Panorama da Batalha de Murten

Before cinema, the way to be dropped inside a scene was the panorama, a painting wrapped in a full circle around you inside a purpose-built rotunda. This is one of them, a canvas roughly 10 meters high and 100 meters around. Louis Braun, a German specialist in these giant works, made it in 1893 and 1894 with a whole team of assistants, on commission from a Swiss panorama company. The subject is more than 400 years older than the paint, the Battle of Murten in 1476, where the Swiss Confederates crushed the army of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Visitors in the 1890s paid to stand at the center and turn slowly, the painted battle running all the way around them. It still survives, and has recently been digitized.