The Garibaldi Panorama & the Risorgimento Resource Explorer [GPE] is a visual interface aimed to provide a better understanding of the relationships between the Garibaldi Panorama and the visual and textual materials collected in the Harvard Risorgimento Preservation Collection (HRPC) as well as other library resources at Brown or elsewhere, made available through our project.
Portraits from the Anne S. K. Brown Collection
The prints available here are from the holdings of the Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection at Brown University Library. They are part of a graphic collection numbering over 14,000 prints, drawings, paintings and watercolors, in addition to over 12,000 printed books, and several thousand scrapbooks, sketchbooks, albums and portfolios
Garibaldi & the 19th Century Illustrated Press
The pictorial newspaper made its appearance in Europe in the early 19th century and by mid-century was well established. Leading papers including the Illustrated London News, l'Illustration, and the Illustrierte Leipzig, and in the United States, Leslie's and Harper's Weekly, were popular subscriptions with the middle and upper classes
Sheet Music from the A.S.K. Brown Military Collection
The display of moving panoramas such as the Garibaldi panorama was often accompanied by music. In this section, we collect examples of the kind of music that spectators in Derby or Nottingham, the two places where we know the panorama was exhibited, might have heard [see the article from the Nottingham Daily Express, February 1861]. They include 10 covers from sheet music with Garibaldian themes, English and American scores, published in Boston and London between 1860 and 1866. Soon, you will also be able to hear a piano recording of these pieces, courtesy of Mary Therese Royal de Martinez.
Nicholas Brown and the Roman Revolution
Edited by David I. Kertzer
When the Roman revolution broke out late in 1848, Pope Pius IX fled the Papal States and called on the Catholic powers of Europe to send their armies to restore him to power. Giuseppe Mazzini led the Roman Republic that briefly came to power, with Giuseppe Garibaldi leading his ragtag forces to defend it. At the time, the only U.S. diplomat in Rome was the American consul, Nicholas Brown. Brown’s copious correspondence with Mazzini and other key figures of the Roman Republic were left to his alma mater, Brown University, with which his family was closely associated. This unique collection is here made available, with associated critical apparatus, to the scholarly community worldwide.
Pamphlets from the Harvard Risorgimento Collection
A total of 5,902 titles from the Harvard College library, all documenting the Risorgimento, were preserved during the first three years of Harvard's first major microfilming project, funded by the NEH Division of Preservation and Access in 1990-92. This project was completed in 1993-95, by microfilming an additional 8,683 pamphlets published between 1814 and 1950. The Brown library acquired a copy of the complete sets of microfilms and microforms shortly afterwards. The digitization of these copyright-free materials provides scholars worldwide unprecedented access to a trove of primary and secondary sources documenting the political, economic, and religious aspects of the unification movement in Italy, from the first war of independence in 1848 through its unification in 1870.
Read the Manuscript
To accompany the panorama, the Brown library also received an original manuscript, which contains several versions of a scene-by-scene narrative of the illustrated story. The manuscript is a handwritten notebook of 144 pages, including the covers. It dates from the same year as the panorama, and we can consider it the work of John James Story, since in the upper right corner of the first page we read this inscription: J. J. Story Burton Street Nottingham Sep. 7th 1860. On page 141, in the upper left corner, we read the date Nov 21 1860, next to a table of contents of the second section, which includes 22 scenes and ends with Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi's entry into Naples (which took place on November 2). We can therefore conjecture that the first 49 scenes of the panorama were probably completed between these two dates, along with the script which illustrates them.
Garibaldi in TAG
The Touch Art Gallery application, originally developed for the MS Surface by Prof. Andries Van Dam's Graphics lab in the Brown University Computer Science department, provided intuitive ways to explore digital collections and large scale art objects. The Garibaldi Panorama was one of the first such artifacts to which TAG was applied, and provided use cases that contributed to its development. The application was used in Prof. Riva's course on moving panoramas and 19th-Century visual culture (which also included the Panorama of the Pilgrim's Progress at the Saco, Maine museum, and the Whaling Voyage 'Round The World at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts). Users could access materials from the Garibaldi & the Risorgimento Archive and other library special collections, such as the Carleton Morse Whaling Collection at the John Hay library at Brown. This video illustrates how the application worked.
Mediating the Risorgimento / Risorgimento Mediato
The international symposium Mediating the Risorgimento/Risorgimento mediato was held at Brown University on April 14 and 15, 2011, to mark the occasion of the 150th-anniversary of united Italy. The topic of the symposium was the role of old and new media (so defined within the framework of their time) in the production and dissemination of an “imagined Italian community” and the articulation of a national discourse, against the backdrop of 19th-century Europe.
Projects
In this section we will collect student projects about the Garibaldi panorama. During spring semester 2011, and again in fall 2012, Prof. Riva taught an experimental seminar on the panorama in which a select group of graduate and undergraduate students used vision technology (the Microsoft Surface) and new software for collaborative learning and research (LADS/TAG and WorkTop) developed under the direction of Computer scientist Andy van Dam and with the assistance of Elli Mylonas of the library's Center for Digital Scholarship. Using this software, students were able to collect digital documents directly from the Brown repository and the web and annotate them, producing a complete set of interlinked digital materials associated with the 54 scenes of the Garibaldi panorama [see slides?]. The first two projects featured in this section experimented with timelines and maps, in order to visualize chronological and compositional elements of the panorama's visual narrative.
Contributed Scholarship
In this section, you can find contributions by members of the research team on specific topics directly related to the Garibaldi panorama, its historical context and the events and characters portrayed.
