Martin Filler accuses project boss of desecration, but Patrice Calvel says he is just ‘doing a bit of vacuuming’
In 2009, amid a rising wave of other refurbishments of medieval buildings, the French Ministry of Culture’s Monuments Historiques division embarked on a drastic, $18.5 million overhaul of the eight-hundred-year-old cathedral. Though little is specifically known about the church’s original appearance—despite small traces of pigment at many points throughout the interior stonework—the project’s leaders, apparently with the full support of the French state, have set out to do no less than repaint the entire interior in bright whites and garish colors that are intended to return the sanctuary to its medieval state. This sweeping program to “reclaim” Chartres from its allegedly anachronistic gloom is supposed to be completed in 2017.
The belief that a heavy-duty reworking can allow us see the cathedral as its makers did is not only magical thinking but also a foolhardy concept that makes authentic artifacts look fake. To cite only one obvious solecism, the artificial lighting inside the present-day cathedral—which no one has suggested removing—already makes the interiors far brighter than they were during the Middle Ages, and thus we can be sure that the painted walls look nothing like they would have before the advent of electricity.
A cheery 2009 report in The Independent, titled “Bright Future for a Gothic Wonder,” presumably expressed the restoration team’s rationale when it asserted that “This is not a repaint but, in the case of 80 percent of the walls and roofs, a restoration of the original thirteenth-century décor, rediscovered only twenty years ago under the dirt and mistakes of the centuries.” Without question the ancient building has degraded over the centuries, but it would have benefited from a very different, more sensitive cleaning that avoided the wholesale transmogrification of the sort that has wrecked Paray-le-Monial.
As Armi notes, “an important driver in this ‘philosophy’ of restoration is money.” With such a large budget at Chartres one can imagine a motivation to do more rather than less. In addition to receiving funds from the French government and the European Union, this undertaking has been supported by the American Friends of Chartres. When the Monuments Historiques’ architect-in-chief, Patrice Calvel, addressed the group at Harvard in 2010, he emphasized the urgency of turning the renovation into an international concern. I could not agree more about raising a worldwide alarm about this unfolding cultural disaster.1
We know that ancient Greek statues were painted in vivid polychrome and adorned with earrings, spears, and other metal accouterments. But the idea of actually adding such long-lost elements to, say, the Parthenon Marbles would be even more controversial than the longstanding debate over where those sculptures should be housed. Officials in charge at Chartres now are engaged in a pursuit as foolhardy as adding a head to the Winged Victory of Samothrace or arms to the Venus de Milo. One can only pray that by some miracle this scandalous desecration of a cultural holy place can be reversed.
- 1. Observant Catholics, whose primary interest in the cathedral is religious rather than aesthetic, have been particularly appalled by one aspect of the program: the repainting of Our Lady of the Pillar, the early-seventeenth-century devotional statue of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child familiarly known as the Black Madonna. As Jean Markale argues in Cathedral of the Black Madonna: The Druids and the Mysteries of Chartres (1988)—an intriguing study of the links between the Christian sanctuary and the Druidic shrine it superseded—there was a direct precedent for Our Lady of the Pillar in the Celtic black mother goddess Sulevia, another case of early Christianity co-opting indigenous beliefs to attract pagans. Whenever and however Chartres’s Black Madonna acquired its mysterious patina—through oxidation or smoke from candles and incense—it was familiar as such to centuries of the faithful until its recent multicolored makeover, which has transformed the Mother of God into a simpering kewpie doll.