A Dramatic Discovery

An exhibition of sculptured fragments from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris may not have the crowd-pulling effect of the spectaculars with which the Metropolitan Museum has regaled New Yorkers in recent years, for it takes a certain empathy and imagination to respond to these damaged monumental heads, these shards of legs and bodies outlined in stylized draperies. Yet as with so much ancient art, which also comes to us mostly in fragments, the effort is well worth making, for these sculptures represent Gothic art at one of its highest points.

Their very existence is a kind of miracle; the Met, with rare understatement, calls it “a dramatic discovery.” It occurred in April 1977, when workmen digging up an eighteenth century courtyard behind the Banque Française du Commerce Extérieur on the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin to install a new computer, uncovered large squarish stones about three feet beneath the pavement. Turned over, they were revealed to be human heads topped by crowns. No one was more excited by the find than the bank’s president, François Giscard d’Estaing, a cousin of France’s president. Every inch a banker, complete with Saville Row tailoring and near-perfect English, he has still not recovered from the excitement of that day and those that followed. In the end—“I practically had them tear down the bank,” he remembers—more than three hundred pieces of sculpture were found, large and small. And there was a pattern in the way they were buried: all the heads and bodies faced south, pointing toward Notre Dame, and the spaces between the stones were filled with loose plaster, evidently to keep them from rubbing against each other. Whoever had interred them had done so with care, if not reverence.

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Ruth Berenson

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An exhibition of sculptured fragments from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris may not have the crowd-pulling effect of the spectaculars with which the Metropolitan Museum has regaled New Yorkers in recent years, for it takes a certain empathy and imagination to respond to these damaged monumental heads, these shards of legs and bodies outlined in stylized draperies. Yet as with so much ancient art, which also comes to us mostly in fragments, the effort is well worth making, for these sculptures represent Gothic art at one of its highest points.

Their very existence is a kind of miracle; the Met, with rare understatement, calls it “a dramatic discovery.” It occurred in April 1977, when workmen digging up an eighteenth century courtyard behind the Banque Française du Commerce Extérieur on the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin to install a new computer, uncovered large squarish stones about three feet beneath the pavement. Turned over, they were revealed to be human heads topped by crowns. No one was more excited by the find than the bank’s president, François Giscard d’Estaing, a cousin of France’s president. Every inch a banker, complete with Saville Row tailoring and near-perfect English, he has still not recovered from the excitement of that day and those that followed. In the end—“I practically had them tear down the bank,” he remembers—more than three hundred pieces of sculpture were found, large and small. And there was a pattern in the way they were buried: all the heads and bodies faced south, pointing toward Notre Dame, and the spaces between the stones were filled with loose plaster, evidently to keep them from rubbing against each other. Whoever had interred them had done so with care, if not reverence.