new lighting sublimates the cathedral before Easter
You have to be ready for large Pascal Ceremonies. Patrick Rimoux and his team complete these days the installation they have designed and has pose in the cathedral to renew its lighting: 1,550 very discreet projectors and 820 electric candles in the chandelier, parent now Notre-Dame: “Because of the fire and lead pollution, the whole system was to be redone, a rare event in the life of a monument, he explains today. Rethinking the whole in close collaboration with the diocese, contracting authority of this project. “
Subtle art of light
These “light sculptors”, sometimes also nicknamed “Shadows”, have thus designed around thirty different lighting programs, “liturgical scenarios” adapted to the atmospheres of the seven daily offices, alternating with a dozen others, to magnify architecture and accompany the many concerts. From now on, a central management controls the set, allowing manual or automatic projector individually ordered
Compared to their predecessors, these engineers benefited from the recent “LED” technology which allows both a miniaturization of diodes and a variation of their temperature, generating different colors, cold white with the hottest gold. “Thus, to bring out the details of vaults and sculptures, we offer white lighting which highlights the 1240 stone, explains Patrick Rimoux.
A light at the service of the sacred
Each liturgical time, its atmosphere. During the Good Friday office, the cathedral will be bathed in a cold light. During the Pascale vigil it is a gradual ignition of the candles which will gently light up the building initially plunged into the dark. While the Easter Mass will be an opportunity to profusely celebrate the return of light.
Father Henry de Villefranche, chaplain of Notre-Dame, already notes how much this development challenges visitors: “When I ask them what touches them most, they answer me” Light! “And that is what the architects of Gothic wanted: that the cathedral allows the meeting of men with God who manifests himself.”
And to add, by contemplating the masterpieces of different epochs that coexist in Notre-Dame: “This new clarity highlights, shows us in a found unit, the genius of men who expressed himself through the centuries in all its diversity!”
A simander to ring the offices of holy week
It is a funny instrument that has just been offered to Notre-Dame de Paris: a “Simandre”, a kind of large wooden book. Indeed, between Holy Thursday and Pascale Mass, the bells of the churches are silent. But to call the faithful to the offices, we used to use the Simandre.
The only existing today, classified as a historic monument in 2016, belongs to the cathedral of Bourges (Cher) and can no longer be used, because it is too fragile. Two Berrichons, the carpenter Pascal Coudereau and the cabinetmaker Sylvain Treuillard, undertook to make two copies of this rare instrument on a 1/2 scale. One was installed in Saint-Étienne de Bourges in 2017 to sound again during the Pascales weeks; The other has just joined the Parisian cathedral.
