of the “Wired!” group at Duke University, a group that integrates visualization technologies with teaching, engaging undergraduate and graduate students in multi-year research initiatives, such as Visualizing Venice, which she also founded.
From 1994 to 1998 Bruzelius was Director of the American Academy in Rome. She is a fellow and member of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Medieval Academy of America, and has received numerous other fellowships and awards in the United States and abroad.