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MOVEMENT IN TWO DIMENSIONS
in part a transparency', says Constable in a letter to his friend Archdeacon Fisher; 'the spectator is in a dark chamber, and it is very pleasing and has great illusion. It is without the pale of the art, because its object is deception. The art pleases by reminding not by deceiving. The place was filled with foreigners, and I seemed to be in a cage of magpies.'
The two subjects of the first Diorama each measured 71! by 45^ ft. They were lit both from above and from behind, and the remarkable diverse effects were produced by combinations of transparent and opaque painting and by light transmitted through ground glass and coloured translucent screens on to the front of the picture, and through it from the back by means of long, vertical ground-glass windows, which could be shuttered when necessary or covered partially or entirely with pieces of coloured glass worked by pulleys and counterweights. The complicated machinery by means of which the audience was revolved was so cleverly contrived that it could be worked by a single man, who turned a crank at the signal of a bell. At the back of the rotunda there were nine boxes which seated forty people, while three hundred and ten more were accommodated in the amphitheatre. As in the Panorama, the spectators were divided by about 40 ft. from the picture, and screens stretching from the proscenium to the picture edges formed a broad tunnel which concentrated the gaze and gave added depth to the image. Performances were continuous from 1 1 a.m. till 4 p.m. and the price of admission was 3 francs for the boxes and 2 francs for the amphitheatre, nearly twice the cost of a visit to the Panorama.
Until 1 83 1 there were always two diorama pictures on view at the rue Sanson, and after that date there were three. One of Daguerre's most spectacular dioramas was the Midnight Mass at Saint-Etienne du Mont, in which the church was first seen in the full light of day, empty, and then at midnight, illumined by candles and full of kneeling figures. It was shown together with a remarkable open-air transformation scene in which the disasters of a terrible landslide which took place at Goldau in Switzerland in 1806 were re-enacted.
Daguerre's London Diorama was built in Park Square East, Regent's Park. Nash designed the facade to form the centre part of the terrace on which he was working at the time; the rotunda was constructed by the elder Pugin, assisted by James Morgan, a civil engineer; and the actual machinery was the
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