Restoration criteria in medieval buildings

In this paper I intend to compare two different methods of restoration which have been used in two very important medieval buildings.

Look at these two photographs: they are of the Carcassonne and Girona city walls.

The Carcassonne walls are in fact composed of two different walls. The internal wall is of Gallo-Roman origin and the external one was built later, in the 13th century, in order to improve the defense of the city. The medieval city was abandoned and consequently deteriorated.

In the 19th century, a restoration process was entrusted to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who intended to rebuild the walls of the medieval citadel according to their original appearance.

The reconstruction was carried out in this way: the missing parts of the wall were rebuilt with stones which are very similar to the original. If you look at the walls, you can notice the difference between the original sections and those which have been rebuilt.

The towers have alsobeen rebuilt because the majority of them had deteriorated and all of their roofs had been destroyed. So all the current roofs of the city are new but there was some discussion in relation to their original colour. The opinion of the restorer was that they should be black. However, some of the towers have red roofs since Viollet-le-Duc’s successor changed the criterion. It seems that the oldest towers, those of Gallo-Roman origin, have red roofs while those of the medieval towers are black.

I don’t know how faithful this criterion of reconstruction is to the original concept. This question is really out of the scope of this paper but it is clear that the intention was to approximate, as far as possible, to the original appearance of the city, using the materials which were most similar to the original. Even the wooden sections of the walls, which had been completely destroyed, were also reconstructed. This is logical because they were the most fragile parts of the monument.

The Girona city walls are of Carolingian origin and they had already been rebuilt in the Middle Ages. More exactly, they were originally built in the 9th century and then rebuilt in the 14th. Thus they are later than the Carcassonne walls since they date from the Gallo-Roman period and were rebuilt in the 13th century. Although I do not know the exact date of the last restoration, it is clear that it has been carried out later than the restoration of the Carcassonne walls.

It is very easy to note that the method of reconstruction used in Girona is very different from the method followed in Carcassonne. The materials used to complete the missing parts of the building are different from the original. Thus it is very easy to differentiate the original sections from those which were rebuilt. The material used for the rebuilding was the typical red brick. The towers were also rebuilt with the same material and all of them are accessible by stairs. There are wonderful views of the city to be seen from the walls and the towers.

This method of restoration is probably cheaper and simpler than that used in Carcassonne. Maybe this is the reason that a different method was followed - or perhaps the criteria for the restoration of old monuments has simply changed in recent years.

In the following paragraphs I intend to discuss which of the two methods of reconstruction is better or more faithful to the original appearance of the building.

On the one hand, without taking into account if the colour of the roofs of the towers is really original or not, the intention of the method followed in Carcassonne in the 19th century was to obtain a result as similar as possible to the original - that is to say, the appearance that the wall would have had in the Middle Ages. The result is really beautiful and you can feel as if you were transported back to the Middle Ages there. The problem is that it is not completely sure if the result is really faithful to the original building.

On the other hand, the intention behind the method employed in Girona was to differentiate the original sections of the building from those rebuilt in the 20th century. The result is clearly different to the original appearance of the wall but perhaps the result can be considered more faithful than that obtained by the first method. Without having to take economic or practical reasons into account, one can easily know what is original and what is not.