NYT: Rags to Reams, but Maybe Not Riches
[EXCERPT]
Fans of immersive landscape paintings and photographs, the kind that give the illusion of extremes of peripheral vision, are called panoramaniacs.
Publishers and museums are catering to their hunger for information about surviving and lost artworks, dating to as far back as the 1700s.
“The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism,” by the art historian Denise Blake Oleksijczuk (University of Minnesota Press), and “Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles” (MIT Press), by the media historian Erkki Huhtamo, document how European and American artists scaled steeples and mountains to make their works. They depicted suburban villas and Egyptian ruins that they had actually seen, and imagined views of polar ice floes and the devastation of an earthquake in Lisbon.
By: Eve M. Kahn
Story Date: 2013-01-24T00:00:00