Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, Paris, France

The Gallery of Kings and Arcade Reliefs of the Western Façade at Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris

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Gothic Revival / Neo-Gothic (1843–1864, after High Gothic sculptural style of c. 1220–1240)

Architectural monumental column statues of crowned biblical kings of Judah in strict linear procession at Notre-Dame’s western facade, with carved colonnettes, foliate capitals, and a continuous band of carved corbel arches overhead. Viollet-le-Duc’s 19th-century replacements for the originals decapitated during the Revolution in 1793, the Gallery of Kings stands as a monument to iconographic ambiguity: the medieval theological program made vulnerable to historical misreading by its visual proximity to secular kingship.