Paris aerial Photos

Paris: An aerial view of Paris from the Eiffel Tower, showing a football stadium and modern high-rise buildings.

Famous Places as seen by Great Painters

Paris is a city where nature has never worn out her welcome, but continues to thrive even in the ultra-modern quarters. The Seine with its shady banks and sunny quays provides a perfect haven of flowers and greenery, while the whole city is dotted with parks and gardens. The Impressionists and after them the Fauves roamed Paris with eager, understanding eyes, recording the tremor of the trees along the avenues, the shimmering surface of the river, old walls glowing in the sun, chimney smoke gathering into wisps of cloud above the rooftops. On monuments mellowed by time the faintest shades of color flicker as if seen across a tenuous veil.

This unique light of Paris, made of sunshine and mist, gives every element its rightful place and tone in the panorama. Even the Eiffel Tower, modern times' great contribution to the silhouette of Paris, blends with the monuments of the past, a soaring, bodiless piece of architecture giving the full measure of the sky above the city. The best painters of the present day no longer linger over anecdote and detail; their broad synthetic vision embraces the seen and unseen treasures of a city as rich in past glories as it is rich in promise for the future.

The earliest paintings in which we can identify actual views of Paris date from the transitional period from Romanesque to Gothic, when outline drawing was coming back into favor at the expense of the monumental style. Definitely on the way out were the lavish gold backgrounds we find, for example, in the Psalter of St Louis, in which the scenes take place beneath the pinnacles, rose-windows and pointed arches of the SainteChapelle. Manuscript painting moved on from blue-and-red to shadings of color, to lively, freehand drawing, to the checkered backgrounds typical of the Parisian ateliers.