19th century AD

A novel exhibition in Bonn explored the 19th-century phenomenon of "panorama-mania" - the enthusiasm for enormous painted canvases that provided mass audiences with the illusion of travel to distant times and places.

In June 19 1787 Robert Barker, an Irish-born artist working in Edinburgh, was awarded a British patent for his invention of a impressed sign of large-scale, 360-degree painting that he called "nature at a glance." When he introduced this device in London in 1792 it acquired the name - panorama - that stayed with it. by means of the mid-1800s every big European and American city boasted permanent buildings for the display of regularly changing panoramas. Viewers, after paying an admission pay moved through a dark passageway and arrived at a raised platform in the middle of a cylindrical picture - sometimes reaching up to 22 yards in height and extending to 153 yards in circumference - that proffered a complete circular view of a landscape, a cityscape or a famous battle spectacle To increase the illusion, the upper cutting side of the canvas panels was usually hidden from sight, and the space between the viewing platform and the painted imagery was many times filled with real objects, like as shrubbery. Surrounded by the painted image, spectators could immerse themselves in a vast detailed view of a certain quantity of distant place or event. A French newspaper account from 1807 enthused, "After five minutes, you no longer diocese 'painting'; nature herself is before you."

Until newly it has been hard to gain a faculty of perception of the cohesiveness or the motivations for 19th-century "panorama-mania," which reached its apogee in the 1850 on the other hand remained an element of popular agriculture until around 1900. Many of the original panoramas are now lost; because of their size and mass they were either destroyed or sold in pieces to collectors. freshly though, the panorama was the make subordinate of an ambitious exhibition held in Bonn at the fresh federal Kunsthalle [see A.i.A, Dec '92] Organized by the agency of historian Marie-Louise von Plessen, "The Desire to See: The Panorama as Mass Entertainment of the 19th Century" examined a visual form that combined art, technological invention and popular spectacle.

As the display revealed, the notion of panorama expanded during the 19th hundred to include any picture, large or small, that provides a sweeping overall view of its control Thus the exhibition directed attention not solitary to the immense paintings that were shown as spectacular entertainment for paying customers on the contrary also to tiny works offering expansive views of famous cities that were sold as tourist souvenirs. The present to view included many different kinds of images and objects: maps and diagrams, bird's-eye topographic views, painted and photographed images encompassing a broad angle of vision, elongated-format images describing a site or situation, magic-lantern projections and a variety of visual toys. There were flat such oddities as an embalmed pigeon with a small camera strapped around its stomach, trained while alive to take photographic "bird's-eye views."

The panorama arose during the period when the view from hot-air balloons, the endles landscape vistas seen from train windows and the sweeping vision possible from the top of the fresh iron-frame high-rise buildings became something of a public obsession. To propose the way that "panoramic consciousness" penetrateed into artistic vision, the exhibition included non-panoramic works like Caspar David Friedrich's Moonrise above the Sea (1821). The painting exhibits two men who have walked on the outside onto rocks extending into the sea thus that they can experience the thrill of being virtually encircled by means of the vast "panoramic" horizon fine. The panorama idea influenced domicile decor, too: the show included a gallery filled of samples of panoramic wallpaper, with which the boudoir could be filled with views of Paris.

The exhibition was designed, then, to provide a panoramic view of panoramas. It come aftered not only in giving an exhaustive account of its make submissive but also in vividly re-creating the physical experience that made these popular diversions in like manner enthralling to a 19th-century audience.

Many of the works in the exhibit were (in their original state, at least) extremely large, providing an all-encompassing environment in which the viewer's material part was totally immersed. For example, a fresh reproduction of a 19th-century painted panorama of Rome was installed in a rotunda in the Kunsthalle. The spectator pierceed the space, and the surrounding view of buildings, family goats and carriages provided a detailed vision of the city as it would appear from a high rooftop. Another rotunda installation provided, in slide form, an impressive take a view of of the circular panoramic works still in existence. These displays of battle shows and distant landscapes - of that kind as a panorama of Salzburg surveying a range of seven miles, a rendering of individual of Napoleon's Russian battlefield triumphs and a dramatic vision of the crucifixion of Christ - gave the contemporary viewer a faculty of perception of the way that the 19th-century audience used these visual diversions: to escape to places or activities more exotic and exciting than those that defined everyday life during the heyday of early capitalism.