La Nature à coup d’œil: atmosfere emotive e questioni critiche di allestimento e di fruizione dei Panorami

La Nature à coup d’œil: atmosfere emotive e questioni critiche di allestimento e di fruizione dei Panorami La Nature à coup d’œil: atmosfere emotive e questioni critiche di allestimento e di fruizione dei Panorami – In 1787, the Scottish painter Robert Barker obtained a patent for La Nature à coup d’oeil: the invention of the Panorama. This painting, set up to embrace the viewer’s look at 360°, would induce a trend of “Rama”, in major Euro- pean cities, as Honoré de Balzac describes it. This tendency developed a new style for illusionistic painting and original immersive forms of spectacle to an international audience, with different cultures. The trend of the Panoramas was an urban and social experience with both playful and documentary objectives, and it confronted the view- ers with a virtual reality to which an elaborate strategy of exhibition offered visual illusionism and multisensory suggestions. The Panoramas proposed an “immersive” painting, as a journey with the imagination having aesthetic and empathic impact, that also aroused resonance in writers such as Chateaubriand or Dickens. However a heated critical debate has accompanied the production and the international circula- tion of these images. Some members of the academic environment reject the latter’s role as “liberal art”, while others claim its emotional power, but also an instrumental role to knowledge and progress in a precise connection with art museums and beyond, also evoked by Edmé-François Miel in his Essais sur les Beaux Arts.