Notre-Dame of Dijon

The full story

Notre-Dame replaced an earlier church, Notre-Dame-du-Marché, which stood on the same spot or close by. Begun around 1220, the work moved fast and was largely finished in the 1240s, but the church was not consecrated until 1334. In the 13th century, its parish, in the heart of a merchants’ quarter and a few steps from the dukes’ residence, was one of the richest in Dijon. Its wealthy townspeople, who took part in governing the town, paid for a large share of the work and so asserted their standing in everyone’s eyes.

The master builder, whose name has not come down to us, took on a challenge: raising a powerful church on a narrow plot. The building is 65 m long and about 20 m wide. Its vaults rise only to 17.50 m, yet the slender supports heighten the upward sweep. It draws on the first great Gothic cathedrals of northern France, such as Soissons, Noyon and Laon, and on Auxerre cathedral, built at the same time. Beneath the porch, the three portals bore sculptures of exceptional quality, compared with those of Chartres and Strasbourg. They were methodically destroyed in 1794. Above, instead of a large rose window between two towers, a double gallery of arches rests on slender columns.

As the townspeople’s church, Notre-Dame also watched over the town. Its north tower kept the archives, its bell tower served as a lookout to warn of approaching suspicious troops or the start of a fire, and the town’s bell summoned assemblies or rang the alarm. The Jacquemart sits at the top of the south tower. During the siege of the town by the Swiss in 1513, and again in 1944, the people of Dijon prayed to the statue of Notre-Dame de Bon-Espoir (Our Lady of Good Hope), still in one of the chapels. In 1946, Dom Robert made the tapestry Terribilis, which commemorates this double liberation.

In the 19th century, the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc held Notre-Dame up as a model of 13th-century building: “a masterpiece of reason where the builder’s science hides beneath an apparent simplicity”. From 1865 to 1884, a vast restoration removed the side chapels, replaced the crossing tower with a lantern tower and spire, and remade 50 of the 51 chimeras. Five 13th-century windows were kept in the north transept, and the master glazier Édouard Didron created 58 new ones. The high altar by the sculptor Jean Dubois, then judged “of detestable taste”, was reassembled next to the church in a neo-Gothic chapel built from 1877 to 1882, the chapel of the Assumption.