The Arcades Project - Operi

A panorama under construction, in an image originally published in L'Illustration. Courtesy of
the Syndicat Autoren- und Verlagsgesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main. See Ql.a,l.
It remains to be discovered what is meant when, in the dioramas, the variations
in lighting which the passing day brings to a landscape take place in fifteen or
thirty minutes. Here is something like a sportive precursor of fast-motion cinema­
tography-a witty, and somewhat malicious, "dancing" acceleration of time,
which, by way of contrast, makes one think. of the hopelessness of a mimesis, as
Breton evokes it in Nadja: the painter who in late aftemoon sets up his easel
before the Vieux-Port in Marseilles and, in the waning light of day, constantly
alters the light-relations in his picture, until it shows only darkness. For Breton,
however, it was "unfinished!':' [QJ.aA]
To reflect rigorously on the particular pathos that lies hidden in the art of the
panoramas. On the particular relation of this art to nature, but also, and above
all, to history. How peculiar this relation was may be gathered from these sen­
tences by Wiertz, whose painting, in fact, has a distinctly panoramic tendency.
"There has been much talk of realism in painting. Generally speaking, paintings
which are called 'realistic' are rarely in keeping with this rubric. Pure realism
ought to manage things so that a represented object would seem within reach of
your hand . ... If, in general, what is properly termed trompe-l'oeil has been little
appreciated, that is because up until now this geme of painting has been practiced
only by mediocre painters, by sign painters, those restricted merely to the repre-