This image has as its subject the topography of Rome and its environs—their natural, geographical features, as recorded by Gell's trigonometrical survey; and the artificial environment, as it existed in Classical times.
In the early nineteenth century, the term "moving panorama" could refer to an optical entertainment (both the apparatus itself and the sequence of virtual prospects that it conjured); an unfolding view of an actual scene, whether of landscape, pageant, or streetscape; and "a series of images passing before the mind's eye" (OED).
This image provides a simulation (a linked sequence of picturesque views) of a simulation (the Diorama of Venice) of a tour of the actual City of Venice and its environs.
The fore-edge painting on the first volume of Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth, probably depicts Kenilworth Castle; and the painting on the third, Cumnor Place; with both buildings pictured in the midst of a vast rural landscape.
This painting exists in two states: the first portrays the actual, "unimproved" prospect from the house at Tatton Park, as it was when Repton first visited the Park, on 8 Nov. 1791; the second depicts the same prospect as it would appear if "improved" by Repton.
The primary subject of this sheet of coastal profiles is the northwest American coast, fragments of which it presents as synecdoches for the whole. Before James Cook's voyages of discovery, naval draughtsmen created coastal, island, or harbour profiles only in broad outline, primarily as an aid to navigation (Richardson 69).
“Port Dick, near Cook’s Inlet” [or “Port Dick, with a fleet of Indian canoes,” as it is described in “A List of the Plates”] is taken from the third volume of George Vancouver’s A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World (1798), where it faces page 150. Drawn by William Alexander from an original sketch by H.
In late-18th and early-19th century Britain, popular interest in "scenes" that exceed or lie beyond the everyday world was heightened by factors such as the emergence of London as Europe's first world-city; James Cook's and George Vancouver's voyages of discovery, which completed in outline the modern map of the globe; and improvements in transport and communication technologies, which brought the distant into the orbit of the near. The consequent appetite for large scenes, evident in the cult of the sublime, was met in part by new virtual-reality technologies—most notably the Eidophusikon, Panorama, Moving Panorama, and Diorama—and an entertainment industry based on them.
This image depicts the failure of harmony in the marriage previously represented (in its partner print) as a harmonious courtship. Harmony is used as a visual pun in each print to convey first, the appealing fantasy of romance, and then the harsh reality of a marriage originating in such a fantasy.
