Grande Panorama Circular de Innsbruck

This is not a single scene but a painted horizon, more than 1,000 square metres of canvas wrapped in a full circle, so that a visitor standing at the centre seems to be inside the day it shows. That day is 13 August 1809, the third battle on the Bergisel hill above Innsbruck, when Tyrolean riflemen under the innkeeper Andreas Hofer fought Napoleon's Bavarian and French troops for control of their homeland. Michael Zeno Diemer and a team of assistants painted the whole thing in about three months, feeding the public appetite for these giant panoramas, the immersive spectacle of the age just before cinema. It hangs today beside the Bergisel itself, a few steps from the ground it depicts.