The story
Step into the round hall on the Bergisel hill above Innsbruck and you stand in the middle of a battle. The Innsbruck Giant Panorama, a painting of about 1,000 square metres wrapped through a full circle, shows the third Battle of Bergisel on 13 August 1809, when Tyrolean fighters led by the innkeeper Andreas Hofer drove back French and Bavarian troops on these same slopes.
The Munich painter Michael Zeno Diemer made it in 1896 with the advice of the Tyrolean painter Franz Defregger, and finished it in about three months. Panoramas were a popular spectacle in the late nineteenth century, and only a few dozen of the classic kind survive. This one travelled. In 1906 it was on show in London when its wooden rotunda back in Innsbruck burned down, and a new octagonal building in the Saggen district took it in a year later.
It stayed there until 2011, when the Tirol Panorama museum opened at the battle site itself. A passage links the painting to the older Kaiserjäger Museum, devoted to the Tyrolean imperial rifle regiments, and to an exhibition on Tyrol's landscape, faith and politics.
