Small Is Beautiful?

Things tiny and things gigantic — or every entity that greatly differs in size from that of humans — have an immense power to fascinate. Perhaps it is because small-scale objects inevitably call to mind the world of childhood and the numerous miniatures it contains (dollhouses, scale models, figurines) and, by association, the phantasmagorical universe of such fairy tales as Little Thumb, Alice in Wonderland, and Gulliver’s Travels. Or perhaps it is these miniature works’ fine details and apparent perfection that create a sense of wonder. As John Mack notes in The Art of Small Things, “Enlargement magnifies imperfection; reduction diminishes it. One aspect of the miniature is that it erases such physical defects and resolves them, in the eye of the beholder, into fragile beauty.”1 1  - ohn Mack, The Art of Small Things, Harvard University Press, 2007, 12. But what lurks behind such frail beauty? Are miniatures really about ideal and marvellous worlds?

The small scale of miniatures allows one to take in that which in normal circumstances would exceed one’s visual capacities. Beyond such a utilitarian function, which makes models useful in such fields as architecture, cinema, and theatre, small-scale representations afford the possibility of a panoptic vision of things normally lying beyond the visual field. As a result, new perceptions of the world are sometimes engendered. When Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver observes the customs of the Lilliputians from his “giant’s” vantage point, that society’s shortcomings come into sharp focus. Although such microcosms, be they ­literary miniatures or small-scale artworks, seem merely to contain wonderful kinds of worlds, a closer look reveals, in many cases, that they are in fact the stage on which particularly sombre situations are played out.