[South side of Notre-Dame, Paris, during Restoration]

1847

Medium

Albumen silver print

Dimensions

17.6 × 23.3 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-870224

By early 1839 Bayard had begun experimenting with light sensitive chemicals in search of ways to fix an image from nature on paper. He immersed himself in this nascent technology/art form that was soon to be called “photography,” all the while maintaining his job as a bureaucrat. Over the next decade Bayard chose to document the transformation of his adopted city with his camera. This image of the south side of Notre-Dame partially under scaffolding documents the cathedral during a period in the mid-1840s when it underwent a major renovation conceived of and overseen by the architects Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus (1807-1857). Notre-Dame had suffered damage during the French Revolution and then from the destruction of the archbishop’s palace in 1831. It was in such disrepair that it was no longer being used as a place for worship. In their proposal for the renovation, the architects took the history of the original twelfth-century project into account, as well as the many changes that had taken place over seven centuries. In the 1854 *Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle*, Viollet-le-Duc wrote: “To r…