1. I only knew about two things about the Musée de Cluny (the national museum of the Middle Ages) before I visited: that it was home to the Lady and the Unicorn tapestry (which I did not photograph because the room was too full to make it worthwhile) and that after years of telling tourists that this was where they could find the original heads from Notre Dame’s Gallery of Kings, I was finally going to see them myself. I was not disappointed.
(In case you’re unfamiliar with this story, basically the 12th century Notre Dame Cathedral was home to a gallery of stone statues of kings of the Old Testament. During the French Revolution, the Revolutionaries got a bit overzealous with the beheadings and decapitated the Old Testament kings. In the 19th century, the Cathedral was renovated, and the statues were replaced; the heads weren’t found until the 20th century, and now they’re on display at the Cluny museum.)
2. The museum is located in the historic city center, known today as the Latin Quarter. This neighborhood was the first to be settled by the Romans when they took Paris from the Parisii in 52 BC, and the site chosen for the Cluny museum is actually a former Roman bath (which is currently being renovated and thus super hard to photograph). On top of the former Roman bath was built the medieval Hôtel de Cluny, formerly the home of the abbots of Cluny, started in 1334; it’s one of the most distinctive examples of civic architecture from the Middle Ages still standing in Paris, and it’s also why visiting this museum feels a bit like visiting a castle.
3. On the day of my visit, there was quite a long line to get in, but seeing as you line up in the courtyard, there’s actually a lot to see before you’ve even entered the museum, like this sundial painted on the former astronomy tower. You can see a few scallop shells sculpted just to the left of the sundial; that’s because Saint James de Compostella (also known as Saint-Jacques or Santiago) began his pilgrimage not far from the Hôtel de Cluny.
The Latin motto inscribed just under the sun is Nil Sine Nobis – nothing without us. The motto is in reference to the rays of sun, without which the sundial would not work. (A bit of medieval sh*tposting, seeing as the sun rarely shines in Paris.)
4. The exhibits inside include quite a bit of medieval sculpture, including this statue of my buddy Saint-Denis, the patron saint of Paris who is always depicted holding his own head, ostensibly because when he was martyred at the top of Montmartre, he picked up his head and carried it to the city of Saint-Denis, where he found a Christian woman, gave her his head, laid down in a field, and died. The Saint-Denis Basilica was built on top of his body and became the final burial place for all but three of France’s kings.
You can see a few traces of the paint that used to decorate all medieval statues; Notre Dame would have been a lot more colorful in the 14th century.
5. What a lot of people don’t realize about medieval structures in Paris, including Notre Dame, is that very few – if any – of them actually look the way they did in the Middle Ages. That’s because in the 19th century, Napoleon III was trying to create national unity and thus set about restoring a lot of medieval structures in the neo-Gothic style. This style was far more flamboyant than the original medieval style (kind of like people putting neo-Classical columns on McMansions, except in the case of the 19th century, they were renovating actual Gothic cathedrals).
Notre Dame was renovated to such an extent in the 19th century that there is not one original gargoyle on the façade; you can see why they had to replace them when you get a look at this guy, on display in the courtyard at the Cluny museum.