A panoramic visual culture
Maps, views and panoramas of cities
Team Paula Bruno | Marina Gutiérrez De Angelis
contacto: pbruno[a]filo.uba.ar / mdeangelis[a]filo.uba.ar
From the point of view of visual culture, travellers' accounts and the production of maps and engravings that accompanied them, speak to us of the importance that the image achieved during the 16th century as a means of knowledge. Maps and other image media assumed a fundamental role in the construction of the historical narrative. These pictorial and cartographic images – with their diffuse limits – challenged the written word for its place as a means of knowledge. The most famous of the maps of that period, that of Sebastian Münster (1611), included American realities together with fantastic images of America. The Atlas was a means of knowledge through images. They became extensive collections and descriptive volumes of the world, especially of the colonial world where European countries had interests that were competing for commercial dominance. Not only maps but also engravings, views, lithographs and drawings became means of knowledge but also of entertainment. The books published based on travellers' accounts offered readers a great variety of images.
The description of America also produced an enormous variety of data and forms of processing and recording in new archival media. The most important disciplines of the 18th century condensed knowledge from cartography, geology, mining, economics and statistics, physiology and botany. During the 17th century, cartography and art were not separate spaces. As Alpers points out, cartographers and editors were called describers of the world and their maps or atlases were defined as the described world. Maps promoted the development of certain types of images in the artistic field. The clearest case is that of engravings of topographical views of cities. We tend to treat maps and paintings separately and this prevents us from understanding the relationship that cartography established with art and travel literature. But it has also meant a biased treatment for this type of images, relegated as marginal artistic practices or as images to which a greater or lesser descriptive capacity is attributed in relation to their realism or fantasy. During the 17th and 18th centuries, maps and paintings did not establish those clearly modern boundaries between the scientific and artistic realms. Beyond their degree of accuracy, they were images of prestige and power.
Views were a new type of image that combined knowledge of cartography with some pictorial elements. Views of cities and ports proliferated throughout the 18th century and were mostly state commissions. Not only in Spain but other countries such as France and England gave impetus to similar projects. They combined cartographic and topographic elements with a costumbrista style that sought to give an account of the situation of the city or port portrayed. At the beginning of the 19th century, panoramas emerged, as heirs to the topographic tradition of the 17th century and the influence and fascination exerted throughout Europe by the vedute of the Venetian Antonio Canale (1697-1768). The techniques for producing panoramas were established over time and accompanied another new type of playful and commercial images such as dioramas, cosmoramas, navaloramas, pleoramas and phantasmagoria. Panoramas sought to surprise the mass public through the immersive spectacle of images that depicted great events and the vision of cities. The panorama involved a relationship between image and body since the visitor did not observe a flat surface like that of the painting but had to walk and move to experience the vision that the extensive canvases offered. The description went hand in hand with the details, since many panoramas were valued for their capacity to offer convincing perspectives taken as documents of reality. Panoramas gave free rein to the desire to recognize European cities but also to explore those in other latitudes. The panoramic view inaugurated a visual culture that found in the horizon a dividing line between reality and possibility. Books, letters, paintings, literary works were characterized from then on by the search for a high perspective to observe cities or actions. What Walter Benjamin calls a panoramic literature. A vision associated with the bourgeoisie but also with the new States that competed for the domination of territories and their global exploitation. The gaze was transformed by the arrival of optical and vision devices such as panoramas, dioramas or the stereoscope
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