While Notre-Dame’s sacristy — a separate space, off the choir, which held the cathedral's treasury — was not touched by the blaze that tore through the building on April 15, 2019, the destruction of the site and its security system meant that all the cathedral’s treasures had to be removed immediately, said Anne Dion-Tenenbaum, a co-curator of the exhibition.
Most pieces are now being stored in the Louvre’s Department of Decorative Arts, where she is the deputy director.
“It gave us an opportunity to really study these objects, whose spiritual dimension makes them very striking,” Ms. Dion-Tenenbaum said in an interview.
Over time, she and her fellow curators uncovered a few surprises in the treasury, which led them to look in other repositories around Paris and the rest of the country to unravel the mysteries of what was in the treasury, what wasn’t and what it all meant.
And a richly colored prayer book illustration, from around the 15th century, depicted the moment in the early 12th century when what was said to be a fragment of Jesus’s cross arrived at Notre-Dame.
Persons:
—, Anne Dion, “, ” Ms, Dion, Tenenbaum, Ermentrude
Organizations:
Notre, Louvre’s Department, Decorative Arts, Dame
Locations:
Louvre’s, Paris, Gaul