The most colossal church of its generation, the [Cathedral of Notre Dame] was the first to employ flying buttresses as part of its original design, although those earliest examples are not visible in this distant view.

As the first cathedral to make use of a full Gothic vocabulary—flying buttresses, rose and other windows of stained glass, pointed arches, and rub vaulting—Notre Dame anchored a style both distinctively French and truly novel.

—From "The Gothic Revolution," July 1989, National Geographic magazine