In 1869, the architect-painter Alexandre-Dominique Denuelle (1818–79) was entrusted with the restoration of polychromy in the fifteenth-century palace of Jacques Coeur in Bourges.¹ The fabled merchant’s abode was originally awash with colour in its interior spaces, which has faded with time, leaving only bare stone. Denuelle dutifully restored the interiors of two rooms on the upper floor — the chapel and the south gallery — based on traces of the original painting which he had documented in the 1840s.² These drawings are unfortunately no longer extant, but the rooms today are preserved in the state that Denuelle had left them, vibrant and dazzling in their gilded and polychrome false masonry and tapestries, covering the walls and ceilings in their totality. The contrast to the rest of the palace, where the exposed bare stones carried at most a hint of their medieval colours, is striking.

Being a historic monument open to the public, one would think that surely visitors and conservators alike must be intrigued by this display of nineteenth-century artistic daring. I am disappointed to report that instead of curiosity and appreciation, visitors are encouraged to harbor nothing but scorn and contempt toward this seemingly harmless and, in all respects, obscure artistic practice. The Centre des Monuments Nationaux’s official guidebook by Jean-Yves Ribault, available for purchase in the gift shop, only has one sentence to say about Denuelle’s intervention, and it is that ‘his work was too forceful and slightly impaired the elegance of the angels set in the arches… .’³ If Denuelle had faithfully reproduced the original decorative scheme of the room, does that not mean Ribault objects to the appearance of the fifteenth-century interior, rather than his restoration? No contextualization was given for this sudden interest in the restoration of decorative polychromy either. Who was Denuelle, and how come he was suddenly tasked with repainting this monument in 1869?

In his 2001 interdisciplinary study of the role of colour, David Batchelor argues that ‘colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture’, a prejudice which he termed ‘chromophobia’, i.e. fear of colour.⁴ This terminology establishes a link to other kinds of systemic phobias that uphold structural oppression and marginalization, to which the depreciation of colour has consistently been attached, and which in turn are strengthened by the revulsion to colour. He suggests a two-step process in which this is achieved: ‘in the first, colour is made out to be the property of some “foreign” body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration.’⁵ Take modernist hegemon Le Corbusier, for example. In his collection of essays When the Cathedrals Were White, to which my title is a response, he equated the clean whiteness of France’s first Gothic cathedrals with moral hygiene and racial superiority.⁶ Almost every remark regarding the chromaticity of medieval and ancient buildings made in his introduction is false: the cathedrals were not white, and his philosophical skyscraper was built on fictitious foundations. The negative perception of Denuelle’s restoration work, as well as its marginal status as an ‘unnecessary intervention’ seem pretty salient examples of chromophobia, inconvenient to the master narrative of whiteness.

Having been interested in the Gothic Revival movement for some time now, I started pondering the idea of writing a piece centering its decorative aspects — especially in relation to colour and painting — as a riposte to the chromophobic emphasis on structure and naked masonry as is too often the case in this corner of architectural history. Every piece of writing I’ve been able to locate where Denuelle’s name is mentioned (and they were few and far between), the author could not be compelled to say more than one or two sentences on his work, as if his oeuvre was some dark, dangerous secret that must be guarded from the reading public at all costs. Orphaned by architectural and art history alike, Denuelle’s name drifts about as a spectre haunting holy houses all across France from Rouen to Nimes, always present yet never to be pinned down.

Upon closer inspection and reading in the footnotes, Alexandre Denuelle was not, in fact, a wandering spirit; instead he belonged to the circle of Gothic Revivalists in France whose most famous figurehead was Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79). From the 1840s on, this group of architects and theorists pushed back against the established academic preference for bare, plain interiors, stemming from Neoclassical dogma, and advocated for colour to be applied in restoration of medieval edifices. Far from an incidental side-product of the conservation movement, polychromy had its own theorists and staunch defenders, and a good deal of ink was spilled in order to reify it as an important pursuit for architects and restorers. It was not restricted to restoration, but was also deliberately employed in new building projects both ecclesiastical and secular.

Even a cursory glance at the theory of architectural polychromy produced in the period between 1840 and 1870 would reveal startling connections between the role of colour in architecture and the articulation of racial whiteness. Although Gothic Revival polychromists were aware of the link between architectural and bodily whiteness established by Neoclassicism, they never abandoned white supremacy themselves; their defiant stance against monochromatic architecture was a pedantic one based on archaeological evidence, not an ideological one redressing racialization. This refusal to deconstruct structures of power ultimately contributed to the failure of the movement to change public opinion, as well as its critical obscurity in the twentieth century. A project to unearth this forgotten era in art and architectural history, then, must also examine the critical junction of chromophobia, archaeology and the articulation of whiteness.