This is the largest carpet ever woven in France: 25 meters long and 9 meters wide at its widest point. A monumental piece of nearly 200 square meters, weighing one ton. It kept small, nimble hands busy from 1825 to 1833. You can discover this treasure in the "Grands décors restaurés de Notre-Dame ('Great Restored Decors of Notre-Dame)" exhibition, which runs until July 21, at the Mobilier national in Paris, in association with the regional directorate of cultural affairs (DRAC, direction régionale des affaires culturelles) for the Ile-de-France region.
Spared by the cathedral fire in April 2019, it is the centerpiece of an exhibition that also includes 21 paintings and 14 tapestries designed for this place of worship. Models of contemporary liturgical furniture in bronze by designer Guillaume Bardet and two wooden barreled chairs by designer Ionna Vautrin, out of the 1,500 currently being manufactured by Bosc in the Landes region are also on display. Everything must be ready for installation at Notre-Dame on December 8, the day of Virgin Mary's feast, in whose honor the edifice was built.
"It's very moving to have to restore a velvet carpet whose weaving, undertaken in the workshops of the Savonnerie, then located at the foot of the Chaillot hill, was repatriated a year later here, to the Gobelins, the two royal manufactures having been linked by ordinance on March 4, 1825," said Joëlle Delaunay, head of the rug reweaving workshop at the Mobilier National, to whom the DRAC Ile-de-France entrusted the restoration of the piece. We were in a confidential area of the Gobelins, known as the "Aquarium" because of its large bay windows. This is the preserve of the rentrayeuses (reweavers), who, like painters, need the light from the north to make the best possible choice for each thread of color.
Here, while the restored half of Notre-Dame's choir carpet was on display in the Gobelins gallery, the other half was being restored. Part of it was unrolled on a huge table, the rest still on the floor in its white shroud. "We'll be ready for December 8! There's a lot less damage on the lower piece: braids to be redone, crease-related breaks or moth holes to be repaired. As for the water poured by the firemen, we dealt with that a long time ago, equipped as we are at the Mobilier National with large blowers," said the expert, surrounded by an armada of spools of linen or wool, cotton braids and curved needles.
The restoration work has enhanced understanding of the know-how of the period. "It's the first time we've seen 19th-century colors intact and so fresh," said Delaunay in front of the carpet. Used for important celebrations – the wedding of Napoleon III in 1853, the visit of Tsar Nicholas II in 1896 and Pope John Paul II in 1980 – this monumental piece has been kept folded in a protective box for almost two centuries, requiring 15 to 20 people to unroll it on each occasion. "We've learned a lot, especially from these mixtures of vegetable dyes, cochineal or madder producing red, yellow weed producing yellow or indigo producing blue," continued the workshop head. "When we thought there were two shades of wool for a red glow, in the end we found we had to combine four shades, which explains the depth and richness of color in the motifs."
You have 22.37% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.