By Vurdlak on January 10, 2007, with 15 Comments
Taylor Russi happened to hear of this illusion in his history class (of all places) and thought he’d send it along. Taylor: “If you look at this first picture of the Medici Chapel, it doesn’t appear to be very large, only five, maybe six stories. Yet, from another view, it towers over Florence. Turns out that it was designed by Michelangelo, who wanted it to be low to the ground, like the buildings of ancient Rome. But, only having the room to build upwards, he made the Medici Chapel look much shorter than it really is, instead.” Even better example of this phenomenon is Fountain’s Abbey Church.
(17 votes)
LAME!!!
the links in the text are getting dubious as well; you’re losing your touch!
I like it!
awesome!! can somebody please explain how this works??
The reason: The building has really tall floors
I think it’s because all of it’s windows are huge. If you compare it’s windows to the windows of the buildings around it, they’re massive.
Ditto ^
How does it work ?
Simple, he has obviously made the features (such as windows) much larger than normal – hence it appears smaller than it is. The second picture show it the best, the windows are clearly at about twice the height of the windows on the other buildings which makes it look about half it’s real size.
The trick is knowing that without another frame of refence, we will assume the windows are ‘normal’ sized and derive our view of the buildings size from that.
The answer is in looking at the building on the right. It has four levels – probably typical height. If you look at the level of the top window – the fourth floor – it matches up with the third floor on the Chapel. So, it’s four stories tall at that point but only looks like three. It also helps that the roof rolls away from you when looking up from the ground.
taylor you steped back tell the truth! :):):):):):):)
talk about ghost town!LOL
tis is crap! sorry i mean lamo!
great… i now know a building is taller than it actually looks.
???
beautiful