At the beginning of the new millennium, some of the chimeras became a new Disneyfied face lift, removing the psychological depth and turning them into family-friendly mascots ideal to sell merchandise. Every era creates its own image of the past - the out-of-date past is most visible in old museums which have failed to keep up with the times.Notre Dame de Paris is unfortunately too modern. He in turn was inspired by Victor Hugo and Jules Michelet. Many of the famous gargoyles and chimeras of Notre Dame de Paris don't happen to be authentic from medieval times but have been designed and commissioned by the French equivalent to Ruskin, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, whose own spleen had a major influence on the new old Notre Dame. After the enlightenment, the romantic 19th century re-discovered the artistic merits of the medieval, Gothic world, re-creating it and re-interpreting it according to the 19th century customs. This unfortunately posthumous publication wonderfully examines the re-imagination and re-discovery of the past.
Lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred images of its monumental yet whimsical subjects, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is a must-read for historians of art and architecture and anyone whose imagination has been sparked by the lovable monsters gazing out over Paris from one of the world’s most renowned vantage points. Tracing their eventual evolution into icons of high kitsch, Camille ultimately locates the gargoyles’ place in the twentieth-century imagination, exploring interpretations by everyone from Winslow Homer to the Walt Disney Company.
He goes on to map the critical reception and many-layered afterlives of these chimeras, notably in the works of such artists and writers as Charles Méryon, Victor Hugo, and photographer Henri Le Secq. These gargoyles, Camille contends, were not mere avatars of the Middle Ages, but rather fresh creations-symbolizing an imagined past-whose modernity lay precisely in their nostalgia.
Michael Camille begins his long-awaited study by recounting architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s ambitious restoration of the structure from 1843 to 1864, when the gargoyles were designed, sculpted by the little-known Victor Pyanet, and installed. The first comprehensive history of these world-famous monsters, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame argues that they transformed the iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument. Most of the seven million people who visit the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris each year probably do not realize that the legendary gargoyles adorning this medieval masterpiece were not constructed until the nineteenth century.
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