Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Karl Friedrich Schinkel is remembered today as Prussia's leading architect, the man behind Berlin landmarks like the Altes Museum and the Neue Wache, but architecture almost wasn't his career at all. In 1806 Napoleon's army crushed Prussia at the battle of Jena, halting nearly every building project in the kingdom, and the newly trained Schinkel, with nothing to build, turned to painting to make a living.

For about a decade he supported himself with romantic landscapes and, more unusually, with panoramas and dioramas, large illusionistic paintings on translucent material lit from behind to mimic changing light and movement. His 1812 diorama The Fire of Moscow recreated the burning of that city as Napoleon's army retreated through it, with simulated flames and crowds fleeing through painted smoke. Another project, a panorama of Palermo in Sicily based on his own travel sketches, took him four months to paint and was shown to the Berlin public in a purpose-built rotunda on St Hedwig's Square.

Once Prussia's building economy recovered after 1815, Schinkel returned to architecture full time, but kept one foot in the stage world. In 1816 he designed the sets for a Berlin production of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, including a star-domed night sky built for the Queen of the Night's aria, a design later opera houses kept borrowing for the next century.