Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was a French architect and author, famous for his restoration of the most prominent medieval landmarks in France. His major restoration projects included Notre-Dame de Paris, the Basilica of Saint Denis, Mont Saint-Michel, Sainte-Chapelle, the medieval walls of the city of Carcassonne, and Château de Roquetaillade in the Bordeaux region.
His writings on decoration and on the relationship between form and function in architecture had a fundamental influence on a whole new generation of architects, including all the major Art Nouveau artists: Antoni Gaudí, Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, Henry van de Velde, Henri Sauvage and the École de Nancy, Paul Hankar, Otto Wagner, Eugène Grasset, Émile Gallé, and Hendrik Petrus Berlage. He also influenced the first modern architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Auguste Perret, Louis Sullivan, and Le Corbusier, who considered Viollet-le-Duc as the father of modern architecture. English architect William Burges claimed that "We all crib from Viollet-le-Duc, although probably not one buyer in ten reads the text".
His writings also influenced John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. At the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, the aesthetic works of Edward Burne-Jones, Christina Rossetti, Philip Webb, William Morris, Simeon Solomon, and Edward Poynter were directly influenced from drawings in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary.
Youth and education
Viollet-le-Duc was born in Paris in 1814. His grandfather was an architect, and his father was a high-ranking civil servant, who in 1816 became the overseer of the royal residences of Louis XVIII. His uncle Étienne-Jean Delécluze was a painter, a former student of Jacques-Louis David, an art critic and hosted a literary salon, which was attended by Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve. His mother hosted her own salon, which women could attend as well as men. There, in 1822 or 1823, Eugène met Prosper Mérimée, a writer who would play a decisive role in his career.In 1825 he began his education at the Pension Moran, in Fontenay-aux-Roses. He returned to Paris in 1829 as a student at the college de Bourbon. He passed his baccalaureate examination in 1830. His uncle urged him to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, which had been created in 1806, but the École had an extremely rigid system, based entirely on copying classical models, and Eugène was not interested. Instead he decided to get practical experience in the architectural offices of Jacques-Marie Huvé and Achille Leclère, while devoting much of his time to drawing medieval churches and monuments around Paris.
At sixteen he participated in the July 1830 revolution which overthrew Charles X, building a barricade. Following the revolution, which brought Louis Philippe I to power, his father became chief of the bureau of royal residences. The new government created, for the first time, the position of Inspector General of Historic Monuments. Eugène's uncle Delécluze agreed to take Eugène on a long tour of France to see monuments. They travelled from July to October 1831 throughout the south of France, and he returned with a large collection of detailed paintings and watercolours of churches and monuments.
On his return to Paris, he moved with his family into the Tuileries Palace, where his father was now governor of royal residences. His family again urged him to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, but he still refused. He wrote in his journal in December 1831, "the École is just a mould for architects. they all come out practically identical." He was a talented and meticulous artist; he travelled around France to visit monuments, cathedrals, and other medieval architecture, made detailed drawings and watercolours. In 1834, at the age of twenty, he married Élisabeth Templier, and in the same year he was named an associate professor of ornamental decoration at the Royal School of Decorative Arts, which gave him a more regular income. His first pupils there included Léon Gaucherel.
With the money from the sale of his drawings and paintings, Viollet-le-Duc set off on a long tour of the monuments of Italy, visiting Rome, Venice, Florence and other sites, drawing and painting. In 1838, he presented several of his drawings at the Paris Salon, and began making a travel book, Picturesque and romantic images of the old France, for which, between 1838 and 1844, he made nearly three hundred engravings.
First architectural restorations
In October 1838, with the recommendation of Achille Leclère, the architect with whom he had trained, he was named deputy inspector of the enlargement of the Hôtel Soubise, the new home of the French National Archives. His uncle, Delécluze, then recommended him to the new Commission of Historic Monuments of France, led by Prosper Mérimée, who had just published a book on medieval French monuments. Though he was just twenty-four years old and had no degree in architecture, he was asked to go to Narbonne to propose a plan for the completion of the cathedral there. The project was rejected by the local authorities as too ambitious and too expensive.His first real project was a restoration of the Vézelay Abbey, which many considered as impossible. The church had been sacked by the Huguenots in 1569, and during the French Revolution, the facade and statuary on the facade were destroyed. The vaults of the roof were weakened, and many of the stones had been carried off for other projects. When Mérimée visited to inspect the structure he heard stones falling around him. In February 1840 he gave Viollet-le-Duc the mission of restoring and reconstructing the church so it would not collapse, while "respecting exactly in his project of restoration all the ancient dispositions of the church".
The task was all the more difficult because up until that time no scientific studies had been made of medieval building techniques, and there were no schools of restoration. He had no plans for the original building to work from. Viollet-le-Duc had to discover the flaws of construction that had caused the building to start to collapse in the first place and to construct a more solid and stable structure. He lightened the roof and built new arches to stabilize the structure, and slightly changed the shape of the vaults and arches. He was criticized for these modifications in the 1960s, though, as his defenders pointed out, without them the roof would have collapsed under its own weight. Mérimée's deputy, Lenormant, inspected the construction and reported to Mérimée: "The young Leduc seems entirely worthy of your confidence. He needed a magnificent audacity to take charge of such a desperate enterprise; it's certain that he arrived just in time, and if we had waited only ten years the church would have been a pile of stones." This restoration work lasted 19 years.
Sainte-Chapelle and Amboise
Viollet-le-Duc's success at Vezelay led to a large series of projects. In 1840, in collaboration with his friend the architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus he began the restoration of Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, which had been turned into a storage depot after the Revolution. In February 1843, King Louis Philippe sent him to the Château of Amboise, to restore the stained glass windows in the chapel holding the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci. The windows were unfortunately destroyed in 1940 during World War II.In 1843, Mérimée took Viollet-le-Duc with him to Burgundy and the south of France, on one of his long inspection tours of monuments. Viollet-le-Duc made drawings of the buildings and wrote detailed accounts of each site, illustrated with his drawing, which were published in architectural journals. With his experience he became the most prominent academic scholar on French medieval architecture and his medieval dictionary, with over 4000 drawings, contains the largest iconography on the subject to this day.
Notre-Dame de Paris
In 1844, with the backing of Mérimée, Viollet-le-Duc, just thirty years old, and Lassus, then thirty-seven, won a competition for the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral which lasted twenty-five years. Their project involved primarily the facade, where many of the statues over the portals had been beheaded or smashed during the Revolution. They proposed two major changes to the interior: rebuilding two of the bays to their original medieval height of four storeys, and removing the marble neoclassical structures and decoration which had been added to the choir during the reign of Louis XIV. Mérimée warned them to be careful: "In such a project, one cannot act with too much prudence or discretion...A restoration may be more disastrous for a monument than the ravages of centuries." The Commission on Historical Monuments approved most of Viollet-le-Duc's plans, but rejected his proposal to remove the choir built under Louis XIV. Viollet-le-Duc himself turned down a proposal to add two new spires atop the towers, arguing that such a monument "would be remarkable but would not be Notre-Dame de Paris". Instead, he proposed to rebuild the original medieval spire and bell tower over the transept, which had been removed in 1786 because it was unstable in the wind.Once the project was approved, Viollet-le-Duc made drawings and photographs of the existing decorative elements; then they were removed and a stream of sculptors began making new statues of saints, gargoyles, chimeras and other architectural elements in a workshop he established, working from his drawings and photographs of similar works in other cathedrals of the same period. He also designed a new treasury in the Gothic style to serve as the museum of the cathedral, replacing the residence of the Archbishop, which had been destroyed in a riot in 1831.
The bells in the two towers had been taken out in 1791 and melted down to make cannons. Viollet-le-Duc had new bells cast for the north tower and a new structure built inside to support them. Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus also rebuilt the sacristy, on the south side of the church, which had been built in 1756, but had been burned by rioters during the July Revolution of 1830. The new spire was completed, taller and more strongly built to withstand the weather; it was decorated with statues of the apostles, and the face of Saint Thomas, patron saint of architects, bore a noticeable resemblance to Viollet-le-Duc. The spire was destroyed on 15 April 2019, as a result of the Notre-Dame de Paris fire.