Gettysburg Cyclorama Is Painstakingly Restored
GETTYSBURG, Pa. -- For generations, kids have begged to see it, and for generations they have walked away wondering, is that all?
The Gettysburg Cyclorama, a huge dinosaur of a painting left over from the heyday of circuses, magic shows and brass bands playing on the town square, has never been a great painting. Its cartoonish soldiers and clutter of horses never really delivered on the promise of an illusion so real you'd swear you were in the middle of the great Civil War battle.
But the giant painting in the round sat at Gettysburg since 1913, while the March of Progress coughed up movies with sound, television, the Internet and computer games. The painting never got better, but it did get stranger -- a relic of what seemed a more credulous era -- and over time it became part of history itself.
And now, in one of the stranger twists of the history of how we tell history, the giant 1884 canvas has been given the loving treatment of an old master painting. On Friday, after a five-year and $15 million restoration effort, the panoramic Battle of Gettysburg cyclorama will reopen to the public. Decades of neglect, cropping and overpainting have been fixed. The painting has been restored to its original 377-foot-by-42-foot size and installed in a new rotunda.
[See story for video closeups and panorama composites of cyclorama.]
Read entire article at Washington Post
The Gettysburg Cyclorama, a huge dinosaur of a painting left over from the heyday of circuses, magic shows and brass bands playing on the town square, has never been a great painting. Its cartoonish soldiers and clutter of horses never really delivered on the promise of an illusion so real you'd swear you were in the middle of the great Civil War battle.
But the giant painting in the round sat at Gettysburg since 1913, while the March of Progress coughed up movies with sound, television, the Internet and computer games. The painting never got better, but it did get stranger -- a relic of what seemed a more credulous era -- and over time it became part of history itself.
And now, in one of the stranger twists of the history of how we tell history, the giant 1884 canvas has been given the loving treatment of an old master painting. On Friday, after a five-year and $15 million restoration effort, the panoramic Battle of Gettysburg cyclorama will reopen to the public. Decades of neglect, cropping and overpainting have been fixed. The painting has been restored to its original 377-foot-by-42-foot size and installed in a new rotunda.
[See story for video closeups and panorama composites of cyclorama.]