Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century

Author(s): Jonathan Crary

Source: Grey Room, No. 9 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 5-25
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262599
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 Géricault, the Panorama,
and Sites of Reality in the
Early Nineteenth Century
JONATHAN CRARY

Even as our present lurches further into the twen ty-first century, there is still a
pervasive sense that an archaeology of our own rapidly changing perceptual world
begins in the nineteenth century amid what Jean-Louis Comolli has now memo
rably described as "the frenzy of the visible .'' 1 The grounds far claiming this would
certainly have less to do with the fact that film and photography were nineteenth
century inventions (far the relative transience of these farms is now self-evident).
Rather, if it is valuable to insist on continuities between the present and 150 years
ago, those links would involve the status of the spectator and the persisten ce of
certain imperatives far consumption, attention , and perceptual competence. Rather
than focusing on the development of specific apparatuses or technologies , su ch as
film or photography, I believe it is more important to see how a related group of
strategies through which a subject is modernized as a spectator traverses a range
of seemingly different ob je c ts and locations.

11111

To move quickly from the general to something concrete, consider William Hogarth's
Southwark Fair from the 1730s, a work in many ways remate from the more modern
problems I have just outlined. It is, however, an image in which we can see
forms of premodern and modern culture coexisting side by side . Clearly we are
looking at the remains of a traditional social phenomenon in an exhausted
condition , at the tail end ofits presence within European collective experience.
Rather than a literal depiction of a specific fairground, we see here the marginal
survival of what had been the carnival energies of festival within premodern Eu
rope. Even through Hogarth's own class prejudices, which privileged thrift,
conjugality, moderation, and industriousness, we still get a tenuous sense of how
the disorder of carnival overturns a distinction between spectator and performer,
how it destabilizes any

Grey Room 0 9, Fall 2002, pp. 5 - 25. © 2002 Grey Room , ln c. and Massachusett s l ns ti tu te of Tech nolog y 7

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fixed position or identity, how with inversions ofhigh and low it parodies and
pro fanes official forms, how it suggests a teeming mix of sensory modalities, the
tac tility ofbodies mingling, sounds and smell, all at least coequal with vision.
But at the same time it is clear that the leftover fragments of carnival, the vertigo
of the topsy-turvy world, had by this time been relegated to the terrain ofthe
fairground, segregated from the more rationalized economic life of the city.
This brings me to one particular component ofHogarth's turbulent scene: the two
seated individuals at the comer looking into a double-sided peep show. 2 Here we
have two spectators who are constituted and positioned very differently than anyone
else depicted in the print. These immobile and absorbed figures, interfacing with
the window ofthe peep show, anticípate one ofthe primary pathways that popular
culture will trace out ofthe eighteenth century into the nineteenth and eventually
even into our own time. And it is a process that obliterates or at least sublimates the
possibility of camival. The continuities I am thinking of can be suggested, for example,
by considering the peep-show-type setup ofthe Kaiserpanorama in the early
1880s or the related miniature arrangement of the stereoscope, which was
pervasive throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (or many other
similar forms). l'm not pointing to any kind of technological lineage or sorne
sequence dependent on the improvement or development of devices, as if the
important questions con cerned the literal viewing apparatus. Even though the form
of the peep show can be followed in reverse from the 1730s-back to the perspective
boxes of the seventeenth century and probably further into the sixteenth century-
what interests me is the move thát begins in the later
eighteenth century when the
spectator of the peep-show form
coincides in a general way with
Walter Benjamin's account of the
reader of the novel as a new iso
lated consumer of a mass-pro
duced commodity. The model of
optical apparatus in the comer
of Hogarth's fairground shifts
from a relatively minar element
of early modern popular culture
to become a powerful model of
what would come to character
ize dorninant forrns of visual

Top left: Kinetoscope, 1890s.

Top right: Stereoscopes in use,

1860s.

Bottom: Kaiserpanorama, 1880s.

8 Grey Room 09
culture in Europe and North America-that is, the relative separation of a viewer
from a milieu of distraction and the detachment of an image from a larger back
ground. The physical device is simply a figure far a broader psychic, perceptual,
and social insularity ofthe viewer, as well as a pervasive privileging ofvision
over the senses of touch and smell. Mikhail Bakhtin indicates that, after the
disappear ance of carnival, experience in the nineteenth century acquires a "prívate
chamber " character far an enclosed and privatized sub ject. 3

1 11 11

As much recent work has shown, a majar component of the making of nineteenth
century visual culture was the education and training of both the individuals and
collectivities far whom new forms of visual consumption were being produced.
The many ways in which this occurred included the self-disciplining of the spec
tator asan occupant of or visitar to interior spaces and institutions: in a sense, the
formation of modern audiences. The prioritization of visuality was accompanied
by imperatives far various kinds of self -cont rol and social restraint, particularly
far forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility.
As Tony Bennett and others have shown, the public museum (whether of art or
natural history) emerged as one ofthe sites in the nineteenth century where new
kinds of social intercourse seemed to pose possible problems. 4 Amid the
democratizing tendencies in postrevolutionary Europe there was concern that an
unregulated mixing of social classes could importa fairground disorder to interior
public spaces, thereby harming the pedagogical and ideological agendas of those
institutions. Far example, when the Crystal Palace was under construction there
was considerable official anxiety that this largest-ever indoor space would be
threatened by unruly behavior and public drunkenness. A large security force
was recruited and set in place on opening day and on days of reduced ticket
prices, but it turned out to be completely unnecessary.5 In this turning point in
the exhibition of manufactured consumer goods, there were virtually no
incidents of trouble. The luster of the commodity radiated its own
exhortations far self-control.

liill

One particular site in Europe has been especially fascinating to those

studying nineteenth century visual culture: the Egyptian Hall which operated in
London , in the area of Piccadilly, more or less continuously from around 1812
until 1904

Crary I Géricau lt, the Panor ama , and Sil es of Reality in the Early Ninete ent h Centur y g
when the building, then a hall for early cinematic exhibitions, was demolished.
Originally called the London Museum by its founder William Bullock, it quickly
carne to be called the Egyptian Hall because of its exterior of simulated Egyptian
relief sculpture and hieroglyphs. 6 Though now physically lost, it is important as a
stratified site through which the historically mutating shape of an exhibition/enter
tainment milieu can be examined over this long span of time. In the nearly 100
years of its existence one could have seen displays of natural history, art exhibits,
freak shows, anda vast range of curiosities, versions of panoramas and magic-lantern
shows, phantasmagorias, ventriloquists, magic shows, movies, vaudeville, and
other music hall-type acts.
At its opening in 1812, advertisements promised "Natural and foreign curiosities,
Antiquities and Productions of the Fine Arts," since the Hall's semipermanent dis
play included various spoils taken from Egypt (alongside, no doubt, a far greater
number offakes): mummies, papyrus texts, statues, gems. There were also exhibits
of hundreds of stuffed birds and animals, organized into a rough categorization
of types and groups. At this point in the late teens the Egyptian Hall was a
hybrid of the various possibilities of organized display in the nineteenth century, a
mix of the obsolete traditions of the cabinet of curiosity with a burgeoning but
inchoate inclination to quasi-scientific organization. But it never was to merge
into the growth of the modern bourgeois museum; instead it remained part of the
modern permutation of the older model of curiosities into a nineteenth-century
preoccu pation with "attractions," to use
Tom Gunning's term.7 Gunning
sees early cinema as an attraction
that, like many other phenomena
in the nineteenth century, relied
on the direct stimulation and
shock of display, the inciting of
visual curiosity and pleasure,
and the solicitation of attention
through surprise and astonish
ment, as in magic acts or shows
of giants or Siamese twins in
which the mere exhibition of
something is self-justifying. The
word "attractions," as Gunning
explains, operated in the writings

Top: Egyptian Hall, c. 1900.

Bottom: Egyptian Hall, 1820s.

Interior view.

Opposite: Poster for Egyptian

Hall attractions, 1844.

10 Grey Room 09
 of Sergei Eisenstein to evoke its fairground origins. In this larger sense it is a
question of how the carnival disorder of the premodern fairground, its profuse
grotesquerie and strangeness, is deposed onto the peep-show model of visual
attraction and how the multifaceted festival participant is turned into an individ
ualized and self-regulated spectator.

1!11 i

Perhaps the single most important category of exhibitionary attraction in the nine
teenth century encompasses those various techniques of display whose allure was
simply their relative efficacy at providing an illusory reproduction or simulation of
the real, regardless ofwhat was being shown. There will never be a clear separation
in this historical period between the appeal of a technique ofverisimilitude solely
as demonstration of its own operation andan attention to the referent conjured up
by that apparatus. Thus a site like the Egyptian Hall is important for the diversity
of "reality effec ts" that occurred within it. This now familiar phrase is of cour se
from the work, in the late 1960s, ofthe French critic Roland Barthes, who insist
ed that a new discursive model of reality takes shape in the nineteenth century,
that "the real" as modernity carne to conceive it was invented then. It should be
remem bered that he used this term in several different ways. On the one hand , the
reality effect for Barthes was a specific device in nineteenth-c entur y literature that
had to do with the function of th e so-called concrete detail in a fictional text-he
called
it the " dire ct collusion of a referent anda signifier,
ff JU JIU""' 1Y 10 • U IJ u .. -v, u v " ª J •
GENERAL "" wher eby the signifi ed is expelled from the sign."8

Tom Thamla
>:
r BZJ
' III BITI 'O t; t .ll Y
i,.IJJI ,. • J11u r uA .11,
I R ' ING_ ,A O An' Rl\ 00 .
'
But he also showed that the reality effec t was not
only textual, and he linked it to the emergence in
• .__., OJ""-'- the nin eteen th century of modern assumptions
EOYPTlAN HALL, PICCADILLY, , ,... .
about history that were manifested in "the devel
A...i ........, e,,.,.,,,., :,:; Wr :'. ! de l&lde O&llery

.
opment of the realistic novel, the private diary,
. :i: _
"' Sº! .' -· docum enta ry literature, the news item, the histor
ical museum, the exhibition of ancient objects and
; :.J
'O

ao ,
1 the massive development of photography whose
sole pertinent feature is precisely to signify that
c a.
B1
O :
the event represented has rea lly taken place."
Important here is that although photography is

!:: l !: .:
'.°. emphasized as a reality effect it is not in any sense
a foundational model or prerequisite for it.
M
-
.....,-., <
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Crar y ¡ Gérícault, the Panorama , and Sites of Rea lit y in the Early Nineteenth Century 11
 1 1111

In the early years of the Egyptian Hall, for example, one of the most successful
exhibits was the display of Napoleon's battle carriage captured after the Battle
of Waterloo and shipped back to England. What went on view was not simply a
carriage but a model of the "real" in newly distilled form. Obviously it was of inter
est because it was luxurious, bulletproof, painted dark blue with gold trim and
wheels ofvermilion, and Napoleon's wounded, one-armed Dutch coach driver
had been brought back to be part of the exhibition. But apparently a feature that was
of overwhelming interest to the thousands of spectators was the chance to look
inside at the plush drawers and built-in cabinets that contained his personal
wardrobe, bars of soap , a pocket watch, tlasks of liqueurs, and numerous other
minar articles. In line with Barthes argument about the concrete detail, these
mundane items became a supplementary but vital confirmation of the
authenticity of the object itself. It is particularly noteworthy that after years of
exhibition on tour through out Britain and other parts of Europe the carriage was
sold to the then thriving establishment of Madame Tussaud's in London, to
become part of her permanent display of waxwork figures of Napoleon (for
whom she had previously worked). 9 This was a familiar strategy in wax
museums, where the simulation was aug mented by the adjacency of objects
having a literal presence-that is, a wax figure seated at the desk or table actually
taken from their prison cell, or, even more simply, the proximity of illusory wax
skin with the real clothing that often had actually belonged to the subject. But
despite the unquestioned popularity of wax museums, it was such "mixed" reality
effects that finally were the most problem atic in the nineteenth century, usually
occupying an outer limit of popular taste or fascination.
At this point I want to examine another piece of the heterogeneous visual
culture of the Egyptian Hall, an object placed on display there in June of
1820, Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. 10 There are many reasons why the
exhi bition of this work in this particular venue is of historical importance, and
there will only be space here to indicate a few of them. First, it should be
noted that the Egyptian Hall was, for awhile, one ofthe most important sites in
London for the temporary exhibition of paintings, usually paintings that either
in terms of sheer scale or subject matter hada viability as a popular commercial
attraction .11 My larger point, however, is an obvious one, though it certainly
bears stating: the observer of painting in the nineteenth century was always also
an observer who simultaneously encountered a proliferating diversity of optical
and sensory expe-

Théodore Géricault
Raft of the Medusa, 1819 .

12 Grey Room 09
riences. In other words, paintings were produced and assumed meaning not in
terms of sorne cloistered aesthetic and institutional domain, but as one of the many
consumable and :fleeting elements within an expanding field of images, commodi
ties, and attractions.

il!ll

Thus, with Raft of Medusa there are two distinct but not unrelated problems: the
circumstances of its production and of its reception. The fact that Géricault chose
for the subject of his painting a contemporary news ítem made it already compat
ible with a larger social arena in which information was transformed into com
modities and attractions. 12 But this is almost incidental to the particular approach
Géricault staked out for his representation ofthis subject, which is why this painting
occupies its unstable position between two distinct historical worlds-between
theenclosed order ofreference organized around the rhetoric ofthe human body in
the art of antiquity and the Renaissance and an unbounded heterogeneous infor
mational field of journalistic, medical, legal, and political sources of evidence, tes
timony, fact, and other guarantees of the real.

Géricault made extraordinary efforts to master, to assimilate the facts, the truth,
the evidence, the very immediacy ofthe horrible event, an event which already by
the time he began working on it had assumed a multilayered informational exis
tence. Géricault engaged the project as if all of this new data could be distilled
and forged into a visual experience that would synthesize and transcend its
fragmented character. According to Charles Clément, one ofhis earliest
biographers, Géricault assembled an immense "dossier crammed with authentic
proofs and documents of all sorts," indicating that Géricault attempted to collect
every news story and public

Crary i Géri,:ault, the Panora;n,1, ar>d Siies of Reafüy ín ,he Ear!y Nineteenth Century 13
document about the expedition and shipwreck, every bit of eyewitness testimony,
including the best-selling firsthand account by two survivors, J.B. Savigny and
Alexandre Corréard. Not only did he assemble all the journalistic images he
could find, but he commissioned the surviving carpenter of the Medusa to build
him a small-scale model ofthe raft, which he tested out in water to see how it
floated and maneuvered. He made the acquaintance of Savigny and Corréard (the
former was the ship's surgeon) and interviewed them at length even though their
published account was already exhaustive. In fact, Géricault used Savigny and
Corréard as models far two of the figures standing near the mast, fastening them
onto the paint ing far their stature as eyewitnesses but also as a way of making
actual the repre sentation. We should note the utter discontinuity between the
semantic status of their images in the painting and the various references to old
master art, whether Michelangelo or Rubens; this is part of the discursive fissure
that I suggest runs through the painting. However, the most extreme and
notorious measure under taken by Géricault to ensure the authenticity of his
work was his insistence on becoming familiar with the immediacy of death-not
death in a narrative, psy chological, religious, or symbolic sense-but death as the
literal degradation of the physical body, the body drained of any living
coherence. What Clément referred to as the immense documentary dossier
ofGéricault would finally have to include also the corpses and body parts he had
delivered to his studio (or studied in hospitals) in arder to live with the sights and
smells of decaying human bodies, justas the sur vivors of the raft who kept parts of
the dead on board far their own sustenance. As far as we know, the only thing
Géricault didn't do while immersing himself in the event was experiment with
cannibalism. It is this whole dossier of fact, of evidence, of direct experience that
produces, to use Barthes's phrase, "the referential pleni tude" of the work. Of
course it is not a work that looks real by virtue of its literal correspondence to a
specific viewpoint of a specific moment. As critics have noted far a century anda
half, we see no starving, emaciated bodies; we don't see the raft as it really was,
submerged a few feet below water level. lts verisimilitude is based ón its more
profaund embeddedness in new networks of the real, in which older models of
visibility are exceeded.

11 11

Working amid this field of effects, Géricault's first inclinations are highly telling.
Initially he was convinced that the project could be achieved only through a
sequence of several paintings, that the event could be narrated only in terms of its
temporal

Right: Théodore Géricault.

Study of severed limbs, c. 1819.

Opposite, left: Raft of the Medusa.

Detail.

Opposite, right: Théodore

Géricault. Madwoman, c. 1821.

14 Grey Room 09
 dispersal, its inherent dislocations. But much of the historical significance of the Raft
is how Géricault forced this content and its discursive substructure back within
the rhetorical terms of a classical model of representation. That he could not do
this seamlessly, that these incompatible projects collide and fracture is part of what
made this such a charged object at this threshold ofmodernity. Even so, as Michael
Fried and others have indicated, it is no accident that in his efforts to reduce the
event of the disaster to a single image he chose this moment-a moment in which
vision takes on such an exclusive priority, in which the focus of attention is fun
neled and narrowed to a single barely perceptible point. 13 To redirect the terms of
Fried's argument, the painting incarnates a vision all but cut off from the possibility
of a reciprocal exchange of gazes. For reprieve and deliverance in this image would
consist in a mutual exchange of gazes, in being acknowledged by the ship, which
is here tragically denied or at least deferred.14 But this is part of what Bakhtin
saw as the "private chamber" character of experience in the nineteenth century,
where the peep-show model of looking describes both an intensification of
visuality and also an isolation of the subject from a lived embeddedness in a given
social milieu.
We get an even more piercing sense of this new understanding of the privatization
of vision in Géricault's late portraits of the insane. We are here a long way from
Goya's nearly contemporary renderings of the madhouse. The line between the
normal and the pathological is made disturbingly indistinct. Seen from across a
room, these pictures appear more or less congruent with the conventions of
middle-class portraiture, and it is only on closer examination that one realizes
something about them is different. A key feature of these images is the
breakdown of a reciprocal gaze, not only the impossibility of a mutuality but a
sense of the complete non identity ofworlds, the loss of a shared objective reality.
Music historian Lawrence Kramer, in an essay on Chopin, thematizes the first
half of the nineteenth century
as a time when "human subjectivity ceases to be a
common field and becomes instead a secret
recess. No longer a shared sameness, the
selfbecomes an essential difference, constantly
threatened with separation from the outer
world."15 Here Géricault discloses that separation,
that difference in extreme form. And it is
alongside this shift that the need arises for at
least a simulation of a real world
experienced in
common, that a
preoccupation
Crnry ¡ Géricault, the Panorama, and Siles of Reality in the Ear!y Nineteenir1 Century 15
with the real emerges, eventually leading to whole industries of reality production
taking shape in a rapidly modernizing West. Yet it is not just that the possibility of our
eyes meeting the eyes of the insane is unthinkable here, because any reciprocity
would include an unbearable moment of self-recognition and self-differentiation.
Rather, it is that Géricault has recorded, with apparent clinical objectivity and
detachment, individuals who were perceiving a hyperdelusional world. It is as if
they were optical instruments whose lens we will never look through, but which,
if we could, would reveal a radically different vision of the real. In a related way,
Géricault was repeatedly drawn during his stay in England to architectural motifs
that functioned as perceptual "black holes." He showed figures on the verge of
entrances into dark unfathomable spaces that communicated nothing back to the
observer except the shiver of an annihilating loss of redemptive possibilities.

ll(¡ l
¡

But back to the spring of 1820, when a somewhat melancholy Géricault made
arrange ments for the huge painting to be rolled up, crated, and shipped to
London where it opened for public exhibition in June at the Egyptian Hall.
Newspaper ads empha sized the grim but sensational subject of the painting and
equally stressed its size as an attraction in its own right. That the public in
England was already well acquainted with the horrific details ofthe story is in
part attested to by the fact that when the painting arrived a stage play about the
wreck of the Medusa, titled The Fatal Raft, was already showing to sold-out houses
a few streets away. Thus the work, now extracted from the universe ofthe Louvre,
was made continuous with another n"etwork of "actualities," a field ofreified
current events, which supported its value as an attraction. In the six months Raft of
the Medusa was on display at the Egyptian Hall, it drew over 50,000 visitors.
Admission was a shilling, which included an abridged edition of the English
translation of the book by Savigny and Corréard. The availability of this text at the
exhibition, of its authority as objective historical discourse, functioned alongside the
painting as a reality effect, complicit in estab lishing what Barthes calls the
authenticity and "omnipotence ofthe referent."

Following its run in London, which did much to ease, at least temporarily,
Géricault's financial problems and depression, a deal was struck to have the paint
ing do a run in Dublin. Here, we learn from standard accounts, the painting did

Right: French Panorama.

Opposite: Egyptian Hall
exhibition of modern and
ancient Mexico, 1820s.

16 Grey Room 09
less well, and after two months in the spring of 1821 the decision was made to have
the work shipped back to France. Why did it not do as well in Dublin as it had in
a
London? In remarkable historical intersection, Géricault's painting competed for
attention in the Irish capital with another artifact of nineteenth-centuryvisual culture,
a moving panorama titled "The Wreck of the Medusa," which represented precisely
the same recent news item.16 Sometimes called a Peristrephic panorama, a moving
panorama involved a long band of canvas on which a continuous sequence of scenes
had been painted and which was unrolled befare a seated audience. Colored
light ing enhanced the effect of individual scenes, and often a small orchestra
added drama to the whole. Thus, for roughly the same price, a consumer had the
choice of seeing over 10,000 square feet of moving painted surface or about 450
square feet of motionless canvas. Moreover, one of the scenes in the moving
panorama was effec tively a copy of Géricault's painting, so one really didn't need to
pay to see the orig inal as well. If Géricault's painting and the Dublin panorama
were rivals for patronage within an economic space around 1820, it certainly
should not be seen as sorne opposition between elite culture anda crude popular
form. Rather it was competition between two types of reality effect that each
represented the same event, and the marketplace decided which was the more
compelling attraction.
The word panorama was used in a variety of ways in the early nineteenth century,
and the Egyptian Hall was a place where large mural paintings, billed as panoramas,
were created as components of exhibitions. One such exhibit displayed a large
quantity of objects and specimens brought back by Bullock from a six-month expe
dition to Mexico. These included a mix of real and simulated artifacts: casts of
Aztec sculpture such as Montezuma's calendar stone, as well as hundred ofbirds
and fish, fake plants and fruits, all placed in the context of a large, three-sided
painting of a Mexican landscape (like a twentieth-century museum diorama) with
a three-dimensional dwelling abutting the two-dimensional painted mural surface.
The word panorama would, of course, soon be used overwhelmingly to signify a
360-degree circular painting exhibited on the interior of a cylindrically shaped
structure. A patent was issued for such a form of exhibition in 1787, but the word
panorama was not used until 1791, and by 1800 numerous panoramas were oper
ating in large European cities.17 The panorama is a compelling object for histori ans
in that it flourished in a relatively consistent manner for a period of time
coinciding very closely with the nineteenth century itself. A key problem is to

Eariy Century 17
explain its historical durability in a time when constant innovation and rapid
obsolescence were already integral parts of cultural production and consumption.
At the same time, within any discussion of reality effects, it should be noted that
the panorama is a distinctly nonphotographic form.

lli

This is hardly to imply that the meaning or effects of the panorama remained static
for over a century. For in fact its status continually mutated in relation to social,
technological, and cultural developments. And about the early 1820s one point
needs to be stressed: the panorama hadan uneasy but relatively uncontested prox
imity to traditional modes of painting. The situation was very different from that
of a few decades later, when the panorama was clearly situated within the terrain
ofpopular entertainment and the term panorama paínterwas an expression of dis
dain. At least into the mid-1820s there was still a pervasive though often uncertain
sense that panoramas were part ofthe same representational codes as older exist
ing forms of painting. It was a startlingly unfamiliar format, but there was the tacit
assumption among many writers that over time panoramic painting would
become a conventional way of representing certain kinds of subjects and that
gradually major artists would gravitate toward it. Initially many artists and critics
immersed in traditional practices were favorably disposed to the panorama. In one of
the last major academic treatises on perspective, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, in
1800, saw the panorama as fully within the terms of classical representation, as
just a new twist on familiar problems. 18 In the popular press of both London and
Paris the same reviewers who wrote about conventional art exhibitions would
often review the opening of a panorama painting, generally applying the same
aesthetic criteria in evaluating the latter's success or failure. We know that many
artists (including David, Ingres, Friedrich, Constable, Turner, and others) were
familiar with and favorably disposed to the panorama. Although this familiarity
means really no more than saying that an artist living in 1920 went to the movies,
it also suggests the degree to which panoramas were pervasive urban
phenomena.

11 11

I think it is reasonable to see the panorama as one of the places in the nineteenth
century where a modernization of perceptual experience occurs. The panorama
falls into the general category of the phantasmagoric as defined by Theodor
Adorno:

Right: Leicester Square

Panorama. London, c. 1802.

Opposite: Panorama viewing

platform, Copenhagen, c. 1880.

18 Grey Room 09
borrowing from Marx, Adorno used this adjective to describe any form or process
under capitalism that concealed or mystified its actual production or operation. 19
How, specifically, was the panorama phantasmagoric? After purchasing entry, a
spectator usually entered into the rotunda by means of a staircase that led one out
onto the central viewing platform. The interior was darkened in such a way that
only subdued light entering indirectly from the top of the building illuminated the
painting on the walls of the structure, leaving the rest of the interior in relative
obscurity. Such lighting conditions made the painting seem to radiate its own light;
and it was sometimes found that on bright summer days the light would be too
strong-enough so that the seams ofthe separate canvas became visible, revealing
the painting's constructed character and thus disrupting the illusion. Part of the
reason for the elevation was purely functional-no doorways could interrupt the
continuous surface of the painting. This also meant that spectators could never cast
shadows on the image, the effect of which would obviously be antiphantasmagoric,
disclosing it to be merely a two-dimensional surface.
Almost all panoramas sought to create a spatial remove from the image, with a
moatlike area surrounding the viewing platform. The spectator therefore had
nothing like the floor in a museum- or gallery-type interior to assist in a subjective
rationalization of the intervening distance between eye and image. We have
accounts indicating that audience members occasionally tossed coins at the image
as a way of determining how far away it was. Forms as seemingly different as
Daguerre's Diorama, Wagner's theater at Bayreuth, the Kaiserpanorama, the
Kinetoscope and, of course, cinema as it took shape in the late 1890s are other
key nineteenth-century examples of the image as an autonomous luminous
screen of attraction, whose apparitional appeal is an effect ofboth its uncertain
spatial loca tion and its detachment from a broader visual field. This is how the
panorama can at least be partially associated with the peep-show model
discussed earlier: it involves a detachment of the image from a wider field of
possible sensory stimu lation and creates a calculated confusion about the literal
location of the painted surface as a way of enhancing its illusions of presence
and distance. At the same

Crary I Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Rea!ity in !:he Early Nineteenth Century 19
time the panorama is another instance of how spectatorship accompanied by a nar
rowed focus of attention produces social docility, even in group circumstances,
even for an ambulatory spectator.

11 11

But the panorama is unique: unlike these other forms, it presents an unbounded
image, an image that is to the viewer endless. It has no frame (and in this
certainly departs from the peep-show model).20 Strictly speaking, it does have upper
and lower boundaries. But as one moves one's eyes, head, or body laterally, the
image appears as a continuous boundaryless field. This is its self-defining feature.
In one sense this horizontal orientation is a decisive culmination of a
secularization of sight long underway, not only for its refusal of the obvious
symbolic resonances of the ceiling and the vertical, but also for its more
important evaporation of the vanish ing point and its residual theological
implications. And it was within this format that a popular taste for concrete
actuality asserted itself. Developing out of late eighteenth-century enthusiasms
for view painting and picturesque landscape (as opposed to images with
mythological, allegorical, or erudite historical themes), panorama audiences
were attracted by cityscapes, landscapes, or recent events that one would have read
about-battles, sieges, or views of remote regions of the world. What was it about
the panorama that seemed to guarantee a heightened verisimil itude? Clearly it had
to do with the novelty of its new encircling format, but what are sorne ofthe ways
to understand this? Going back to Barthes's essay, we find that his most extensive
example of the reality effect is one that he himself describes with the word
"panorama."21 Barthes has derived this characterizatión from a tex tual object,
Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It is from a point in the novel when Emma has been
making regular trips to Rouen to see her lover. She has made the coach ride to
Rouen often enough so that she knows every turn in the road, every land mark
along the way, including the crest of a hill from which the entire city of
Rouen spreads in full view below.22 Here are Flaubert's words: "Then, all at once,
the city carne into view. Sloping downward like an amphitheater, drowned in mist,
it sprawled out shapelessly beyond its bridges.........Thus seen from above, the
whole landscape had the static quality of a painting." 23 The rest of the paragraph
is an accumulation of details-about the boats anchored in the Seine, the distant
gray hills, the factory chimneys, streets lined with bare trees, roofs wet with rain,
and so on. Thus Flaubert himself introduces in his text, if not specifically the
panorama, the idea of a visual image that is circular or round (an amphitheater)

Panorama of Prague, 1840s.

Fragment.

20 Grey 09
and which is like a painting. Important here are the affinities between the strategies
ofthe real at work in panorama painting and in literary realism; it is a pretending
or seeming to transcribe the world in a scrupulous fashion while avoiding the trap
of what Barthes calls "the vertigo of notation," whereby an authentic realism would
seem to demand the deliriously impossible inclusion in representation of every
thing present to sight. This is where the "insignificant detail" in the text
intervenes as if to proclaim that if this level of minutiae, of narrative irrelevance, is
given, then the world is being seen in its completeness, its reality.

il ll

If we can speak of the panorama as a reality effect, it is an effect produced through

a confluence of more elements than I could begin to discuss here. But perhaps
the overriding way in which a related impression of completeness, of an
inexhaustible inclusion of the real, is achieved is through the novel 360-degree
format of the image. Like the name itself, the setup of the panorama presumes to
presenta total view, characterized by a seemingly self-evident wholeness. And one
important def inition of the adjective panoramic as it was used in the nineteenth
century is the notion of a full 360-degree view that has no obstructions, nothing
blocking an opti cal appropriation of it. In this sense the panorama provided an
imaginary unity and coherence to an external world that, in the context of
urbanization, was increas ingly incoherent. The viewing platform in the center of
the panorama rotunda seemed to provide a point from which an individual
spectator could overcome the partiality and fragmentation that constituted
quotidian perceptual experience. But while seeming to provide such a simulation
ofperceptual mastery and identifying the real with that sense of coherence, the
panorama was in another sense a dereal ization and devaluation of the
individual's viewpoint.

lj
I r

The authority of the panorama was founded on the limitations of subjective vision,
on the inadequacy of a human observer. It posed a view of a motif, whether a land
scape or city, that seemed immediately accessible but that always exceeded the
capacity of a spectator to grasp it. Unlike eighteenth-century topographical paint
ing, the panorama image is consumable only as fragments, as parts that must be
cognitively reassembled into an imagined whole. A structure that seems magically
to overcome the fragmentation of experience in fact introduces partiality and

Géricault, the Reafüy Eady Nlneteenth 21

incompleteness as constitutive elements ofvisual experience. Very generally, per
spective had far several centuries established the pervasive fiction of an adequacy,
a congruence between the subjective point of view of an observer and the world.
That a perspectival representation allowed only a partial and delimited opening
anta that world was offset by the universality and rationality of the laws by which
it was composed. Panorama painting, to the contrary, with both its cancellation of
the vanishing point in the work and the reciprocal loss of a localizable point of
view, heightened the disparity between a subjective visual field and the possibility
of a conceptual and perceptual grasp of an external reality. It simulated a totality
that was necessarily beyond the reach of a human subject. In one sense it became a
degraded simulation of the sublime, available to anyone far the price of a ticket;
but, at the same time, perception was transformed into the accumulation ofinfor
mation, of details, of visual facts that finally resisted synthesis into perceptual
knowledge. The proliferation ofreality effects in the nineteenth century coincided
with the collapse ofthe scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic systems that had in
a variety of ways posed an imaginary reconciliation of the limitations of a human
observer with a full possession of a perceivable world.
Two almost contemporary images disclose very different intuitions about the
panoramic viewpoint. Caspar David Friedrich's Traveler above the Sea of
Clouds (1818) has long been associated, perhaps excessively so, with the effects
of the panorama, and it has been suggested that Friedrich not only was extremely
famil iar with early panorama painting in Germany but that he briefly had plans
around 1810 to undertake one himself.24 In the painting the position of this
depicted observer and his relation to the surrounding landscape certainly
correspond to the central viewing platform in a panorama and the illusory sense of a
distant image. It seems to incarnate the ascendancy of
newly released bourgeois aspirations
and fantasies of autonomy; it implies
the mastery of a position that tran
scended local provincial viewpoints
and permitted at least an optical
appropriation of a natural world that
was increasingly being parceled and
abstracted into smaller units of prop
erty. Of course, within Friedrich's work
any sense of exhilaration is insepara
ble from a metaphysical melancholy

Right: Caspar David Friedrich.

Traveler above the Sea of C/ouds, 1818.

Opposite: Plan of the raft of

Medusa. Published in Narrative of
a Voyage to Senegal, 1818.

22 Grey Room 09
at the tragic insufficiency of the relation between subject and world. And in a larger
European context this image gives a piercing sense ofhow the panorama coincided
with new forms of subjective isolation, of a sensory impoverishment and emotional
privatization.

1 1
l l

The other image, again almost historically simultaneous with the Friedrich, has,
as far as I know, never been associated with a panoramic viewpoint and certainly
does not have the same defining high vantage point of The Traveler. But ifwe con
sider the perceptual conditions that are diagrammed within Géricault's Raft, we have
a group of observers no less situated on what we could call a viewing platform, sur
rounded by an unobstructed 360-degree view. 25 The sail itself, a curved piece of
can vas, hovers on the horizon line like a section of the assembled painted canvas
that lined the interiors of the panorama rotundas. And the group of spectators on
this platform have a far more pressing motivation to sean the perimeter of the cir
cular field than Friedrich's mountain climber. Unlike The Traveler, which suggests
the security of a stable point of view, Géricault's work discloses a very different
sense of the conditions of panoramic experience-it is to be uprooted from any
point of anchorage and to be drifting on an amorphous surface like the sea, without
markers, without a center, and on which homogeneity and repetition overwhelm
singularity. At stake in this work is an apprehension of the numbing disproportion
between the limits ofhuman perception and the implacable otherness ofthe exte
rior world. This is the field on which Géricault's dossier of documents, facts, evidence,
images of reality effects drifts, tied together precariously like the raft itself, never
congealing into a reassuring armature of meanings. And also unlike Friedrich,
Géricault is incapable of imagining a crisis of perception in terms of a solitary indi
vidual. The sensory and cognitive dislocations of modernity can be mapped only
through the tangled and hazardous destiny of a collective subject.

Crary I Gérícault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reaiity in !he Early Nineteenth Century 23
Notes
This essay is the text of a lecture delivered recently at various locations, and I'm grateful to my hosts and
audiences at Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Emory, Yale, University ofWashington, and the Whitney ISP.
My thanks also go to the Grey Room editors far their help and advice.

1. Jean-Louis Comolli, "Machines ofthe Visible," in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Laueretis
and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 122.
2. On the history ofthe peep show, see Der Guckkasten: Einblick, Durchblick, Ausblick, ed.
David Robinson, Wolfgang Seitz et al. (Stuttgart: Füsslin Verlag, 1995); and Richard Balzer,
Peepshows: A Visual History(New York: Abrams, 1998).
3. See, far example, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1968), 276-277; and Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 130-132.
4. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: Theory, History, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).
5. See the account of these concerns in Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on
Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 136-148.
6. See the extensive factual account of the Egyptian Hall in Richard D. Altick's indispensable The
Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 235-252. See also Celina Fox, ed.,
London: World City 1800-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 418-421.
7. Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde," in
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990): 56-62.
8. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1986), 147.
9. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds., The London Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan,
1983), 255.
1p. On the exhibition of Géricault's work in England and Ireland, see Lee Johnson, "The Raft of the
Medusa in Great Britain," Burlington Magazine 46 (August 1954): 249-253; Suzanne Lodge, "Géricault
in England," Burlington Magazine 62 (December 1965): 616-627; Lorenz E. Eitner, Géricault: His Life and
Work (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 209-212; and Rupert Christiansen, The Victorian Visitors:
Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), 6-41.
11. See, far example, the account ofthe exhibition at the Egyptian Hall ofBenjamin Robert Haydon's
enormous Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, which coincided with the display of Géricault's painting in
1820, in David Blayney Brown et al., Benjamín Robert Haydon 1786-1846 (Kendal: The Wordsworth
Trust, 1996), 12-13.
12. The Medusa was part of a convoy of French ships en route to Senegal in July 1816. Dueto the
inexperience of the captain, the ship ran aground on ocean shoals many miles off the African coast.
After two days a decision was made to abandon the ship; however, because of negligence, there
were only a few serviceable lifeboats. To accommodate everyone, a raft was hastily assembled out ofthe
ship's timbers and 150 passengers rode on it, towed by one of the lifeboats. When the crew in the
lifeboat realized the raft was impeding their own progress to safety they cynically cut the cable, leaving
the raft and its company to drift on the open sea. Thirteen days later, after storms, drunken and
murderous

Fragment of panorama painting.

24 Grey r,oom Oll

fighting, cannibalism, starvation, and delirium, fifteen survivors were rescued by another ship. Of
these, five died soon after reaching shore. An event devoid of anything heroic or ennobling, it became
a political scandal, focusing public attention on the corruption of the Restoration regime, which had
awarded command of a ship toan incompetent Royalist officer, thus causing 140 unnecessary deaths.
13. Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 29-31.
14. In creating that "reversed telescope" effect of vast separation between raft and distant
ship, Géricault was obviously aware from Corréard and Savigny's book that the eventual rescue
occurred because the raft was spotted through a telescope, that is, through the use of a visual
technology that exceeded the mere human vision deployed on the raft, surmounting the obstacle
of distance and space. J.B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Corréard, Narrative of a Voyage to
Senegal in 1816 (1818; reprint, London: Dawsons, 1968), 142-143.
15. Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 88.
16. Valuable studies of the panorama include Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a
Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York:
Abrams, 1999); Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19., exh. cat., Jahrhunderts,
(Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993); Ralph Hyde, Panoramania (London: Barbican Art Gallery,
1988); and Albrecht Koschorke, "Das Panorama: Die Anfiinge des modernen Sensomotorik um 1800,"
in Die Mobilisierung des Sehens, ed. Harro Segeberg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), 147-168.
17. Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, Élements de perspective pratique, a l'usage des artistes ... (1800;
reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1973), 339-343.
18. See Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981), 85.
19. See my comparison of the nineteenth-century optical models deployed by the panorama and
the stereoscope in Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 295-296.
20. Barthes, "The Reality Effect," 145.
21. Perhaps the most stunning visual treatment of this particular hilltop view of Rouen is the
watercolor by J.M.W. Turner and subsequent engraving by William Miller for the 1834 volume
Wanderings by the Seine. In the summer of 1829, in order to promote sales of Turner's engravings,
an exhibition ofhis watercolors was held at the Egyptian Hall.
22. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Modern Library,
1957), 299.
23. See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah
Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 47.
24. That the rescuing ship, the Argus, was actually named after a mythological creature with a
hundred eyes has struck many as an extraordinary coincidence. Less often remembered is that the full
mythological name was Argus Panoptes, accidentally evoking a range- of forms through which the
capacities of an individual (merely mortal) human observer were exceeded, including the panorama
and Panopticon. Savigny and Corréard report that "One, among others said, joking, 'If the brig is sent
to look for us, let us pray to God that she may have the eyes of Argus,' alluding to the name of the vessel,
which we presumed would be sent after us. This consolatory idea did not quit us, and we spoke of it
frequently." Savigny and Corréard, Narrative of a Voyage, 132-133.

Crarv j Géric ault, the PanorBn1a, and Sites o-f Re aiitv in the Early Nineteenth Century 25