Man's Head from the Notre-Dame of Paris

The National Museum of the Middle Ages is particularly rich in sculptures and architectural decorations from a large number of Parisian monuments (the abbeys at Saint-Germain des Prés, Sainte-Geneviève, Saint-Denis, Sainte-Chapelle of the city palace) as well as the Notre-Dame, Paris. The cathedral's sculpted decorations, mutilated and ripped from the monument by revolutionaries, have been brought together by a series of extraordinary coincidences, particularly the discovery in 1977 of dozens of statues and fragments in the basement of a Parisian bank. As a result the entire evolution of sculpture in Paris in the 12th and 13th centuries can be traced. The museum also collects many masterpieces from Italy, England and northern Europe.