The Panoramic Order: Piecing Together the City

Abstract

The big sketch collections create order from an astonishing variety of components and perspectives. In other words, as bodies of knowledge they allow full scope for diversity within a cognitive superstructure that is always in evidence. Unlike sociology, however, they do not present knowledge of society in the form of empirical science. The forms in which they link observation and abstraction so that they become systems of cognition are, characteristically, hybrids between science, art and popular culture. The models of the panorama and of the encyclopaedia further support the paradigm of physiology which works as an epistemological vehicle, making possible the notion of interrelations in a living body. Wulf Wülfing has pointed to the analogy between panoramic and encyclopaedic orders in the sense that both aspire to cyclical completeness; be it a circular painting representing an overview or a printed work assembling a circle of knowledge, an orbis doctrinae (Quintilian’s expression translating the Greek term encyclopaedia; the first encyclopaedias in book form date from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century).¹ Both panoramas and encyclopaedias were, of course, important in their own right as media that popularised knowledge. But the aspect that matters to Wülfing and also concerns the present study is their status as models of (re)presentation. The encyclopaedic paradigm thus informs periodical publishing, especially the form of the review, whereas the panoramic one is frequently found in nineteenth-century travel literature.²