ABSTRACT
In the mid-19th century, the young French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) began to assert himself as one of the most important restorers of historic monuments. Within this time, in addition to the restoration works of the Sainte Marie Madeleine de Vézelay basilica (1839), the Saint-Chapelle (1840) or the Notre Dame of Paris (1845), Viollet-le-Duc began to understand and disseminate the restoration of historic monuments as a discipline independent of the architecture design (Choay 2008; Neto 2001). Later, between 1854 and 1868, the French restorer, Commission des Monuments Historiques Architect and Inspecteur Général des Édifices Diocésains, wrote the essential Dictionnaire raisonnée de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe, publication that along with the restoration works themselves disseminate throughout the world the principles of Viollet-leDuc. This theorist was undoubtedly a successor of Ludovic Vitet (1802-1873) and Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) ideas, to whom we owe the creation of the previously mentioned establishment of the restoration of historic monuments as an autonomous
Despite this tendency towards the materialization of utopian architecture models, it is important to emphasize that through the valorisation of the gothic architecture as a rational and scientific structure and its graphic re-imagination (Vinegar 1998) Viollet-le-Duc broke through the common mystical and religious interpretations of this construction style. Equally important is the fact that, as noted by Aron Vinegar (1998), to the French theorist, as to the comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the main form of revealing and, consequently, of knowing the organism, a biological or architectural one, was the dissection. This exercise was fundamental to the restorer, an architect well acquainted with the structure, the anatomy, or the style of the historic monuments under his responsibility. Thus, the utopian aspect of this process began only after the exhaustive gathering of graphic representations, dissection, and study of the different elements. Actually, the utopian aspect of this restoration plans began with the graphic restoration of these historic monuments according to the ideal-type set by Violletle-Duc, even though these constructions do not resemble any real structure.
