After the disastrous fire that nearly destroyed Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019, the French government briefly considered proposals for rebuilding it in a new form “adapted to the techniques and issues of our time.” The architect Norman Foster suggested a glass roof and a glass spire, while the landscape artist and architect Clément Willemin recommended adding a roof garden with wildflowers. The Slovakian firm Vizum Atelier argued for a virtual spire: a giant beam of light like the ones that commemorate the fallen World Trade Center towers every September 11. The Swedish firm Ulf Mejergren even submitted a plan for topping the venerable structure with a giant cross-shaped swimming pool (which, if nothing else, would presumably minimize future fire risk). In the end, President Emmanuel Macron and his advisers decided to restore the cathedral as it had stood before the fire. The amazingly rapid reconstruction project came to a conclusion in December 2024.

Would Eugène Viollet-le-Duc have approved? He was the architect principally responsible for the way Notre-Dame appeared in modern times, and while he adored the Middle Ages, he was anything but a pedantic traditionalist. The decades-long restoration project he oversaw, starting in 1844, aimed to respect the spirit of the original cathedral but not to recreate any single earlier version, and it made full use of nineteenth-century techniques, including iron reinforcements of the famous flying buttresses. Viollet-le-Duc provided the cathedral with a spire considerably taller than its medieval predecessor, surrounded by new statues of the twelve apostles, as well as a flock of gargoyles and chimeras inspired as much by Victor Hugo’s hugely successful novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) as by the historical evidence. Although it is hard to imagine Viollet-le-Duc as a fan of the swimming pool roof, he might not have objected to some of the more modestly innovative twenty-first-century reconstruction proposals for Notre-Dame.

But traumatic episodes like the Notre-Dame fire generally provoke returns to the safe and familiar, not experimentation. Macron, moreover, did not have the vision or confidence of his predecessor François Mitterrand, who supported, in the face of ferocious opposition, I.M. Pei’s proposal for the glass-and-metal pyramid that now stands in the courtyard of the Louvre. In one sense, an opportunity was lost. But as visitors can attest, the cathedral remains the astonishing building it was before 2019, now meticulously rebuilt, thoroughly cleaned, and with the original bright colors of the interior on glorious display.

Coming so soon after the reopening, the Bard Graduate Center’s “Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds,” the first major exhibition dedicated to him in the United States, is doubly welcome. Not only does it give a full, clear, and beautifully arranged overview of Viollet-le-Duc’s career, it also, through its attention to his drawing, brilliantly illuminates the main features of his art (which nineteen essays in the sumptuously produced catalog further expound on). Through his work on Notre-Dame and many other French monuments, he did as much as any other figure to invent modern architectural restoration. He helped create the field of architectural history as well, while his writings on form and function inspired many of the most important modernists, including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright called his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle “the only really sensible book on architecture in the world.” But Viollet-le-Duc was no modernist avant la lettre. As the exhibition shows, he was a quintessential representative of French Romanticism.

Viollet-le-Duc belonged to the French artistic establishment from his birth in 1814. His father, a noted poet and critic, became the superintendent of royal residences in 1830, which allowed the family to move into an apartment in the Tuileries Palace. His uncle Étienne-Jean Delécluze trained as a painter with Jacques-Louis David and later became a member of the government commission overseeing French historical monuments. Family connections included the writers Stendhal, Hugo, and Prosper Mérimée, a leader of the Romantic movement who became the young Eugène’s mentor. Coming from this background, Viollet-le-Duc not surprisingly chafed at the rigid classicism that still dominated the elite École des Beaux-Arts, and he refused to enroll there. Instead he worked as an apprentice architect for several years and executed drawings and paintings at a frenetic pace. His uncle called him a “drawing machine.”

The Bard exhibition begins with a rich sample of this early work, which already displays the principles that guided Viollet-le-Duc throughout his career. Many of them come from long tours he took in Italy and provincial France: sketches and paintings of such familiar sites as the Roman Colosseum, the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and the ancient Greek theater at Taormina, as well as studies of landscapes and mountain ranges. The classical sites here look nothing like they did in Piranesi’s famous eighteenth-century etchings, which emphasized their decay and the puniness of the modern figures who crept about in their shadows. Viollet-le-Duc’s 1840 painting of the Taormina theater, which he presented as part of a proposal for its restoration, recreates it as it was in classical times, full of toga-clad spectators watching a play. As Bérénice Gaussuin points out in a fine catalog essay, he took considerable liberties with the theater’s physical layout. But he did so in order to capture what he saw as its essential characteristics, including the presence of the sea and Mount Etna. “The combination,” she writes, “restores not only a lived sensation but also a memory.” Martin Bressani, who curated the exhibition with Barry Bergdoll, notes in his own essay that in later writings on drawing pedagogy, Viollet-le-Duc advocated exercises in which students drew from memory alone, “forcing them to rely…on the lively observations stored in their minds.”

What stands out above all in this early work is the way Viollet-le-Duc treated his subjects, both buildings and landscapes, as dynamic and evolving. His 1836 painting of Mount Etna shows it partly veiled in cloud and steam in vibrant colors, some of which recall nothing so much as a well-cooked steak. From early on Viollet-le-Duc had a fascination with geological processes, such as the way glaciers carved new shapes in the landscape or the way mountains rose and fell. A building, too, could evolve and grow over time. In this vision of the world, deeply influenced by the Romanticism of his mentor Mérimée and other contemporary writers and artists, the essence of an object lies not in the shape it takes at any specific moment but in its entire life course and the logic that governs it.

Like so many of his generation, Viollet-le-Duc also saw the life course of man-made objects as indissolubly linked to that of the people who produce them. As Irene Cheng shows in her catalog essay, he had a deeply racialized view of the world, expressed most fully in a late work, his illustrated The Habitations of Man in All Ages (1875), which associated different building styles with different human races and traced French architecture back to “Aryan” roots. In a related lecture he wrote:

The distinctive feature of the [Aryans], who were destined to dominate the entire planet, is locomotion; not the locomotion of the nomad who ceaselessly circles without ever settling anywhere, but that of the White who always moves ahead.

Viollet-le-Duc was a close friend of Arthur de Gobineau, the author of the notorious The Inequality of Human Races (1853–1855). He was also, like most of his generation of elite Frenchmen, an enthusiastic supporter of colonialism.

Already on his return from his tours, the young Viollet-le-Duc had come to identify the spirit of the French nation with the Gothic style of architecture. In the early nineteenth century many French critics still saw Gothic buildings the way their Enlightenment predecessors had: as irregular, confusing, and ugly, utterly lacking the clean geometric lines of the great classical Greek and Roman constructions. In contrast, the French Romantic movement championed the Gothic as intensely human and expressive of the genius of the French nation. Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris popularized this view, while also calling attention to the dilapidated condition of the cathedral that was its true main character. In 1840 Mérimée, now France’s inspector general of historical monuments, gave Viollet-le-Duc his first restoration project: the Gothic abbey of Vézelay, which was in danger of collapse and bore the scars of both Protestant iconoclasm and French revolutionary vandalism. Viollet-le-Duc lightened the roof and rebuilt both the vault and the arches, saving Vézelay and making his name. With Mérimée’s enthusiastic backing, he was now perfectly positioned to win, in partnership with the architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus, the competition announced in 1843 for the restoration of Notre-Dame.

The Bard exhibition centers on this enormous project, showing how extensively Viollet-le-Duc worked out his ideas for it in drawing after drawing. Bressani, in his essay, explores how the architect experimented with new forms of drawing in the process, including fragmented views and écorchés—the word comes from the verb meaning “to skin” and refers to peeling back a surface to show an underlying structure. As both curators observe, he was effectively providing architects with a new graphic language. Another item on display shows the elaborate color codes Viollet-le-Duc used to distinguish the different types of stone in the project. He rendered even the smallest ornamental sculptures in exquisite detail, while making inventive use of shadows so that his drawings of gargoyles and chimeras appeared as lifelike as possible, seemingly captured in mid-leap.

At the time Viollet-le-Duc’s approach to Notre-Dame drew considerable criticism. Some writers objected to his removal of the baroque choir and altar installed in the seventeenth century, others to the supposedly inauthentic new spire and the new statues at its base, not to mention the new gargoyles and chimeras. And many faulted the architect for his general approach, which he summarized in 1866: “To restore a building is not to maintain it, repair it, or remake it: it is to reestablish it in a complete state that may never have existed at any given moment.” Was he really capturing the living essence of the cathedral or just projecting his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto it? John Ruskin, a fierce critic of Viollet-le-Duc, scorned his work as a poor imitation of the original and famously wrote that

restoration…means the most total destruction which a building can suffer…. It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.

Viollet-le-Duc did not waver in the face of such attacks. One telling detail suggests the extent of his self-confidence—indeed, perhaps, arrogance: the statue of Saint Thomas at the base of his new spire looked suspiciously like Viollet-le-Duc himself.

A surprising part of the exhibition, not to be missed, shows just how greatly Viollet-le-Duc changed the cathedral. Twelve years ago a French company released the video game Assassin’s Creed Unity, set in the Paris of 1789. Although its plot, centered on a conflict between the Knights Templar and a secret brotherhood of heroes, is predictably silly, the developers consulted with leading historians and produced a breathtakingly detailed and accurate recreation of Paris in the late eighteenth century. On the top floor of the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, visitors to the exhibition can don a virtual reality headset and wander about in a depiction of Notre-Dame before Viollet-le-Duc’s renovations. (They cannot, alas, duel with evil Templars.) Dour and gray, shorn of its original spire, its statuary decaying or destroyed, the baroque choir sitting uneasily under the Gothic vault, the cathedral of 1789 still had its glory, but a half-ruined glory. Whether or not Viollet-le-Duc restored the Gothic “essence” of Notre-Dame, he performed a necessary act of rescue.

But at the same time, the game illuminates one aspect of the restoration that the exhibition surprisingly neglects. Until the 1850s the cathedral produced a different impression on visitors than it does today, not merely because of the state of the building but because of what surrounded it. In place of the imposing Préfecture de Police and the grand square (usually filled by long snaking lines of tourists waiting to enter) that are now in front of Notre-Dame, there was a warren of small, dark streets, with buildings even crowded between it and the Seine. Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration project coincided precisely with the mammoth urban renewal enterprise of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who plowed wide boulevards through the city center, tore down thousands of medieval buildings, exiled workers and artisans to poor suburbs, installed modern sanitation systems and broad, gaslit sidewalks, and generally created the city center as it appears today. Both Haussmann and Viollet-le-Duc consulted frequently with Emperor Napoleon III, who had staged a coup in 1851 and thereafter ruled as an autocrat.

The Notre-Dame restoration was very much an official project, carried out in service of a state desperate to bring order and discipline to the raucous, rebellious city that had toppled two earlier nineteenth-century regimes. Viollet-le-Duc’s project might at first glance seem the opposite of Haussmann’s: the one worshiping the Parisian past, the other seeking in large part to erase it. Arguably they fit together quite well. Viollet-le-Duc’s Notre-Dame, beautiful as it is, lacks something of the unruly, even dangerous qualities of the medieval Gothic. As Hugo wrote in his novel, in the Middle Ages the “grave and powerful cathedral…inspired terror.” Viollet-le-Duc’s Notre-Dame also possesses a homogeneous quality that the original cathedral, constructed over nearly two centuries and constantly modified thereafter, lacked. The restoration was a taming as well.

The remainder of Viollet-le-Duc’s career bears out this point. He took on many other official projects, including restorations of other major French cathedrals and the medieval ramparts of the fortified town of Carcassonne. For the emperor and empress’s personal use he rebuilt the ruined Château de Pierrefonds, giving them, as the catalog puts it, the “fantasy of a great medieval castle for country retreats, pageants, and spectacles.” During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Viollet-le-Duc offered his service as a military engineer to the city of Paris, then fled when, after the fall of Napoleon III, the radical Commune took power there. He did not enjoy his former political favor under the subsequent republican regime and settled in Lausanne, Switzerland.

There, ever the workaholic, he continued to write compulsively. To his huge historical dictionary of French architecture and another major reference work on furniture, he added his history of dwellings and books on architectural theory, military fortifications, and Russian art. And he continued to draw: everything from cats, his favorite animal, to the mountains that always remained objects of fascination for him. A series of playful drawings in the exhibition illustrates battles between cats and lead soldiers. On the walls of the house he built for himself in Lausanne, the catalog notes, he painted an “immersive primordial mountain panorama.” A second VR headset in the exhibition allows viewers to see the house as it stood during Viollet-le-Duc’s final years. He died there in 1879, “reportedly of exhaustion.”

Today most of this work is little known except to art historians, and the Bard Graduate Center and the curators have done a signal service in surveying it so thoroughly. Of course, inescapably, the exhibition serves above all to place his most important project, the restoration of Notre-Dame, in a satisfyingly broad perspective. Most casual visitors to the cathedral never realize the extent to which what they see is a creation of the nineteenth century as well as of the Middle Ages. “Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds” cannot change that fact. But those who see it will come away with a much greater understanding of the nineteenth-century imagination at work in what amounted almost to a rebuilding. That imagination, imprinted by racial theories and subservient to power, is in many ways distant from our own. But in its passionate attachment to the strange harmonies of the Gothic and in its profound understanding of the craft first developed in the Middle Ages, it can still touch a chord in us and bring alive what Victor Hugo called “a vast symphony of stone.”