Brown University has an unusual digital resource that focuses on Giuseppe Garibaldi’s life and political career. It consists of a panoramic painting produced in the mid-nineteenth century. Brown’s Garibaldi panorama was painted in England around 1860 by John James Story. The enormous piece measures 83 metres long and 1.45 metres high. It continues seamlessly on both sides of its paper base and depicts 55 separate scenes of Garibaldi’s life. In this respect it is like a primitive graphic history, wound on two large spools and designed to be scrolled, like an enormous version of a sequence of images on your smartphone.
The first scene exemplifies Garibaldi’s courage as a teenager, when he risked his life to save some friends who got into difficulties sailing off the Mediterranean coast near Nice. It includes gory battle scenes (Scene 18, The Defence of Rome), emotional moments like the death of his wife (Scene 27), life and guerrilla warfare in the mountains (Scene 8) and scenes of triumph (Scene 49). Originally, a reader would have read out a script as the paintings scrolled from one scene to another.
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