#viollet-le-duc

Château de Dampont, Val-d'Oise, France

Maçonnerie

Decorative Sunday 

A few months ago we shared plates from the Industrial and Applied Arts publication L’Art Pour Tous. That magazine has two direct connections to the subject of today’s post, the influential Dictionnaire Raisonné de L’architecture Française. The magazine’s director, Claude Sauvegeot, was a student of the Dictionaire’s author, architect and medievalist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, and was published by A. Morel, who took up editorship of the Dictionnaire after the death of the original publisher, Balthazar Bance.

The ten volumes that comprise the Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire were published in Paris from 1854 through 1868, with Bance publishing the first six volumes. The Dictionary’s entries are illustrated by hundreds of wood engravings. Bance’s son Albert, still a minor at the time of his father’s death, was slated to succeeded him at the helm of the multi-generational Bance publishing business. However, Balthazar’s leadership of the Bance firm had been been marred by financial hardships, and a portion of Bance’s commercial contracts were actioned off, including the rights to the Dictionnaire. 

Those publishing rights were snapped up by August-Jean Morel. Morel went on to publish the last four volumes, as well as establish an important relationship with Viollet-le-Duc. Founded by Morel in the late 1840′s, Veuve A. Morel et Cie. and its associated bookshop specialized in finely produced books on art, architecture, and design. The firm remained operational for decades after Morel’s death in 1869, under the management of Morel’s widow and with active involvement from Viollet-le-Duc himself. 

You can find more Decorative Sunday posts here. 

Views of Paris from the top of the Centre Pompidou:

1) Eiffel Tower; 2) Tour Saint-Jacques, the Conciergerie and Tour Montparnasse; 3) Notre Dame, the Pantheon and Saint-Étienne-du-Mont; 4) Sacré-Cœur and Montmartre; 5) La Défense in the distance and Saint-Eustache on the right.

I did not visit the church of Saint-Eustache, but I found a wonderful quote from Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, a 19th-century architect who restored many prominent medieval landmarks in France.  He considered Saint-Eustache to be "a confused pile of debris borrowed from all sides, without connection and without harmony, a kind of Gothic skeleton covered with Roman rags sewn together like the pieces of a harlequin habit."

So, he was not a fan.

Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle

by Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 1814-1879