Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel

VIOLLET-LE-DUC, EUGÈNE-EMMANUEL. - French architect and writer, b. in Paris on 21 Jan. 1814, son of the writer Emmanuel-Nicolas, d. in Lausanne on 17 Sept. 1879.

In 1863 he obtained the chair of Aesthetics and History of Art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from which he had to resign because of the controversies his teaching aroused; in 1874 he was elected radical deputy for the Montmartre district. V. is chiefly known as a brilliant restorer of French medieval churches and monuments. In his restoration work he followed the canon of remaking the missing or unsafe parts exactly as they had come from the hands of medieval craftsmen. That canon is now abandoned, but V. deserves credit for having saved from certain ruin the most distinguished Romanesque and Gothic monuments of France and for having aroused an intense interest in them. His studies and his restorations also made a notable contribution to the spread of the taste for Neo-Romanesque and Neo-Gothic, to which unfortunately the construction of so many Romanesque and Gothic churches is due, even in missionary territory. Among the monuments restored, mention should be made, among others, of the Ste-Chapelle in Paris; the church of Vézelay, of Notre-Dame in Paris, the Cathedrals of Amiens, Laon, Reims, Lausanne, the town hall of Narbonne, etc. As a writer, always clear and concise, he owes his fame to the Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (10 vols., Paris 1854-68), adorned with very numerous drawings of his own, a work still fundamental. Also to be remembered: Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français de l'époque Carlavingienne à la Renaissance (6 vols., ibid. 1872-75); Entretiens sur l'architecture (2 vols., ibid. 1858-72); la Cité de Carcassonne (ibid. 1856). His drawings, published in 1884 (100 plates) and in 1896 (2 vols.), are kept in the Trocadéro museum.

A. Pietro Frutaz