Notre Dame: Here's what the 850-year-old cathedral meant to the world
Notre Dame , a survivor of wars and revolutions, has stood for centuries as not merely the greatest of the Gothic cathedrals and a towering jewel of Western architecture. It has stood, in the words of one shell-shocked art expert, as "one of the great monuments to the best of civilization." And so it was that across the globe Monday, a stunned and helpless art world wept alongside the people of France as a massive fire ravaged the beloved cathedral. "Civilization is just so fragile," said Barbara Drake Boehm, senior curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval Cloisters branch in New York, her voice shaking as she tried to put into words what the cathedral meant. "This great hulking monument of stone has been there since 1163. It's come through so many trials." "It's not one relic, not one piece of glass it's the totality," she said, struggling to find words expansive enough to describe the cathedral's signi