I was saddened to see the Notre Dame in flames: - Texas teacher essay

Architectural history expressed with spiritual emotion:

"Michelangelo said that God had placed the image inside the marble he was getting ready to carve. His task simply was to chip away the marble until the image became visible." Ramnath Subramanian 

Firefighters and technicians work on a balcony of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral in Paris, four days after a fire devastated the cathedral. Thousands of Parisians and tourists watched in horror from nearby streets on April 15, as flames engulfed the building and rescuers tried to save as much as they could of the cathedral's treasures built up over centuries. (Photo: Lionel Bonaventure, AFP/Getty Images)

Essay published in El Paso Times newspaper:

Notre Dame Cathedral reminds us about how protection, preservation of history is paramount.

Ramnath Subramanian- When I was standing with my wife, Maria, in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris, two years ago. A few words written by Ernest Dimnet (1866-1954), a priest, who wrote in the “Art of Thinking”, came to my mind.

He had written that “Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.”

The Notre Dame, I thought to myself, far from being just a grand building, is — to quote Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe — “frozen music,” which stirs the soul to contemplate God and divinity.

I had the same feeling standing in front of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence, the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

No building of the modern era has this kind of an effect on me.

Modern buildings have impressive scale and height, but they lack transcendence.

Take the Duomo, for example. The plan for the dome’s construction submitted by Brunelleschi in 1418 was considered by many to be a madman’s scheme.

However, the architect, with his head full of God, heard “harps in the air.”

Eschewing (aka, bypassing) the flying buttresses, which were quotidian (aka, common) in architecture all across Europe, Brunelleschi’s proposal, as Ross King writes in “Brunelleschi’s Dome,*” was to erect the dome literally over thin air by the “perfect placement of brick and stone.”

He also “built ingenious hoists and cranes to carry an estimated seventy million pounds hundreds of feet into the air.”

Brunelleschi worked out the kinks in the design and construction over a period of several years, and gave us a masterpiece that hovers in the air like God’s signature.

Likewise, in Istanbul, the Blue Mosque lifts the city heavenward with its ascending domes and six slender minarets.

In Madurai, it is impossible to look at the Meenakshi Temple and not be awed by its elegance and beauty, which, though created by man, is firmly bosomed in God.

The protection and preservation of all these ancient buildings is a supreme duty of man, for as God willed the genius architects to build, he so wills us to protect their works.

I was saddened last week, therefore, to see the Notre Dame in flames.

As details of the tragedy emerged, I was nonplussed by the failure of authorities and technology systems to detect the fire early and to put it out with dispatch.

As images of the conflagration flooded news channels, I felt an extraordinary sadness which, try as I might, I could not shake off.

How sad it is to see old things die.

The cathedral will be rebuilt, for sure, but it won’t be the same, because the new builders will not hear the same harps in the air that the old builders did.

Regardless, whether reality is in front of us, or is a transfiguration of what was in front of us, the truth that God’s hand makes wonders to happen cannot be attenuated.

Michelangelo said that God had placed the image inside the marble he was getting ready to carve. His task simply was to chip away the marble until the image became visible.

Individual ambition and civic pride are always at play in grand constructions, but when religious faith enters the equation, grandeur puts on a show that is for all ages.

Of all the cities I have visited, Florence is my favorite, because it preserves its historical roots well.

Walking down the cobblestone streets you wouldn’t be too surprised if you espied Michelangelo or Brunelleschi rushing about to get their day’s work done.

History comes alive and stays alive when we take care of the things that belong to the past.

Ramnath Subramanian is a retired public-school teacher. 

* Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture

On August 19, 1418, a competition concerning Florence's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore--already under construction for more than a century--was announced: "Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome....shall do so before the end of the month of September." 

The proposed dome was regarded far and wide as all but impossible to build: not only would it be enormous, but its original and sacrosanct design shunned the flying buttresses that supported cathedrals all over Europe. The dome would literally need to be erected over thin air.

Of the many plans submitted, one stood out--a daring and unorthodox solution to vaulting what is still the largest dome (143 feet in diameter) in the world. It was offered not by a master mason or carpenter, but by a goldsmith and clockmaker named Filippo Brunelleschi, who would dedicate the next twenty-eight years to solving the puzzles of the dome's construction. In the process, he did nothing less than reinvent the field of architecture.

Brunelleschi's Dome is the story of how a Renaissance genius bent men, materials, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural wonder we continue to marvel at today. Denounced at first as a madman, Brunelleschi was celebrated at the end as a genius. He engineered the perfect placement of brick and stone, built ingenious hoists and cranes to carry an estimated 70 million pounds hundreds of feet into the air, and designed the workers' platforms and routines so carefully that only one man died during the decades of construction--all the while defying those who said the dome would surely collapse and his own personal obstacles that at times threatened to overwhelm him.

Even today, in an age of soaring skyscrapers, the cathedral dome of Santa Maria del Fiore retains a rare power to astonish. 

Author Ross King brings its creation to life in a fifteenth-century chronicle with twenty-first-century resonance.