Note 23 — Chapter II

The building that most resembles the Mausoleum in design and dimensions among the products of modern art is probably the Arc de l’Etoile at Paris. Its length (rejecting fractions) is 150 feet English, its width 75. Its “totus circuitus” is therefore 450 as compared with the 416 of the Mausoleum. But, on the other hand, the area covered by the latter building is more than 2000 feet in excess of that covered by the former. The height of the Arc de l’Etoile is 150 feet to the cornice of the attic, and therefore considerably in excess, and it was intended to have been crowned with a quadriga, which, with its low pedestal, would have added 45 feet to this dimension, thus making up 195 feet as compared with 141·7, which was the total height of the Mausoleum. It is, however, one of the peculiarities and one of the principal beauties of the design of the Mausoleum, that it would have looked very much larger and probably even higher than the “Arc,” had it occupied its situation; and it is quite certain that a chariot group 14 feet high would look larger and more dignified on a pedestal raised on a pyramid, as at Halicarnassus, than would one twice that height on the great flat roof of the “Arc.” In the one case the group compares with a base of 20 feet by 16, in the other with a great flat measuring 150 feet by 75. At Halicarnassus one-tenth of the whole height was quite sufficient for the crowning group; at Paris one-fifth would hardly have sufficed to produce the same effect.