Notre Dame

October 16th, 2017

On Saturday, Glenn and I took a tour of Notre Dame sponsored by Paris Accueille les Etudiants et Chercheurs du Monde.  It is an organization established to help visiting students and researchers with all aspects of their stay.  (We only found out about them recently.  Their services would have come in hand earlier!)  

Glenn and I had both been to Notre Dame before, but it had been many years.  Our tour guide was a funny guy, a German artist living in Paris, who warned us that art, not history, would be the focus of the tour.  He then proceeded to tell us many interesting facts about the history of the site, the actual physical building process, the glass-making process, the characteristics of the environs at the time, and the historical evolution of Catholic doctrine.  He did also touch on the symbolism in the colors used in the paintings and windows, red to symbolize the earthly, blue the heavenly, and purple the meeting of the two.  He noted the use of purple in the church, especially in vestments during Lent and Easter, but I also wondered if the liberal use of purple by royalty had the same origins, to suggest it as the confluence of mortal and divine.