Restoration of Notre-Dame’s smoke-damaged stained glass starts

TROYES, France, Sept 3 (Reuters) – When Notre-Dame de Paris suffered intensive structural injury in a significant fireplace, many of the historic cathedral’s stained glass was capable of stand up to the warmth and the flames.

However the home windows have been closely dirty with smoke and mud which blocked exterior mild and obscured the vary of colors of the 170 years-old glass.

Greater than three years after the large blaze, eight glass manufactures from France have begun the painstaking operation to wash and restore 39 excessive home windows within the medieval cathedral’s nave, choir, transept and vestry.

Flavie Serriere Vincent-Petit, head of the eponymous stained-glass firm in Troyes, southwest of Paris, has been given the duty of restoring 22 home windows.

The glass-cleaning course of entails gently rubbing the floor with cotton soaked in water and ethanol, a fragile and repetitive course of aimed toward accumulating deposit with out damaging the window.

“There’s a main cleansing part, to clean off each the blaze’s mud and the dust ensuing from human breath, in addition to candle soot, so we are able to put the home windows again into place and provides again full brightness to Notre-Dame,” she mentioned.

The cathedral has been closed for restoration because the April 2019 fireplace gutted its roof and despatched its spire crashing by the vaults beneath.

The goal is to reopen the cathedral, which dates again to the twelfth century, by 2024 when France hosts the Olympic Video games. learn extra

Notre-Dame’s stained-glass home windows have been created by architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, who additionally designed the 96-metre (315-feet) spire.

The workshop of Cologne Cathedral in Germany can be serving to with the reconstruction by restoring the stained glasses of 4 excessive home windows.

Reporting by Manuel Ausloos; Writing by Sybille de La Hamaide; Enhancing by Mike Harrison

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