Marin E. Gray

Nearly thirty years after the French photographer had jettisoned his given last name of Bossu[1]—meaning hunchback in French—in favor of his pseudonym, Charles Marville and his camera haunted the quarters of Victor Hugo’s hunchback of Notre-Dame. From his ambitious and rather apt vantage point, Marville produced a seemingly exultant image of the spire of Notre-Dame-de-Paris within a vast swath of Paris cityscape.

Marville, Charles. Charles Delahaye. 1857. Albumen-coated salted paper print. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.156232.html

Less than twenty years earlier, however, Marville’s camera would have captured an entirely different view of Paris. With a swiftly climbing population and without accompanying updates in available space and sanitation systems, the city became known for its disease-ridden, overcrowded conditions—an “immense workshop of putrefaction,” derided French socialist philosopher Victor Considerant. “[M]isery, pestilence and sickness work in concert,” continued Considerant, testifying to the horrors of the city’s condition which polluted the Parisian psyche in 1845.[2] Yet in Marville’s photographic print from 1860, Considerant’s Paris is banished from view.

The albumen print Spire in Lead and Hammered Copper (Fig. 1) records a nuanced commentary on the processes that transformed Paris from Considerant’s “workshop of putrefaction” to a modernized city with a rehabilitated identity. It functions as a time capsule for a single, fleeting moment in the broader timeline of Parisian development, visually consolidating its physical shifts (urban reorganization and monument restoration) with those less tangible (values and symbols celebrated as part of French identity). The modern viewer opens Marville’s time capsule in the wake of the tragic fire at Notre-Dame-de-Paris in April of 2019, finding a photographic lens from the past through which to view the present anew. As the world leans on the memories stored within photographs like Marville’s to memorialize and recreate a fallen monument, we confront photography as a monumental medium in its own right. With the fire as a jarring reminder of the ultimate impermanence of monuments, a fresh look at Marville’s Spire in Lead and Hammered Copper reveals how photography, too, is a worthy guardian and narrator of cultural heritage.

Figure 1. (Left) Charles Marville, Spire in Lead and Hammered Copper, Notre-Dame, Paris, 1860. Albumen print, 49.7 x 36.4 cm. (19 9/16 x 14 5/16 in.). Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, x1994-57.

The tale passed down to the present by Marville’s photograph is inextricable from its era’s dramatic shifts in city physiognomy, namely Napoleon III’s ambitious public works and city renovation campaign overseen by prefect of Seine Georges-Eugène Haussmann.[3] In 1853, Haussmann set out to reweave the urban fabric of Paris by creating a rational organization of avenues and squares alongside modernized aqueducts and sewage systems. Focal points of notable historic and symbolic units of Paris were plugged into Haussmann’s city circuit, not the least of which is the cathedral of Marville’s photo.[4] The formerly dense web of the Île-de-la-Cité on which it stands saw the most radical reorganization; even as select medieval monuments were protected as centerpieces of Haussmann’s project, much of the surrounding medieval map was demolished upon being deemed unsanitary and unsalvageable. No longer a historic quarter but a bureaucratic quarter, the area capitulated to its modernized role as an institutional hub.[5]

Haussmann’s renovations were, unsurprisingly, not without opposition: they represented a wave of gentrification that forced citizens from their pre-modern homes and largely eradicated the city’s medieval traces in a process already decried by Victor.[6] Indeed, the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame were two of the only medieval structures remaining on the island post-Haussmann.[7] Marville efficiently grounds the resulting contemporary grievances in his view of the cathedral’s spire, subtly mocking Haussmann’s treatment of the Île-de-la-Cité. Marville’s photo tells a visual narrative of the state of the abruptly detached cathedral as it resonated with 1860s audiences, departing from the grounded flâneur’s view to assume the cathedral’s solitary perspective from the position of its south tower. In soaring to the height of the cathedral, the photo’s shift in perspective also shifts the connotation attached to the spire. Rather than viewing the structure as a crown atop the roofs of Paris as one might from the streets below, Marville’s camera rises to find a secluded ruler isolated at the hands of Haussmann. The region visible within the borders of the composition exposes a recently cleared park space barricading the cathedral—an emptiness where Notre-Dame’s neighboring buildings once stood on the eastern tip of the Île-de-la-Cité (Fig. 2). These absences within Marville’s photo work in concert with its potent presences—like the spire itself—to distill for the viewer the tensions of its moment within a Haussmannian Paris.

Figure 2. (Right) Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc, Projet for the new fleche for Notre-Dame, transverse section, Jan. 1843. C. R. M. H. Inv. no. 1840.

Marville’s visual critique of modern Paris’ implications for the symbolic cathedral of its past had particular resonance within the moment in which it was created. The hunger for a distinct national identity in the wake of the French Revolution, and the search for the proper symbol in which to invest it, had pushed its way to the top of French national concerns. The mid-nineteenth century saw a prioritization of investment in cultural heritage by financing extant monuments like Notre-Dame. While the city’s dilapidated physical state inspired renovations to its physical structures, the deteriorating state of French identity spurred renovations to its symbolic structures. Notre-Dame was one of many medieval monuments that had fallen far from its former glory, languishing in a state of deterioration paralleling French identity as a result of damage accrued during the French Revolution and subsequent years of neglect. Coupled with prominent works like Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the renewed zeal for France’s cultural heritage brewed an acute sensitivity to the disrepair of its monuments which spurred the mid-nineteenth-century fleet of Parisian restoration campaigns.[8] The campaign to restore Notre-Dame undertaken by architects Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus was thus more than a project of rehabilitating a historical symbol; it was a project of rehabilitating modern French identity. Baron Ferdinand de Guilhermy captures in words the significance of Notre-Dame to the mission of national identity which Marville captures in his image, writing, “The history of Notre-Dame is intimately linked to the entire history of France.”[9] Not only was Notre-Dame a critical visual focal point of the Île-de-la-Cité’s Haussmann reorganization, but it also assumed a role as a point of cultural consolidation for nineteenth-century France’s fragmented élan vital.[10] Likewise, more than the praise of a static monument, Marville’s photo commends the successful restoration of both a national symbol and a national identity.

Capturing the sway held by the cathedral as a representative of French heritage and identity, Marville’s photograph casts the spire’s visual influence over the city. It emphasizes the unflinching verticality of the spire as it bisects the cityscape, a triumphal reinstatement of French identity within the city. The framing of the intersection of the spire with the rigid plane of the horizon additionally forms a cruciform configuration, mirroring the structure of the cathedral below which can be read from the roof structure seen in the base of the image. This composition integrates the expanse of cityscape into a structure that echoes that of the cathedral, projecting the monument’s visual impact across the Seine and its cultural impact across France.

Marville, Charles. Spire of the Chapel of the College Saint Dizier, ca 1860. Albumen-silver print from a glass negative. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/286548

Yet Marville’s image probes deeper still into Notre-Dame’s relationship with its nation. France’s fixation on its architectural past as a means of defining its cultural present brought with it the side effect of muddling the concepts of the historical and modern, inciting temporal tensions incapable of escaping Marville’s incisive photographic documentation. In centering the composition around the spire, Marville welcomes a vast stretch of the cathedral’s surrounding neighborhoods extending beyond a minimized segment of Notre-Dame’s roof. This juxtaposition of city and cathedral both evinces and belies coordinates for a Paris teetering on the edge of old and new: Notre-Dame’s spire injects itself into the expanse of the mid-transformation Parisian landscape as an extension of a medieval French monument, embodying French heritage as a historical holdout against a modern city backdrop. In reality, the chronology of structures is quite the opposite—the spire is the most modern of the photo’s subjects, having been recently constructed in the cathedral’s contemporary restoration. The composition’s cityscape view privileges the neighboring Île Saint-Louis, a seventeenth-century area largely free of Haussmann’s modernizing touch.[11] The artifice of the photograph lies in its communication between subjects and the troubling of their connotations, deliberately poking at the tug-of-war between historical and modern. Marville’s composition, being a capture of the contemporary moment, is saturated with the moment’s dialogue concerning the role of the heritage of the French past in modernity.

Further, the photograph’s focus on one of the most conspicuous displays of French monumental restorative work illuminates the nature of its commission and the developing role of its medium. Amid such culturally significant changes to Paris’ physical appearance, it comes as no shock that the new medium of photography was deployed to freeze and preserve the ever more ephemeral moments of Paris. It is also perhaps unsurprising that in the case of Marville’s photograph of Notre-Dame’s spire, the medium’s documentary potential was commandeered to serve in a practical advertising role for the cathedral’s restoration work. As its name suggests, Spire in Lead and Hammered Copper was produced as a commission by the metalwork firm Monduit et Béchet, hired by Viollet-le-Duc in what was certainly one of the firm’s most notable endeavors: the ornamentation of Notre-Dame’s new spire.[12] The text printed on the photograph’s mount specifically identifies both architect and artisan, reading, “Achevée par Monduit et Béchet” and “Viollet-le-Duc architecte.”[13] The firm likely distributed Marville’s advertisement among Parisian officials and existing and potential clients in addition to its formal display at international expositions.[14]

In the setting of such expositions, Marville’s bold vantage point made the photo an effectively eye-catching mode of advertisement for the firm and ambassador for the broader restoration project. Participants in the expositions vied for attention among the multitudes of wares displayed by other parties; selecting a sample of offerings that stood out against the sea of others was of particular importance. Given the context of the Spire’s commission, the photograph was composed to stand out. Marville decidedly shuns the grounded vantage point immersed in Haussmann’s sweeping avenues accessible to the general Parisian onlooker, instead ascending unexpectedly to the height of the brand-new spire of Viollet-le-Duc and Monduit et Béchet. This innovation in perspective as set against the backdrop of the displays of the international exposition advertises for its subject—and by extension, the presenting firm and architect responsible—a corresponding air of innovation.

Even beyond the distinctness of the lofty perspective, the viewpoint additionally invites a consideration of the detail of ornamentation and craftsmanship which would be otherwise largely invisible to the viewer. The photo’s close centering of the spire reveals the intricacies of the metalwork lost to passerby 300 feet below, further emphasized by the spire’s singularity reinforced against the city far beneath.[15] The horizontal split between the busy scene of the distant city and the clean space of the sky strategically nudges the eye upwards along the spire until it becomes an uncontested focal point, where the spire’s topmost ornamentation acts as a landing pad for the viewer’s gaze and attention. Whether at an exposition or in informal circulation, the photo’s legibility of view efficiently advocates for the architect and artisan’s work in the momentous restoration of Notre-Dame.

However, more than pragmatic interests of future business were at stake in the promotional function of Marville’s piece. A restoration endeavor both costly and lengthy, the spire was not constructed without its share of controversy. Though the project was the product of extensive research of Notre-Dame’s thirteenth-century form, Viollet-le-Duc exercised his creative license to carry the cathedral beyond a mere replica of its earlier existence into its role in modernity.[16] The architect firmly believed in his obligation as a modern restorer to both honor and improve the original design, working from the advantage of the “perfections of modern industry.”[17] This creed often led to a pluralism of design lauded by few and condemned by many.

The timber and lead spire built by Viollet-le-Duc after his former architectural partner's death was, for example, more detailed in structure and ornamentation than the architects’ earlier 1843 proposal (Fig. 2) and the spire’s original wooden structure.[18] The frame design features more distinguished secondary structures and angle posts which markedly taper with the ascendance of the central post, elaborating on the spire’s foundational octagonal structure. Far from minimizing the highly criticized nineteenth-century liberties taken in restoring the medieval edifice, though, Marville unapologetically celebrates them.

Physically arranging the photograph around the spire’s reimagined design, Marville additionally deploys the delineations inherent to the surrounding landscape to emphasize those of the spire: the top edge of the uppermost level of angle posts is positioned as if holding up the horizon; the next set of structures is aligned with the Seine’s cut between the Île Saint-Louis and the Right Bank; the roots of the gable-like additions spring from the plane created by the level roofs of the nearest Île Saint-Louis buildings; and the upper ornamental balcony rests on the southeast bank of the island. Viollet-le-Duc’s design is portrayed as a natural, uncontested continuation of the most traditional and cherished features of the visible Parisian cityscape rather than the ambitious departure from tradition perceived by critics.

Marville, Charles. Viaduc du chemin de fer de ceinture. 1865. Albumen-coated salted paper print. Paris Museum, Paris. https://www.parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/musee-carnavalet/oeuvres/viaduc-du-chemin-de-fer-de-ceinture-20eme-arrondissement-paris-2#infos-principales

Still, another dramatic pivot from the 1843 spire design was the tiered structure imposed upon its base angle buttresses, themselves graduated platforms for Viollet-le-Duc’s prominent addition of twelve sculptures of the Apostles.[19] In Marville’s composition, the figures and their stages cast distinct shadows in the late afternoon lighting in a doubled assertion of their presence; no attempt is made to obfuscate their contributions to the execution of Viollet-le-Duc’s modern aesthetic enterprise. Marville confronts the restoration’s critics head-on, conspicuously praising the objects of their critiques.

This strategic visual rhetoric is far from accidental—Marville’s photograph was composed through the lens of his prior training as a painter, engraver, and illustration designer.[20] His mastery of perspective and composition manipulates the scene’s established elements in the spire’s image as if they were created and positioned by his own artist’s hand. Making decisions of element alignment, vantage point, and time of day of the photo, Marville transfers his artistic training to the nascent medium of photography to contend variously with and to perpetuate the moment’s currents of thought regarding the cathedral and its restoration.

Just as Marville’s photo serves as documentation of a single moment in the rapid progression of Paris, it both documents and is shaped by a particular moment of innovations in its medium. The photograph was produced using a wet collodion negative and albumen print process, a technique notable for its exceptionally sharp images and minimal exposure time—and its impracticality for field use.[21] The rendering of the negative was extremely time-sensitive, as the entire process of preparing, sensitizing, exposing, and developing the material had to have been completed while the plate was still wet.[22] Necessitating the added impracticality of a portable darkroom setup within the cathedral’s tower, Marville’s process thus records the modernization of the city in another aspect: in capturing the development of Paris outside the walls of Notre-Dame, Marville ushers technology into the physical interior of the church. The cathedral’s structure is itself transformed into a photographic apparatus in a marriage of the historic symbol with modern technology.

Yet Marville could have alternatively opted to utilize the dry paper negative process he had experience with, a technique which would certainly have been more practical for his vantage point and was understood as the superior method for architectural and landscape photography.[23] The dry method’s longer exposure time would not have presented significant issues for his lofty landscape view, and the process’ relative lack of urgency would have logistically eased his endeavor. However, the dry process could not have produced an image with the level of detail and clarity present in his wet plate photograph.[24] The miniscule exposure window of the wet process which rendered the creation of the photograph a far more difficult maneuver conversely allowed Marville to capture the fugitive moments of Paris’ landscape without interrupting the photograph’s legibility. By choosing to experiment with the wet collodion method, Marville was able to freeze the vestiges of a transforming city actively in motion by arresting its shifting shadows and watery reflections. Marville’s sacrifice of practicality for the sake of image sharpness and preservation of the scene’s ephemeral effects attests to the priority he placed upon the precise capture of a precise moment in time.

Additionally, the photograph’s markedly shallow depth of field is exploited in service of its narrative concerning the spire’s relationship to—or seclusion from—the landscape. The sharply in-focus, high-contrast view of the foreground emphasizes the imposing presence of the restored spire structure in contrast with the less-defined city of the distance washed in a diffuse haze. The effect of the shallow depth of field only bolsters Marville’s narratives of the spire: the discrepancy in contrast and focus between the foreground and background of the composition underscores the visual and metaphorical significance of the monument, contributes to the sense of the cathedral’s recent estrangement from the rest of the city, and particularly highlights the depth and intricacy of detail present in the restored spire.

Once the sharply focused glass negative of the spire was created, Marville then employed the albumen print technique to render photographic positives. Having prepared a thin sheet of paper by coating it in albumen and sensitizing it with a silver nitrate solution, he introduced the negative in contact with the paper, exposed it to produce a positive, and stabilized it with another chemical solution.[25] As a photographic commentary and advertisement intended for circulation, the significance of the image being created through this print process must not be overlooked. The albumen printing technology allowed for nearly limitless, more stable reproductions from a single negative, enabling the photo to become a reproducible, circulated object.[26] Indeed, Marville’s spire print exists in a myriad of collections today. The copies escort nineteenth-century Notre-Dame across centuries and borders, international testaments to the transmission enabled by their contemporary popularity and advancement of their medium.

Marville, Charles. Cloud Study Over Paris. 1856. Albumen-silver print. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/265131?pkgids=236&pos=2&nextInternalLocale=en&ft=*&oid=265131&rpp=4&exhibitionId=%7B21968755-5ddd-4fea-81c5-000d8aaaf6b3%7D&pg=1

In its sensitivity to the evolving context of its subject monument, efficient recording of its transforming city, and its transportability, Marville’s print itself lived as a portable monument. Not only did the image consolidate the signals reverberating around Paris in 1860 in the antenna of the Notre-Dame spire, but it also circulated as a stand-in for the cathedral in transmitting its signals of French cultural heritage, nationalist aspirations, and modernity. Marville’s time capsule might then be more aptly described as a postcard, commemorating in its replicability the French national identity the monument guards in its singular, immobile presence. But the photograph did not solely circulate as an ambassador for mid-nineteenth century hopes for French identity; the image also facilitated the wider circulation of its critiques of the realities of the modernization imposed upon Paris.

For the modern viewer, Marville’s print takes on new significance. The loss of Viollet-le-Duc’s now cherished spire in Notre-Dame’s fire of 2019 forces a renewed appreciation of the photograph as a substitute monument, a commemoration which has outlasted the commemorated. Marville’s monument to an ephemeral moment persists, enjoying a temporal range that is today actively extended into tomorrow as a reference for Notre-Dame’s twenty-first-century restorers. France once again looks to its past to secure the symbols of its identity for the future.

Guillot, Francois. Smoke and Flames Rise During a Fire at the Landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral. April 2019. Photograph. The Atlantic, Paris, April 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/04/photos-notre-dame-cathedral-burns-paris/587203/

Marville’s photographic acknowledgment and documentation of the transitory Parisian moment provides an astonishingly pertinent visual for modern France, as its people again come to terms with the shock of change afflicting its historical symbol and begin anew to restore the cathedral. Though Marville’s Spire in Lead and Hammered Copper may preserve a fleeting moment of Paris, the photograph has proven an enduring monument to the ongoing history of Notre-Dame and its ceaseless conversation with its city and nation.

1. Sarah Kennel et al., Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris (Washington, DC: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 15.

2. Patrice de Moncan, Le Paris d'Haussmann (Paris: Les Editions du Mécène, 2002), 10.

3. Howard Saalman, Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York: G. Braziller, 1971), 13.

4. Ibid., 16.

5. Ibid., 17.

6. Victor Hugo and Danny Smith, “War on the Demolishers” West 86th 25, no. 2 (2018): 224–48.

7. Philip Goldswain, “Picturing a City: Charles Marville’s albums of Paris,” Paper Cities (2016), 221.

8. Joel Herschman, et. al., Un Voyage Héliographique à Faire: the Mission of 1851: the First Photographic Survey of Historical Monuments in France: Catalogue (1981), 10.

9. Dany Sandron and Andrew Tallon, Notre Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021), 152.

10. John B. Wolf, “The Élan Vital of France: a Problem in Historical Perspective,” in Modern France: Problems of the Third and Fourth Republics, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Russell & Russell, 1964), 23.

11. Peter Barberie, “Charles Marville’s Seriality,” Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 67 (2008): 42.

12. Ibid., 41.

13. Spire in Lead and Hammered Copper, Notre-Dame, Paris (Charles Marville), x 1994-57," Princeton University Art Museum collections online, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/18987

14. Barberie, Charles Marville’s Seriality, 42-43.

15. Lynn T. Courtenay, “Viollet-le-Duc and the Flèche of Notre-Dame de Paris: Gothic Carpentry of the 13th and 19th Centuries,” in The Engineering of Medieval Cathedrals, Studies in the History of Civil Engineering (Aldershot: Routledge, 1997), 322.

16. Daniel D.Reiff, “Viollet Le Duc and Historic Restoration: The West Portals of Notre-Dame,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 30, no. 1 (1971): 30.

17. Viollet-le-Duc. Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle par m. Paris, Dict. V (1855), 452.

18. Courtenay, “Viollet-le-Duc,” 321.

19. Ibid.

20. Joke de Wolf, Le nouveau Paris: Charles Marville photographs the city transformation (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2017), 13.

21. National Gallery of Art. Ambition and Innovation. https://www.nga.gov/features/marville/ambition-and-innovation.html

22. “Negative Processes,” The British Journal Photographic Almanac (1912): 584.

23. John Towler, The Silver Sunbeam: a Practical and Theoretical Text-Book on Sun Drawing and Photographic Printing (New York: J.H. Ladd, 1864), 232.

24. National Gallery of Art, Ambition and Innovation.

25. “The Negative,” The British Journal Photographic Almanac (1906): 798.

26. Bertrand Lavédrine, et al., Photographs of the Past: Process and Preservation (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2009), 112.

Bibliography

Barberie, Peter. “Charles Marville’s Seriality.” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 67 (2008): 30-45.

Courtenay, Lynn T. “Viollet-le-Duc and the Flèche of Notre-Dame de Paris: Gothic Carpentry of the 13th and 19th Centuries.” In The Engineering of Medieval Cathedrals, Studies in the History of Civil Engineering 1 (Aldershot: Routledge, 1997), 313–325.

de Moncan, Patrice. Le Paris d'Haussmann. Paris: Les Editions du Mécène, 2002.

Goldswain, Philip. “Picturing a city: Charles Marville’s albums of Paris.” In Paper cities, 215-233, 2016.

Herschman, Joel, et al. Un Voyage Héliographique à Faire: The Mission of 1851: the First Photographic Survey of Historical Monuments in France. 1981.

Hugo, Victor, and Danny Smith. “War on the Demolishers.” West 86th 25, no. 2 (2018): 224–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/702324

Kennel, Sarah, Anne de. Mondenard, Peter Barberie, Françoise Reynaud, Joke de. Wolf, Charles Marville and the National Gallery of Art. Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris. Washington, DC/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Lavédrine, Bertrand, Jean-Paul Gandolfo, John McElhone, Sibyllé Monod and Getty Conservation Institute. Photographs of the Past: Process and Preservation. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2009.

National Gallery of Art. Ambition and Innovation. https://www.nga.gov/features/marville/ambition-and-innovation.html

“Negative Processes.” The British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1912.

Saalman, Howard. Haussmann: Paris Transformed. New York: G. Braziller, 1971.

Sandron, Dany and Andrew Tallon. Notre Dame Cathedral: Nine Centuries of History. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021.

“Spire in Lead and Hammered Copper, Notre-Dame, Paris (Charles Marville), x1994-57," Princeton University Art Museums collections online, April 18, 2023, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/18987

“The Negative.” The British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1906.

Towler, John. The Silver Sunbeam: a Practical and Theoretical Text-Book on Sun Drawing and Photographic Printing, New York: J.H. Ladd, 1864.

Wolf, John B. “The Élan Vital of France: a Problem in Historical Perspective.” In Modern France: Problems of the Third and Fourth Republics, edited by Edward Mead Earle, 19–31. London: Russell & Russell, 1964.

Wolf, Joke de. Le nouveau Paris: Charles Marville photographs the city transformation. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2017.

Marville’s Monument: A Fireproof Time Capsule of Notre-Dame-de-Paris