Panorama Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- ''This article is about the artistic term Panorama. For other uses, see Panorama (disambiguation).
A panorama is a wide, all-encompassing view; hence also a panoramic format. The word comes from Greek pan ("all") horama ("view") and was coined by the Scottish painter Robert Barker in 1792 to describe his paintings of Edinburgh shown on a cylindrical surface, which he soon was exhibiting in London. From 1793 Barker moved his panoramas to the first purpose-built panorama building in the world, in Leicester Square and made a fortune. Viewers flocked to pay a stiff 3 shillings to stand on a central platform under a skylight, which offered an even lighting, and get an experience that was "panoramic" (an adjective that didn't appear in print until 1813). The extended meaning of a "comprehensive survey" of a subject followed sooner, in 1801. Visitors to Barker's semi-circular Panorama of London, painted as if viewed from the roof of Albion Mills on the South Bank, could purchase a series of six prints that modestly recalled the experience; end-to-end the prints stretched 3.25 meters. (see link)
Barker's accomplishment involved sophisticated manipulations of perspective not encountered in the panorama's predecessors, the wide-angle "prospect" of a city familiar since the 16th century, or Wenceslas Hollar's "long view" of London, etched on several contiguous sheets. When Barker first patented his technique in 1787 he had gaven it a French title: La Nature à Coup d’ Oeil ("Nature at a glance"). A sensibility to the "picturesque" was developing among the educated class, and as they toured picturesque districts, like the Lake District, they might have in the carriage with them a large lens set in a picture frame, a "landscape glass" that would contract a wide view into a "picture" when held at arm's length.
Barker's Panorama was hugely successful and spawned a series of "immersive" panoramas: the Museum of London's curators found mention of 126 panoramas that were exhibited between 1793 and 1863. In the US, the experience was intensified by unrolling a canvas-backed scroll past the viewer in a cyclorama (noted in the 1840s), an inflation of an idea that was familiar in the hand-held landscape scrolls of Song China Panoramas were only eclipsed by the moving pictures. (See motion picture.) The similar diorama, essentially an elaborate scene in an artificially-lit room-sized box, shown in Paris and taken to London in 1823, is credited to the inventive Louis Daguerre, who had trained with a painter of panoramas. Few of these unwieldy ephemera survive; a rare surviving painted panorama is the Mesdag Panorama, a museum in The Hague. An exhibition "Panoramania" was held at the Barbican in the 1980s.
"Panorama" inspired many jocular "-rama" coinages, such as the wide-screen Cinerama process that brought the viwer's peripheral vision into the experience, which is extended in the modern IMAX film-projection technology. Most recently the cartoon series Futurama spoofs such overblown retro-futuristic technovisionary imaginings.
The immersive esthetic experience of Barker's Panorama infuses state-of-the art simulations at Disneyland or Universal Studios, on their way to achieving the ultimate immersion art: the holodeck of Star Trek. But nowadays panorama once more connotes the landscape vision itself, unmediated by art or technology.
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