MARION — The fire at Notre-Dame on April 15, 2019, was a shock to all who know and love Paris.

On Feb. 11 at 7 p.m., the Sippican Historical society will host a lecture, led by Caroline Bruzelius on the repair of Notre Dame via Zoom. 

Bruzelius is a scholar of medieval architecture and sculpture in Italy and France. She has published extensively on Gothic buildings and taught at Duke University from 1981 to 2018. Between 1994 and 1998 she was Director of the American Academy in Rome.

Although the cathedral was saved, its restoration is enormously complex and may take much longer than the five years promised by the French government.

Stabilizing the cathedral while removing the crumbling debris of this previous scaffolding presents extraordinary engineering challenges, a process still far from complete.  

At the same time that the site is being cleared and consolidated, a remarkable group of enterprising scholars has united to study all aspects of the cathedral, from the origins of the wood and stone to structural aspects of medieval construction.  

Utilizing a wide range of new analytical technologies, study of the cathedral promises to generate new knowledge and a new model of interdisciplinary and state-of-the art collaboration between experts in material science and historians.

Contact Leslie Piper at info@sippicanhistoricalsociety.org to request the Zoom link for this presentation.