The Sculptures of Notre-Dame Cathedral

Notre-Dame is a cathedral you read as much as you look at. Its facade and towers carry one of the richest programmes of medieval sculpture in France — portals that once served as a stone Bible for a largely illiterate city, alongside the beasts and chimeras that Viollet-le-Duc added seven centuries later.

The three west portals

The heart of the sculptural programme is the west front's three doorways. The central Portal of the Last Judgment shows Christ presiding over the weighing of souls, with the blessed and the damned ranged around him — a vivid warning carved for everyone entering the church. To the left, the Portal of the Virgin depicts the death, assumption and crowning of Mary, framed by saints and the signs of the zodiac. To the right, the Portal of Saint Anne — incorporating the oldest carvings on the facade — tells the story of the Virgin's parents and of the cathedral's early bishops.

The west portals, left to right

Medieval or 19th century? How to tell

Most of what visitors read as medieval on the west front is 19th-century work carved in a medieval idiom, and the distinction changes what you are looking at. Three rough tests hold up on the ground.

• Surface: medieval stone is pitted and weather-softened; Viollet-le-Duc’s recutting is crisper and more uniform.
• Faces: 1790s crowds went for heads. A complete, undamaged face high on the facade is usually a replacement.
• Whimsy: the chimeras are pure 19th century — they are decoration, not medieval waterspouts, and they have no drainage function at all.

The Gallery of Kings

Above the portals runs the Gallery of Kings, a horizontal band of 28 statues representing the kings of Judah, the ancestors of Christ. During the Revolution in 1793 the crowd mistook them for kings of France and struck their heads off. The statues you see today are 19th-century replacements carved during the Viollet-le-Duc restoration.

Gargoyles and chimeras

Two very different kinds of creature prowl the upper cathedral, and visitors often confuse them. The gargoyles are functional: elongated stone waterspouts that throw rainwater clear of the walls, their mouths the outlets of hidden gutters. The chimeras — the brooding, thoughtful monsters of the tower gallery, including the famous horned figure often called Le Stryge — are purely decorative and were designed by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century. Medieval in spirit but modern in date, they have become some of the most photographed sculptures in Paris.

The choir screen reliefs

Inside, running around the choir, is a painted stone screen carved in the 14th century with scenes from the life of Christ — the Nativity, the Passion and the appearances after the Resurrection. Their survival, colour and storytelling detail make them one of the interior's quiet treasures, easy to miss beside the soaring architecture but well worth slowing down for.

Reading the stone

Taken together, the sculptures turn the building into a single, legible composition: salvation and judgment at the doors, the lineage of Christ across the facade, the life of Christ within, and, high above, the watchful stone menagerie of the towers. A good guide will help you decode the portals in particular, where the carving rewards a close, patient look.

The apostles of the spire

Ringing the base of the spire stood sixteen large copper statues — the twelve apostles and the four symbols of the evangelists — designed during the Viollet-le-Duc restoration and modelled by the sculptor Adolphe-Victor Geoffroy-Dechaume. They carry a remarkable footnote: just days before the 2019 fire, all sixteen were lifted off by crane and sent away for cleaning as part of the restoration works. That timing spared them from the blaze that destroyed the spire they had guarded. Cleaned, conserved and returned as part of the rebuild, they once again stand watch around the new flèche — an unlikely survival from the night the roof came down.