Blum, “Le Portail central de la façade occidentale de Saint-Denis,” trans. Sallez, architect-in-chief of Saint-Denis, graciously granted his permission for it.ĭuring those same years Professor Crosby subsidized my travel, research, and writing, and finally arranged for the translation and publication in France of an article presenting a condensed version of the findings with respect to the sculpture of the central portal (Summer McKnight Crosby and Pamela Z. Each year from 1968 through 1973 he arranged for the erection of scaffolding from which I could examine the carved surfaces under magnification, and M. Under his auspices I received the necessary permissions to do the research on site. In 1968 he asked me join his archaeological “équipe” and undertake an examination of the portals. Yet Professor Crosby remained certain that vestiges of the twelfth-century sculpture still existed, at least in the central portal.
For his revised opinion, see idem, The Sculptors of the West Portals of Chartres Cathedral, 113. Sculpture in the Ile-de-France from 1140–1190, 3. Stoddard, The West Portals of Saint-Denis and Chartres. Whitney Stoddard's conclusions, later modified on the basis of the archaeological study published in 1973, were entirely the opposite: “Combining documentary and visual evidence, we are forced to eliminate as twelfth-century work all sculpture of the west facade of Saint-Denis except some of the plinths below the former jamb sculptures, fragments preserved in museums in France and the United States, and some of the tympanum and archivolts of the central portal” (W. Here, as elsewhere, the heads and hands have been redone, the draperies without doubt reworked, but the overall composition of the scene remains intact). Içi, comme ailleurs, les têtes et les mains ont été refaites, les draperies ont été sans doute retouchées mais les grandes lignes de la scéne sont restées intactes.” (If one can overcome a very legitimate repugnance, one can see that one of the portals, that in the center, has preserved its original dispositions. * See, for example, Emile Mâle in “La Part de Suger dans la création de l'iconographie du Moyen Age,” Revue de l'art ancien et moderne 35 (1914): 339: “Si pourtant on veut bien triompher d'une répugnance trop légitime, on s'apercevra qu'un des portails, celui de milieu, conserve ses dispositions primitive. The rhetoric in their diatribes gave support to later critics who believed that none of the original carving had survived. Indeed, nineteenth-century heads-crude parodies of the twelfth-century style-offend the informed viewer today no less than they did the few but articulate critics who denounced the restorations. The drastic and stylistically unsympathetic restoration in the nineteenth century by the sculptor Joseph-Sylvestre Brun overshadowed the twelfth-century aesthetic to the point that some critics dismissed the sculptural ensemble as completely restored.
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Having spent the better part of his professional career studying the architecture of the twelfth-century church and excavating for the remains of earlier structures, he wanted to resolve the differences of opinion about what, if anything, remained of the twelfth-century sculpture on the western portals. The archaeological study of restorations to the three western portals at Saint-Denis began in summer 1968 under the aegis of the late Sumner McKnight Crosby. Early Gothic Saint-Denis: Restorations and Survivals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
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