The Leipzig Panometer is an attraction in Leipzig, Germany. It is a visual panorama displayed inside a former gasometer, accompanied by a thematic exhibition. The current theme is "New York 9/11". The Panometer was created in 2003 by the Austrian-born artist Yadegar Asisi, who coined the name as a portmanteau of "panorama" and "gasometer". He opened another Panometer in Dresden in 2006. His panoramas are also displayed in Berlin, Pforzheim, Wittenberg, Hanover and Rouen. [1]
The Leipzig Panometer occupies a disused telescopic gas holder in Connewitz. The gasometer was built in 1909, under Hugo Licht, and was in operation until 1977. It has a diameter of 57 metres (187 ft) and a total height of 49 metres (161 ft), including the cupola with lantern. From 2002 to 2005 it was renovated to allow the transformation into Asisi's panoramic display. The final step was the addition of a glass foyer, which connects it to an adjacent gasometer and also contains the restaurant. [2]
So far the panoramic pictures have been 105 metres (344 ft) in circumference and around 30 metres (98 ft) in height, making them currently the largest such pictures in the world.[ citation needed ] (The one in Dresden is slightly less tall.) Digital technology is used to combine photos, drawings and paintings into a single large picture file, which is then printed onto individual strips of textile. The strips are combined into a circular picture which is then hung up as a single piece. The panorama is viewed from a raised platform in the centre. Perspective distortion is used to create an impression of space.
There are also light and sound effects, including a simulated day-night cycle, sounds from nature, and music composed especially by the Belgian composer Eric Babak [3]
In the area between the panorama and the outer wall there is an exhibition on a theme related to the picture (currently the Titanic ), as well as a film viewing room.
2003–05: Mount Everest. The viewer's vantage point was from the Valley of Silence. The accompanying exhibition showed the history of Western journeys to Everest on one side of the building, and the viewpoint of local Buddhist inhabitants on the other. This included a mandala made from coloured sand and a stupa constructed in Nepal (both sacred artworks). [4]
2005–09: Ancient Rome. A recreation of an 1889 panorama of Rome by Alexander von Wagner, portraying Constantine the Great's entry into the city following his success in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. The exhibition covered the day-to-day life and architecture of Ancient Rome, and featured plaster casts from the University of Leipzig's antiques collection along with paintings, architectural drawings and models of famous Roman buildings. It included a reconstruction of the partly destroyed, 12 metres (39 ft) high Colossus of Constantine, rebuilt as an anamorphosis (a kind of visual illusion). Since December 2014 this panorama and the colossus are displayed in the Pforzheim Gasometer. [5]
2009–13: Amazonia. This was made to honour the 150th anniversary of the death of Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist who explored South America. The panorama shows a diverse and detailed image of the flora and fauna of the rainforest, in which some smaller animals are only visible with a telescope. The sound and light effects include animal calls and a simulated tropical rainstorm. Humboldt had expressed his desire for a panorama which would "show nature in its wild luxuriance and the fullness of life". [6] The exhibition includes a large model (60:1) of a mosquito.
2013-2015: Leipzig 1813. A new exhibition opened on 3 August 2013 to mark the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, depicting not the battle itself, but Leipzig at that time. [7]
2015−2017: The Great Barrier Reef, showing the reef in front of Australia's coast from under water.
2017−2019: The Titanic, depicting the sunken wreck as a manmade symbol to outperform nature and to fail.
2019-2022: Carolas Garten, a panorama by Yadegar Asisi that depicts the garden of a former employee of the Panometer in detail. You are the size of an ant, looking up at all the things in the garden. A bee is depicted in such a close-up that the pollen clinging to the hairs of its legs is visible. [8]
2022-now: New York 9/11, war in times of peace, recalls the attacks of 11 September and their far-reaching global impact, and allows for a complex consideration of the subsequent events.
The Colosseum is an elliptical amphitheatre in the centre of the city of Rome, Italy, just east of the Roman Forum. It is the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built, and is still the largest standing amphitheatre in the world, despite its age. Construction began under the Emperor Vespasian in 72 and was completed in AD 80 under his successor and heir, Titus. Further modifications were made during the reign of Domitian. The three emperors who were patrons of the work are known as the Flavian dynasty, and the amphitheatre was named the Flavian Amphitheatre by later classicists and archaeologists for its association with their family name (Flavius).
Panoramic paintings are massive artworks that reveal a wide, all-encompassing view of a particular subject, often a landscape, military battle, or historical event. They became especially popular in the 19th century in Europe and the United States, inciting opposition from some writers of Romantic poetry. A few have survived into the 21st century and are on public display. Typically shown in rotundas for viewing, panoramas were meant to be so lifelike they confused the spectator between what was real and what was image.
A statue is a free-standing sculpture in which the realistic, full-length figures of persons or animals are carved or cast in a durable material such as wood, metal or stone. Typical statues are life-sized or close to life-size; a sculpture that represents persons or animals in full figure but that is small enough to lift and carry is a statuette or figurine, whilst one more than twice life-size is a colossal statue.
A panorama is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images, or 3D modeling. The word was coined in the 18th century by the English painter Robert Barker to describe his panoramic paintings of Edinburgh and London. The motion-picture term panning is derived from panorama.
The Pergamon Museum is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin, Germany. It was built from 1910 to 1930 by order of Emperor Wilhelm II and according to plans by Alfred Messel and Ludwig Hoffmann in Stripped Classicism style. As part of the Museum Island complex, the Pergamon Museum was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 because of its architecture and testimony to the evolution of museums as architectural and social phenomena.
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.
The Exposition Universelle of 1900, better known in English as the 1900 Paris Exposition, was a world's fair held in Paris, France, from 14 April to 12 November 1900, to celebrate the achievements of the past century and to accelerate development into the next. It was the sixth of ten major expositions held in the city between 1855 and 1937. It was held at the esplanade of Les Invalides, the Champ de Mars, the Trocadéro and at the banks of the Seine between them, with an additional section in the Bois de Vincennes, and it was visited by more than fifty million people. Many international congresses and other events were held within the framework of the exposition, including the 1900 Summer Olympics.
Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography. The term has also been applied to a photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio, like the familiar letterbox format in wide-screen video.
A diorama is a replica of a scene, typically a three-dimensional model either full-sized or miniature. Sometimes it is enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum. Dioramas are often built by hobbyists as part of related hobbies such as military vehicle modeling, miniature figure modeling, or aircraft modeling.
Pamukkale, meaning "cotton castle" in Turkish, is a natural site in Denizli Province in southwestern Turkey. The area is famous for a carbonate mineral left by the flowing of thermal spring water. It is located in Turkey's Inner Aegean region, in the River Menderes valley, which has a temperate climate for most of the year.
The Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum was a Civil War museum located in Atlanta, Georgia. Its most noted attraction was the Atlanta Cyclorama, a cylindrical panoramic painting of the Battle of Atlanta. As of December 2021, the Cyclorama is located at the Atlanta History Center, while the building is now Zoo Atlanta's Savanna Hall.
Epic films have large scale, sweeping scope, and spectacle. The term is slightly ambiguous, sometimes designating a film genre and at other times simply big-budget films. Like epics in the classical literary sense, it is often focused on a heroic character. An epic's ambitious nature helps to set it apart from other genres such as the period piece or adventure film.
The Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, sometimes known as the Basilica Nova—meaning "new basilica"—or Basilica of Maxentius, is an ancient building in the Roman Forum, Rome, Italy. It was the largest building in the Forum, and the last Roman basilica built in the city.
Alexander originally Sándor vonWagner was a Hungarian painter.
The Dresden Panometer is an attraction in Dresden, Germany. It is a venue displaying one of two panoramic paintings of Austrian-born artist Yadegar Asisi inside a former gasometer, accompanied by an exhibition. One of the two panoramas, Baroque Dresden depicts Dresden as it might have appeared in 1756, the other, Dresden 1945 shows the city after it was destroyed during World War II. The Panometer was created in 2006 by Asisi, who coined the name as a portmanteau of "panorama" and "gasometer". In 2003 he had opened a Panometer in Leipzig.
Anton van den Wyngaerde was a prolific Flemish topographical artist who made panoramic sketches and paintings of towns in the southern Netherlands, northern France, England, Italy, and Spain. He is best known for the many panoramas of cities in Spain that he drew while employed by Philip II. After his death, his works were dispersed into different collections, and their importance neglected. Their historical and artistic value have been recently rediscovered.
The Holtermann Collection is the name given to a collection of over 3,500 glass-plate negatives and albumen prints, many of which depict life in New South Wales goldfield towns. It also includes numerous photographs of Australian rural towns and the cities of Sydney and Melbourne taken between 1871 and 1876. The collection is held by the State Library of New South Wales.
The Tirol Panorama with the Museum of the Imperial Infantry or Tirol Panorama is a museum in Innsbruck in the Austrian state of Tyrol, which is mainly important because it houses the Innsbruck Giant Panorama Painting.
The Bourbaki Panorama is a circular panoramic painting depicting the internment of the French Armée de l'Est in neutral Switzerland at the end of the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. The army, led by General Charles-Denis Bourbaki, had been defeated in the field while attempting to raise the Siege of Belfort and fled to Switzerland in the aftermath. The Swiss admitted the French soldiers, and local villagers and the Swiss Red Cross provided aid.
Connewitz is a district and also a town in the south of the municipal district of Leipzig, Germany.