The Bourbaki Panorama

"I hope to show that the pictorial panorama was in one respect an apparatus for glorifying the bourgeois view of the world; it served both as an instrument for liberating human vision and for limiting and "imprisoning" it anew. As such it represents the first true mass medium." - Stephen Oetermann, in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (1997)

Or perhaps not. The Bourbaki Panorama (1881), designed by Swiss artist Edouard Castres and executed with the help of fellow painters, including Ferdinand Hodler, strikes me as a critique of war worthy to be compared to Aristophanes' Lysistrata.

Castres' scene of never-ending bleakness depicts the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War. In February, 1871, General Bourbaki and his troops, exhausted by defeat, were driven by the advancing Germans across the border into neutral Switzerland at Les Verrieres. In this first test of international law, foreign troops were given refuge, provided they lay down their arms until war's end.

Surely this medium that debuted as a popular amusement for Londoners in 1791 became something else altogether in the hands of the visionary from Geneva. The man in the top hat (at right - c.1850s) was standing in front of a moving panorama about the Arctic, shown in San Francisco.
You can see the entire panorama at http://www.bourbaki.ch