Panorama da Transilvânia

By 1897 the revolutions of 1848 were half a century old, and Hungarians wanted their uprising remembered on the grand scale. A team gathered in a rotunda in Lwów — today Lviv — the same building where Jan Styka had just painted his famous Racławice cyclorama, and under his direction Polish and Hungarian painters worked side by side. The canvas ran roughly 15 metres tall and 100 long, showing the Battle of Nagyszeben from that Hungarian war of independence, wrapped around the viewer so the fighting seemed to close in from every side. Panoramas like this were the cinema of their day. This one did not survive whole. It was later cut into about 100 sections, and only some 30 fragments remain, scattered now among a few museums in Poland.