(jazzy piano music)
- [Steven] The ancient Romans founded
the city of Paris in the middle of a river
on an island called the Ile de la Cite,
and that's where we're standing
in front of one of the great Gothic cathedrals,
Notre-Dame de Paris.
- [Beth] So we're really in the heart of Paris,
the theological center of Paris,
with the church of Notre-Dame,
but also the political center of,
we're right near the Louvre,
which was the Palace of the King.
- [Steven] And before the Louvre,
the King's Palace was even closer to this cathedral.
The cathedral is a potent symbol,
both of theological power, but also of worldly power.
- [Beth] And so it makes sense
that the church was attacked during the French Revolution.
We can see it in the background
of Delacroix Liberty Leading the People,
that image of a revolution.
- [Steven] That's right, from 1830 and in that painting,
we can actually see the symbol of revolutionary France,
the tri-color flag, flying from one of the towers.
And of course before that revolution in 1830,
Napoleon had been crowned here as Emperor of France,
and so there really is this powerful, historical tradition
that begins in the medieval world,
but goes right up to the modern.
Notre-Dame de Paris was the tallest gothic cathedral
when it was built.
It out-stripped all of the previous gothic churches
and was taller even than the largest church
in the world at that point, which was at Cluny.
- [Beth] And the gothic architects
employed a number of methods to achieve that verticality.
The most obvious among them are the flying buttresses.
- [Steven] So these are beautiful external skeletal forms
that help take the lateral weight
that is produced by the massive vaulting,
the massive stone roof and draws it outside the church
so that the inside of the church,
the walls of the church, can be opened up
and as much light can be brought in as possible.
- [Beth] The gothic architects wanted
to open up the walls to windows.
- [Steven] And of course, glass is not weight-bearing.
Glass can't support the weight of, especially, the vaulting.
And here's the important issue,
is they can't bring the weight straight down
because it actually pushes out,
and therefore, you need to have fairly massive walls,
or in this case, buttresses and flying buttresses.
So the difference between a buttress and a flying buttress
is pretty straightforward.
A buttress is a solid masonry wall perpendicular
to the walls of the cathedral
that's meant to keep the walls themselves
from being pushed outward.
A flying buttress is not a solid wall.
Really, it's just a rib that allows
for the thrust to be brought down
into the more solid mass of the buttress below.
- [Beth] And we can see that all around Notre-Dame.
- [Steven] Now much of this was restored in the 19th century
but it's important to understand
that the church has been under construction
and renovation since it was begun.
- [Beth] Well, there were several building campaigns
just in the 12th and the 13th century.
- [Steven] And moving up to the 14th century and onward,
a series of changes.
- [Beth] It's really not unusual
for a gothic church to have such a long building campaign.
And then they were often restored later
in the 19th and in the 20th century.
- [Steven] This church looks spectacular
though now, doesn't it?
- [Beth] It does, and clearly, a lot of people today
are enjoying it.
- [Steven] When you first walk in
and you look down the length of the nave,
you're in this long, narrow, very tall space.
And that's in part because the three part elevation
is closed off to you from that angle
as one looks down the length of the church.
But as you walk down, especially the aisles,
the full width of the church in its complexity open up.
- [Beth] And the way that this shrinks the walls of stone
and replaces it with walls of glass
felt really miraculous, I think.
- [Steven] If you look up at the clerestory,
you have these panes of glass,
these sheathes of light that seem to almost float.
And there is really a sense of the miraculous.
Then as you move down to the gallery,
you've got an unprecedented delicacy in the columns,
that seem to miraculously support everything above it,
including the vaulting, but of course, in truth,
the weight is borne outward.
And then as you move down to the first level,
the part of the church that's doing the real work,
you can see those huge buttresses
that had been made into separate chapels
in the 13th century.
If you look at the giant piers,
that really a series of bundled columns,
many of which soar all the way to the roof.
- [Beth] And they're bundling together
all of these narrow elements,
one loses sight of just how massive those piers are.
- [Steven] That's the brilliance of this kind of masking
and this emphasis on verticality, this emphasis on line,
all of these key characteristics of the gothic.
- [Beth] That soaring quality,
that almost feels as though it's lifting you up
toward the heavenly.