LA SEINE , LA RIVE GAUCHE ET L’ÎLE DE LA CITÉ

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FRÉDÉRIC MARTENS

Genre: Landscape

Date: 1846

Location: Paris, France

Format: Panoramic

“Frédéric Martens (1809-75) – born in Venice but resident for most of his life in France – was one of the early pioneers of panoramic photography, inventing arguably the first camera capable of taking an image with a field of view wider than the human eye could apprehend without moving the head. Called the Megaskop camera, this instrument featured the vital innovation of a hand-cranked set of gears that ensured a smooth movement of the lens across the set of fourteen curved daguerreotype plates that were necessary to cover the 150-degree field of view. The camera also had the clever feature the aperture behind the lents that narrowed towards the top, to prevent the sky being overexposed in comparison with the ground below.

The Megaskop camera was made by the company of opticians and printmakers run by Marc Secrétan and Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours, who also produced albums of engraving based on Martens’s photographs.

Martens travelled extensively across Europe, documenting cities such as his narrative Venice, as well as as Trieste, Frankfurt and Rouen. Martens displayed his panoramas at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, where he was awarded a medal fir his images, which were described in the citation as having a ‘richness, effect and perfection of definition’ that made them ‘the fines specimens in seems possible to produce.’

The image above shows conclusively that the judges knew what they were talking about.

It is a stunning panorama of the center of Paris, 40cm (153/4 inches) long, in width the detail of the medieval layout of the city is still visible. It marks a significant turning point in the history of the French capital: two years later, after the trauma of the Revolutions of 1848, the government of the Emperor Napoléon III (Louis Napoléon) undertook extensive reconstruction, specifically to fill the city with broad plazas and wide avenues to make it easier for the authorities to quell further civic unrest. Thus this view is not only magnificent artistic and technical achievement in its own right; it is also a valuable historical document that provides evidence of an urban layout that has now largely vanished.” PL)

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