While wandering around downtown Lucerne, Switzerland...
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| A section of the painting showing the disarmament of the soldiers. P/C Wikimedia |
... I came across a really interesting building. It was clearly an old building in a regular polygonal shape--looks like a hexadecagon (16 sides). It's obviously been embedded within a fairly square modernist building.
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| P/C Dan--captured from Google Maps satellite view |
I went inside and found a completely remarkable painting of an important event in Swiss history--the internment of the French Armée de l'Est in neutral Switzerland at the end of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. (Note: in this case, "internment" doesn't mean being an intern for the summer, but rather describe a neutral country detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907.)
The thing is... the painting is huge, and in the round--it takes your breath away, it's that dramatic.
You enter into the center of the vista from below and are immediately surrounded by a 360-degree view. It's a 19th century version of VR. In a world without movies, videos, 3D computer graphics, virtual reality, or augmented reality headsets, it was the closest thing you could get to being there in the middle of the action.
Being in the middle of this circular painting reminded me that I'd visited another, similar installation a few years ago--although that visit was somewhere in the eastern United States. But, I wondered, where would I have seen something like this?
This makes a great SearchResearch Challenge for the week.
1. What is this kind of art installation called?
2. Are there any of these giant 360-degree paintings still in use somewhere in the US? (If so, where? Any in the eastern US still around?)
3. How many of these things have survived from the 19th century into modern times? (And... is there one you can visit near me?)
4. What was the effect of this internment on the development of Switzerland? Why was it such an important event?
The first 3 Challenges are pretty straight-forward, while the last one calls for a bit more thinking.
As always, let us know how you found the answers. (If you just know off the top of your head, that's fine, just say so. If you called your favorite Swiss historian, let us know that as well.)
But please share your method with us!
Keep searching!
