After the April 2019 fire, archeologists were given permission to dig under the damaged cathedral. Many of the recovered artifacts, which had been lost for centuries, are now on display at the Musée de Cluny. The exhibition “Making Stones Speak. Notre Dame’s Medieval Sculptures” is running until March 16, 2025.
Photograph Courtesy Denis Gliksman, Inrap
After the fire, archeologists were given unprecedented permission to dig under the cathedral. What they found astounded them.
In February 2022, the reconstruction of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was ready to begin. After the April 2019 fire, it had taken nearly three years to remove the debris and to shore up the damaged stone walls and ceiling vaults. If Notre Dame was to reopen in 2024, as French President Emmanuel Macron had decreed, it was urgent to begin rebuilding what had been lost—starting with the emblematic wooden spire that rises above the center of the church.
But first, archaeologists had to be called in. Under French law, any construction project that will disturb soil where ancient artifacts or remains might be found requires an intervention by government archaeologists. At Notre Dame it was their job to make sure nothing valuable would be crushed by the 770-ton scaffolding that was needed to rebuild the spire.
Christophe Besnier and his team from the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research were initially given no more than five weeks to dig under the stone floor at the crossing, where the transept (the short arms of the cruciform church)meets the nave and choir. Historical artifacts are common at Notre Dame when you dig deep enough; the site had been occupied for more than a millennium before the cathedral was built in the 12th and 13th centuries. But since Besnier’s team was only authorized to dig 16 inches beneath the floor—the depth of the scaffolding’s foundation—he actually didn’t expect to find much. Happily, he was wrong.
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“The remains turned out to be much richer than expected,” he says. In all, his team found 1,035 fragments of numerous works of art. “It’s very impressive.”
The archaeologists unearthed magnificent art works that had originally stood at the center of the cathedral—what French critic Didier Rykner has called “some of the most exceptional works of sculpture from any period in the world.” Recently, some 30 of those sculptures, which had been lost for centuries, went on view at the Musée de Cluny.
A piece of sculpted decoration found during the excavations.
Photograph Courtesy Hamid Azmoun, Inrap
A portion of a sculpture of Jesus — one of more than a thousand fragments of art not seen in hundreds of years.
Photograph Courtesy Hamid Azmoun, Inrap
Originally all the sculptures at Notre Dame are believed to have been brightly painted. Here some remnants of red pigment survive on a recovered sculpture.
Photograph Courtesy Hamid Azmoun, Inrap
As soon as Besnier’s team removed the floor tiles and a thin layer of dirt and rubble, the top of a lead coffin appeared. Nearby, limestone sculptures began to emerge: life-sized heads and torsos neatly lined up right under the floor along the entrance to the choir.
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Besnier then got permission to dig deeper than 16 inches so he could extract the artifacts. As the construction team waited, the five-week dig stretched to more than two months. Another lead coffin turned up, as did a few less luxurious burials—not too surprising, since there are graves all over the cathedral.
The statues turned out to be the most significant find. The archeologists determined they are remnants of the 13th-century limestone “rood screen” that originally closed off Notre Dame’s choir and sanctuary from the public’s view. Dismantled in the early 18th century, the 13-foot-high screen had essentially disappeared. Only a few fragments and no complete depiction of it existed, nor any record of its fate.
Now, having been found, it provides a vivid reminder of how different the experience of visiting Notre Dame was in the Middle Ages, when the cathedral was built.
The rood screen is a lost masterpiece, rediscovered
The rood screen was a masterpiece of painted Gothic sculpture. Among the life-size figures Besnier’s team excavated were the head and torso of a lifeless Christ—eyes closed, red blood dripping from the spear wound in his side. “The sculpture is really exceptional in its finesse, its attention to detail,” Besnier says. “The rendering of the eyelids, the ears, the nose—it’s incredible.”
Today, when people walk in through Notre Dame’s central front portal, they’re able to see the modern altar and into the choir beyond. But in the 13th century, when Notre Dame was completed, that view was interrupted by the rood screen, which was topped with a giant crucifix. (“Rood” is an old Saxon word for cross.)
The 13th century rood screen was destroyed at the beginning of the 18th century. Parts of it were then buried under the cathedral.
Photograph Courtesy Denis Gliksman, Inrap
A detail of a hand that was carved into the rood screen. Though the screen was taken down, it was considered sacred, and thus not allowed to leave the church.
Photograph Courtesy Denis Gliksman, Inrap
The rood screen at Notre Dame served two purposes, says architectural historian Mathieu Lours. The first was to give priests a platform to read scripture to the public who assembled in the nave. Staircases led to pulpits atop the screen, from which priests could preach to the masses. The second was for privacy: The screen allowed the priests to seclude themselves in the choir during their eight daily prayer services, keeping them out of the public’s view.
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The sculptures on the screen told the central story of Christianity. “We know from old descriptions that there were scenes from the passion of Christ,” says historian Dany Sandron. From the Last Supper through the crucifixion to the resurrection, the whole story was there.
In the Catholic mass that same story is reenacted during the sacrament of the Eucharist, when bread and wine are believed to become the body and blood of Christ. But during the Middle Ages, the faithful at Notre Dame couldn’t see the priest behind the rood screen performing the sacrament. Nor could they hear the words he was muttering at the distant main altar, which stood then at the far end of the choir.
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The silence wouldn’t have been frustrating back then to the congregants. “It’s the moment when one sees nothing and hears nothing that is the most important moment,” Lours says. “It’s the most mysterious moment, when people listen the most…. They know something absolutely incredible is happening. A miracle is happening.”
(To be sure, in those days there were hundreds of masses celebrated every day at Notre Dame’s many secondary altars. There were no rood screens in front of them. If people wanted to get closer to the miracle, they could.)
Why the rood screen was taken down
The rood screen stood for nearly five centuries. Eventually, liturgical practices changed, and artistic fashion did too; the Gothic style came to be reviled. Notre Dame’s clergy were traditionalists, and they held onto their rood screen longer than did most French churches.
But under pressure from King Louis XIV, who wanted a more open choir—one that would include large statues of himself and his father Louis XIII—the original rood screen was finally dismantled in the 1710s and, we now know, buried next to where it had stood. Though the sculptures had been dismantled and broken, they were still considered sacred, and thus not allowed to leave the church.
The researchers unearthed around a thousand fragments of the screen, of all sizes, of which around 700 still bore traces of paint. Originally all the sculptures at Notre Dame, including those on the front façade, are believed to have been brightly painted, before that too went out of fashion. The colors preserved on the rood screen sculptures will thus offer clues to what the whole cathedral once looked like.
Besnier isn’t sure how much of the screen his team has excavated, but he believes a lot more of it lies buried under the choir, outside the scope of their dig. “It would be unforgivable to leave such splendors in the cathedral floor. The excavations must continue,” Rykner wrote. But with the choir freshly restored and Notre Dame about to re-open, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. “It’s not on the agenda,” Besnier says.
If it hadn’t been for the fire, Besnier says, his team would never have gotten the chance to uncover even this partial portion of the rood screen. And in the end, the archeological excavations didn’t slow down progress on the restoration. The new spire got built on schedule. The cathedral is re-opening on December 8.
