Paris is like a reef of culture that is encrusted with sculpture. Sculpture is all over the city. It’s almost like the Parisians despise an empty flat spaces and have some primal urge to decorate pristine places and make them conform to their will.

When I visited La Cuesta Encantada, also nick-named “Hearst Castle” in California, USA, I was struck by how much religious art, William Randolph Hearst had carpet-bagged during his lifetime. It wasn’t that Hearst was a particularly religious man; it’s just that the best art from the time periods that Hearst was interested in was religious in nature because the Catholic Church with its enormous appetite for iconic images was the greatest patron of the arts in Europe during those eras.

In Paris, the church still seems to play an important role in supporting the arts. Not so much in the commissioning of new work but by providing space to display it.

One such place is the huge neo-classical pile known as Église de la Madeleine or just La Madeleine. It’s a dark inside the church but the outside is surrounded with sculpture.

All the parks are populated with sculpture that range from overwrought romantic nonsense through to surprising modern pieces like Dubuffet’s “Le Bel Costumé”, which was almost hidden by a hedge of trees in the Jardin des Tuileries.

The surfaces of the buildings haven’t escaped attention either, and many have been covered with so much carving they seem to be writhing with life. Even the portico roof (which most people wouldn’t even look at) of the Pantheon is stunning, never mind the rest of the building.

It just goes on and on.

I think that if I lived in Paris I’d want my home to be a plain white minimalist cube. Not because I don’t like sculpture, but to just to give my brain and eyes a rest.