Notre Dame Paris

by Joan Carroll

Title

Notre Dame Paris

Artist

Joan Carroll

Medium

Photograph - Digital Art

Description

One of the best stories about the famous west facade of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris involves the Gallery of Kings ... the 28 statues of Judean Kings above the portals and seen at the bottom of this photo. During the French Revolution (1789-1799), some people mistook the Judean kings for the hated French monarchy. So they tied rope around the statues' necks, pulled them down and guillotined them in Cathedral Square. The statues were replaced in the early 19th century, but the originals--dating back to the year 1220--disappeared. Nearly 184 years after the stone kings were decapitated, workmen enlarging a basement beneath Paris' French Bank of Foreign Trade made an eerie discovery: 21 of the 2 1/2 foot tall limestone heads (the others are still missing) and more than 300 other statuary fragments were found carefully buried within a wall of plaster three feet below the bank's courtyard. It was left to Francois Giscard d'Estaing, the bank's president and a cousin of French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, to link the discovery--one of the greatest archeological finds of this century--with the Notre Dame statues that had been torn down during the First Republic. An amateur collector himself, he learned that in a clean-up campaign in 1796, the pile of stone and rubbish was sold by the state at auction to a building contractor, who used them to construct a new home for wealthy lawyer Jean-Baptiste Lakanal. Lakanal, a devout Catholic, apparently decided to strictly obey the law of the church, which requires the burying or burning of religious objects which have been removed from a church. The heads were interred, all facing in the same direction. The heads are now on display at the Cluny Museum in Paris.

FEATURED PHOTO, Catholic Art Gallery group, 4/28/19

FEATURED PHOTO, Churches group, 4/19/16

Uploaded

April 18th, 2016

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