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The Gothic Façade in Word and Image Romantic and Modern Perspectives on Notre-Dame De Paris

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The Gothic Façade in Word and Image Romantic and Modern Perspectives on Notre-Dame De Paris The Gothic Façade in Word and Image Romantic and Modern Perspectives on Notre-Dame de Paris Stephanie A. Glaser The various relations between architecture and text or between architecture and its visual representation offer compelling material for intermedial inquiry. Taking the Gothic façade as its central focus, this essay explores Victor Hugo’s description of the façade of Notre-Dame de Paris and a woodcut after a drawing of the cathedral façade by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. Building on the idea of intersemiotic transposition put forth by Claus Clüver, the essay examines to what extent each representation might be considered a transposition of the medieval edifice. On another level, the juxtaposition of verbal and visual representation allows fruitful comparison of the two by looking at possible convergences, by investigating is- sues of word-image transposition, and by reflecting on questions of illustration. The essay also explores how the verbal and the visual diverge in their particular representational strategies and thereby elucidates the particular understanding of the cathedral as portrayed in each. By taking cultural and historical information into account, the essay further provides insight into how the Gothic cathedral was perceived during the Romantic period. Claude Monet’s series La Cathédrale de Rouen (1892–1894) fasci- nated twentieth-century artists1. His grand study of the play of light and shade within the façade’s stone recesses and upon its jutting ma- sonry seems to have paved the way for the modern treatment of the Gothic cathedral. In the early decades of the twentieth century, as pre- war nationalism promoted the Gothic as an expression of national character2, the Gothic cathedral, particularly the Gothic façade, be- came an important topos in painting: as early as 1902 Henri Matisse painted Notre-Dame de Paris from his studio window, pushing the 1 The series inspired Kasimir Malevitch, Piet Mondrian, and Roy Lichtenstein. 2 After the turn of the century, the Germans touted the Gothic’s Germanic charac- ter, as evidenced by two scholarly works, Wilhelm Worringer’s Formproblem der Go- tik of 1911 and Kurt Gerstenberg’s Deutsche Sondergotik: Eine Untersuchung über das Wesen der Deutschen Baukunst im Späten Mittelalter of 1913. At the same time, the French Celtic League promoted the Gothic cathedral as the true expression and creation of the original French – that is to say, Celtic – spirit, as Mark Antliff dis- cusses in Inventing Bergson (cf. 1993: 106–134). 60 Stephanie A. Glaser theme further in his 1914 paintings; in the period from 1910 to 1914 Maurice Utrillo painted the façades of St. Denis, and of Paris, Reims, and Orléans cathedrals; in 1912 Albert Gleizes and Robert Delaunay rendered the cathedrals of Chartres and Laon respectively with the dy- namism characteristic of the cubist aesthetic3. As Monet had done two decades earlier, these artists pushed traditional means of representa- tion and perception to the limits: Matisse experimented with line and its dissolution; Utrillo with form and mass; Gleizes with rhythm, sur- face, and depth; and Delaunay with simultaneity of color and percep- tion. Like Monet’s study of Rouen Cathedral, these works do not take the Gothic cathedral as their subject, but rather as the object – or, bet- ter said, the laboratory – where visual experiments with light, color, form, spatial relations, and temporal dimensions take place4. Focusing on the façade as the most important part of the edifice, these works portray it as practically independent from the architectural whole to which it belongs, and they omit the iconographical indica- tions of its sacred origin and meaning. Nonetheless, such a portrayal is not particular to modernity – it was common during the Romantic pe- riod, when the Gothic façade was so ubiquitous that it might be con- sidered a trope within Romanticism and within the larger discourse on the Gothic5. Still, Romantic representations of the Gothic façade dif- fered significantly from their modern counterparts: while the modern aesthetic tended to privilege the façade in its own right, Romantic thought revered the façade as the key to understanding the edifice – it served as synecdoche for the whole. Secondly, Romantic representa- tions concentrated on the façade as the direct subject of a work, ana- lyzing its structure and creating meanings for it rather than seeing it solely as an object for visual experiments. Nonetheless, to say that visual experimentation was foreign to re- presentations of the Gothic cathedral from the late eighteenth through 3 Antliff discusses the connection drawn by Albert Gleizes between cubism, Gothic art, and the Celtic spirit (cf. 1993: 129–132). 4 Georges Roque argued this point in an unpublished lecture, “La façade comme surface, de Monet à l’art abstrait”, given at the colloquium L’imaginaire moderne de la cathédrale at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in January 2006. 5 I understand the ‘Gothic discourse’ to comprise the revival and re-use of Gothic forms, the scholarly endeavors to understand the origins and architectonics of the Gothic, as well as the literary and visual representations of Gothic architecture, as dis- cussed in my doctoral dissertation (see Glaser 2002). .
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