South Portal, Chartres Cathedral

The South Portal of Chartres Cathedral, sculpted between 1210 and 1235 with its 13th-century apostolic statuary, belongs to Marville's earliest photographic period. In 1854, Charles-François Bossu — known as Charles Marville — receives one of the inaugural commissions of the Commission des Monuments Historiques to document Gothic cathedrals threatened by neglect or by the restoration projects of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The mission precedes by four years his appointment as photographer to the City of Paris (1858, officially confirmed 1862) and establishes his documentary discipline well before the Vieux Paris corpus. Unlike his later Paris views on wet-collodion glass negative, the Chartres campaign is made on the calotype paper negative, printed on salted paper — the high-resolution wet-collodion process is only generalised in France after 1851 but Marville still works in the calotype tradition of Henri Le Secq and Édouard Baldus, who participated in the parallel Mission héliographique of 1851 commissioned by the same Commission des Monuments Historiques. The salted-paper print is held at the Metropolitan Museum (Gilman Collection), the Musée Carnavalet, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, 2013 exhibition), and is reproduced in Sarah Kennel's monograph ("Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris", National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2013). Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: this is the natural reference work for the Maison Picturale salted-paper line — the original procédé reformulated with non-toxic chemistry restitutes the matte fibrous render and the warm tonal signature of Marville's monumental heritage commissions, with Vandyke (non-toxic ferric ammonium citrate and silver) as the silver-ferric variant, and platinum-palladium grand-format when the client commissions a museum-scale restitution of the Gothic statuary.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / MET Open Access