Le portail Royal de la cathédrale de Bordeaux. Redécouverte d’un chef-d’œuvre

Inaccessible behind an iron grille for several decades and blackened by pollution, the Royal Portal of the cathedral of Bordeaux has recently been restored and reopened to the public. This restoration has led to a genuine rediscovery: a masterpiece of 13th-century European sculpture. Moreover, the remains of the original polychromy still preserved allow us to reconstruct and to analyse the initial coloured appearance of the portal – an aspect of French monumental sculpture of this period that has been little studied. 

This publication gives an overview of the research undertaken recently during restoration carried out between 2011 and 2014. It brings together contributions written by art historians, archaeologists, a staff member in charge of the restoration and a specialist of communication science. Their results revise fundamentally our vision not only of the portal’s sculpture, its iconography and its stylistic treatment, but also of its architectural framing and its initial colouring. They permit us to retrace the history of the Royal Portal from the Middle Ages to the present.