Cathedral Painted by Monet to Be Restored After Acid-Rain Damage

The proud cathedral immortalized by Claude Monet survived bombs and fire in World War II only to face a slow death from acid rain.

“Monet painted the cathedral as if it were melting,” Yves Lescroart said. “Now, it really is.”

As curator of historical monuments in Upper Normandy, Lescroart heads an ambitious new project to halt the steady disintegration of the cathedral’s western facade.

Monet, father of the Impressionist art movement, used Notre Dame de Rouen as a model for about 30 of his best-known paintings nearly 100 years ago.

They depict the Gothic facade bathed in shimmering light and color at various times of day. The cathedral’s natural color at the time was a light brown.

The facade has been blackened by decades of exposure to some of France’s worst industrial pollution, aggravated by constant rainfall and prevailing westerly winds.

What once were distinct noses and eyes on its statues of biblical figures have become puddles of featureless stone. Scaffolding rings the portals to catch falling pieces.

“It’s the same problem all over northern France,” Lescroart said. “After the war came the chemical war.”

Some of France’s greatest cathedrals--at Reims, Chartres, Beauvais and Strasbourg--lie in the postwar industrial belt stretching from Normandy to the German border.

All show signs of damage from two generations of pollution, which is slowly being reversed by factory modernization and more stringent controls.

None has been scarred so badly as Notre Dame de Rouen, which sits in a valley of the Seine River near more than 60 factories, chemical plants and oil refineries.

Smokestacks belch 100 tons of sulfur a day into the damp atmosphere between Rouen and Le Havre, the nearby port. In 1974, the total was twice that.

Frequent rains bring the pollution down on the cathedral, built of a soft, yellow regional stone favored by medieval masons.

Of all the walls and towers, the western facade is the most vulnerable. It lies directly in the unsheltered path of westerly winds that blow pollution and acid rain from Le Havre and Rouen’s industrial suburb of La Couronne.

Sulfuric acid clings to the delicate stonework, forming a black stain that gradually spreads and penetrates deeper into the stone, exploding it.

The Rev. Jean Larcher, abbot of the cathedral, demonstrates the results to visitors by lightly tracing an index finger across a stone buttressing the 495-foot spire, second-highest in France after Beauvais.

“Look how tender the stone is,” he said, holding up a finger covered in chalky white powder.

Age naturally takes its toll on stone, but war and pollution have hastened the process in Rouen and elsewhere.

Larcher, 57, was a boy when British bombers missed their military targets the night of April 19, 1944, and dropped seven bombs in and around the cathedral.

Much of the southern wall crumpled and one of the four pillars holding up the spire collapsed. The spire, itself the work of a 19th-Century restoration, remained standing.

Two wartime fires in the neighborhood added to the damage, blackening most of St. Romain’s tower, the oldest part of the structure.

Forty-five years later, the World War II damage has been repaired, and Lescroart and architect Michel Lantzen are turning their attention to Monet’s facade. The five-year restoration project should begin this spring.

Archeologists will spend the first year gently spraying water on the facade with the pressure of a light drizzle, to loosen stains and neutralize acids. Scientists will test the stone chemically to find how deeply the acid has penetrated and whether any microorganisms have become ingrained.

After the spraying, workers will brush off as much of the black stain as possible and seal the cleansed stone with protective agents. Stonework that cannot be saved will be replaced.

Most of the statues will be taken to a museum next door and be replaced by castings of silicon and powdered rock.

“Cathedrals are permanent workshops,” said architect Yves Boiret. “There is always scaffolding around them, and from accounts we’ve read, there always has been.”

Boiret is working on the cathedral at Reims, in the Champagne region, where the Culture Ministry has begun a program to increase public participation in saving historic monuments.

Restoring cathedrals is a costly process and traditionally has been solely the government’s responsibility. The budget for Rouen alone last year was $1.4 million.

The Culture Ministry wants communities to pay about 40% of the cost.

Boiret hopes the Reims City Council will ban cars from the cathedral area. He said their noise and exhaust emissions damage stone.

“Cathedrals get old,” Boiret said. “They are like people; they’re not eternal. Sooner or later, the stone weakens. It’s inexorable.”