Immersive Risorgimento: The Panoramas of the Battle of Solferino in France and Italy

The years between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century were marked by a great media transformation that led to a process of spectacularisation of politics. The war dimension was decisively affected by this transformation. A whole set of new cultural products offered to the public a virtual participation in war events of the time. Panoramas were the most effective ones, as they allowed for an immersive experience of the battlefields. At the same time, panoramas conquered the interest of institutions which integrated them into their policies of spectacularisation. The aim of this paper is to show how panoramas were crucial in the 19th-century process of militarisation of the imageries, by presenting the Italian unification, the so-called Risorgimento, as a case study. More precisely, the paper will focus on the panoramas devoted to the battle of Solferino (June 24, 1859), in which the Piedmontese and French armies defeated the Austrians. The Panorama of the Battle of Solferino, painted by Jean-Charles Langlois in 1865, and the similarly themed ones exhibited in Milan in 1881 and in Turin in 1884, will be discussed.