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Look, I like gold in some contexts. I'd like to have a vault full of it for a rainy day or the collapse of civilisation. I'd like to have lots of historic gold coins that I could hold in my hand and contemplate the history of. But when it comes to using gold for decoration I am of the same mind as John Maynard Keynes who described it as "a barbaric relic". The sickly yellow colour of the genuine metal (as opposed to some logos which are derived from the colour of gold) looks to me to be little bit trashy.
Yet you can go barely anywhere in Paris without seeing some form of gilded statue or monument. In this case it is the statue of Joan of Arc in the Place des Pyramides. (The statue was by a sculptor named Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910), who created it in 1874.)
The tour company with which we had booked an evening tour of the Louvre has its offices immediately behind me and we were waiting outside for the tour when I noticed this. If I had realised that I had more time, I would have gotten a shot from the front and from the side as well but I thought that we were likely to leave in only a couple of minutes.
I also note that even the top spikes of the fence around the garden are painted gold. Oh dear.
I will admit though; it's unlikely that I'll ever forget the statue.
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Edit, January 2024: HAH! "Unlikely to forget", he says. Today I was reviewing, tagging, keywording and de-PBaseing some shots from 2010, which included a trip to Melbourne on 03 April 2010. And what did I shoot then? A photo of a sibling of this statue, commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria for display outside the State Library. It was cast by the same sculptor in 1906. The shot is not yet in my galleries at the time of writing, but will be eventually. It does differ from this one in a few respects. The Melbourne one is not gilded. Also the one in Melbourne holds aloft flowing banners, which can also be seen on another statue from the same cast, this time located in Philadelphia. I suspect that this one would have had banners at one time as well, but Paris has suffered quite a bit of turmoil since 1874 (to put it mildly) and it's quite possible that the banners were lost. In fairness to myself, though... the one in Melbourne was shot ONLY from the front. And when I saw both the Melbourne statue and the name of the sculptor... it did make me twig to the connection to this one.
Addendum: My personal opinion is that Facebook is a sociopathic organisation that steals other peoples' intellectual property (including the images in this gallery) despite being explicitly denied permission to do so.
©2000-2024 AKMC. May not be used, copied or reproduced or used in AI training without written permission, especially by Facebook