| When I visited Paris, I could see the Arc de Triomphe from the Louvre and thought I would just walk there. After all the walking I'd already done I gave up and took the Metro the last two stops. My sense of distance was thrown off by how monstrously huge the Arc is. I don't know where they take the pictures of it from, but standing across the street from it I had to just about stand on my head to get the whole thing into frame on my camera. And as big as the Arc is, the Napoleonic Louvre is bigger (And, I might add, covered with his initial, like a child marking his belongings). And they additions were made in such a way that from the outside it looks five times bigger than it is. There's a certain element of shock and awe going on here. The only thing I've seen on a similar scale is the Washington Monument, and you understand why all the pictures of the Lincoln statue make it look like it's immediately behind the pillars. It is not. It's on the far end of a large room, also too big to get into frame. It's just so big that it destroys perspective. To people confronted with this for the first time, I can see how they might wonder why they didn't stop at a smaller monument. In an era without high rises, there's a bit of grotesquery about the scale of these things. They were paid for on the backs of the lower class. I'm sure it was a very concrete image of the slide back into monarchy. The only thing I've seen on a similar scale in the US, aside from nature, is the Lincoln Memorial. Seeing the monument, you understand why all the pictures of the Lincoln statue make it look like it's immediately behind the pillars. It is not. It's on the far end of a large room, also too big to get into frame. It's just so big that it destroys perspective. Now, in an era of high rise apartments, the ridiculous proportions prevent these buildings from simply being swallowed in a sea of truly mundane buildings of comparable size. And that is probably why these places have such a tourist draw even today. |