So, someone just dropped this in my inbox, and no, I haven’t written about it but I knew about it. This is the sort of thing that happens, unfortunately. I do have a post about the Black Madonna of Chartres, Our Lady of the Pillar.
Here’s the linked article above, and here’s another article from someone who visited for a pilgrimage, with photos, from patheos.com.
They did this in 2009.*
They “restored” the entire cathedral based on how they have assumed its builders in the Middle Ages (the 1200s) intended it to be. Including, but not limited to, painting a Black Madonna white.
No matter what you think about the Black Madonnas of Europe, or the arguments about their meaning and intent or anything like that, painting her this way is both an academic and a religious sacrilege. There is…a lot to say about the whole debacle, but I’ve already been rubbing my forehead enough over this. I’ll just say that this “restoration” says a lot more about society today than any medieval society.
* The change to the Madonna itself was apparently slightly more recent. The “restoration” to the entire Cathedral began around 2009 and is supposed to be completed in, I believe, 2017.
The restoration is now complete and open to the public.
The Black Madonna is now white.
We do not know the names of those who planned and built the cathedral at Chartres, “this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest,” as Orson Welles called it in his film “F for Fake.”
Now, too, the Black Madonna is a memory: The gift shop sells a postcard only of her blanched visage, rosy-cheeked as if blushing. To illustrate the complexity of the controversy, it should be noted that the statue was commissioned as a copy of a much-admired earlier Madonna. Her name? Notre-Dame la Blanche — Our Lady the White One.
“A Controversial Restoration That Wipes Away the Past,” Benjamin Ramm for the New York Times
