Sevastopol panorama

Building of the circular painting

Sevastopol Panorama is a 115 meter long and 14 meter high circular painting in Sevastopol , Ukraine .

overview

The picture shows the defense of the city during the Crimean War (1853-1856). It was created in the years 1901–1904 by Franz Alexejewitsch Roubaud (1856–1928) and his collaborators Leopold Schönchen, Oskar Merté, Karl H. Frosch, Eldring. The fighting between the attacking French and British troops and the Russian defenders are shown. The plant was badly damaged in 1942 and restored from 1951 to 1954.

Detail from the panorama

Panorama picture

In his colossal painting, 115 meters long and 14 meters high, Roubaud depicts the morning of June 6, 1855 , when the Russian army was able to hold back the English and French troops for the last time before they stormed the city. The French army chose this date because exactly 40 years earlier they had lost the Battle of Waterloo . The French therefore wanted victory at all costs.

As the founder of the Russian Panorama School, Roubaud was commissioned a few decades later to create a monumental monument commemorating the heroism of the defenders of Sevastopol. Roubaud lived in Munich around 1900, where he had a pavilion built especially for this commission. For three years he painted the panorama together with students from the Bavarian Art Academy and built it up. In the meantime, a building for this panorama has been erected on Istoritscheski bulwar in Sevastopol. On the 50th anniversary of the defense of Sevastopol, the rotunda with the antique-looking entrance portal was opened on May 14, 1905, and the panorama was transported from Munich to the then Russian port city. On the outer facade there are marble busts of the most important officers of the Crimean War , including one of the writer Lev Tolstoy , who took part in the defense of Sevastopol. In front of the mural, Roubaud built models of destroyed bunkers, horse-drawn carts, cannons and fallen soldiers, creating a feeling of three-dimensionality . Around 4,000 figures are immortalized on the painting, including many officers and some civilian historical figures: the most famous Russian surgeon at the time, Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogow , the first Russian nurse PI Grafowa and the Dasha of Sevastopol - a young woman who supplied the combatants with water .

During the Second World War, on June 25, 1942, the round building with the panorama was destroyed. 86 pieces of canvas were saved and brought to safety by sea with the Russian destroyer "Tashkent". However, these originals could no longer be restored, so that 19 artists in Moscow were commissioned to paint and rebuild the panorama from scratch on a new canvas. Like Roubaud and his art students in Munich fifty years earlier, the Moscow artists had been at work for three years until 1954. On October 16, 1954 - 100 years after the first defense of Sevastopol - the panorama was reopened in the completely rebuilt round building.