BEFORE there were IMAX cinemas, there were panoramas. Typically around 400 feet long and 50 feet high, the immersive paintings toured America in the last decades of the 19th century, sometimes accompanied by 3-D dioramas. They weren’t meant to last, and when ticket sales dwindled, most were discarded like old fairground rides. Only two made in their heyday can still be seen in the country. One is at (and of) Gettysburg; the other, known as the Atlanta cyclorama, encapsulates the problems involved in commemorating the civil war—and a possible solution.
The cyclorama was made by a team of German artists in Milwaukee in the mid-1880s: photographs of their workshop reveal a lubricating beer supply and a patriotic pin-up of Kaiser Wilhelm I. The subject was the Battle of Atlanta, a crucial Union victory, specifically the afternoon of July 22nd 1864. Many midwestern soldiers fought there. The picture was intended profitably to celebrate northern heroism.
When the cyclorama made its way south—first to Chattanooga and then, in 1892, to Atlanta itself—its meaning was reversed. An impresario recoloured the uniforms of captured...Continue reading
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