Michael Zeno Diemer

Walk into the round hall of the Tirol Panorama museum in Innsbruck and you are standing inside a battle. All around you, on about 1,000 square metres of canvas, Tyrolean farmers fight Bavarian and French troops on Bergisel, the hill above the city, on 13 August 1809. Their leader was Andreas Hofer, the innkeeper who became Tyrol's folk hero. The painting was made in 1896 by Michael Zeno Diemer, a young painter from Munich.

Panoramas were the mass entertainment of the late 19th century, a kind of cinema before cinema, and Diemer had trained at the Munich Academy. For the Innsbruck commission he worked under the eye of Franz von Defregger, the Tyrolean history painter. The finished canvas hung in its own purpose-built rotunda in the city until 2010, when it moved to the new museum on Bergisel. It is one of only about 30 panoramas from that era to survive.

Later Diemer turned to the sea and the sky. He painted ships and naval scenes, designed posters and picture postcards, and in 1909 painted a zeppelin flight for the Deutsches Museum, the science museum in Munich. His son Franz-Zeno Diemer became a pioneering test pilot. The painter spent his last years in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau, where he died in 1939.