A scene from the massive watercolor panorama by artists John James Story and Henry Selsun details a chapter in the life of Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi.

PROVIDENCE

The crowd that first saw the 273-foot-long painting unfurled was likely crammed in a church hall somewhere in Nottingham, England. It would have been sometime in 1860, just after the painting, known as a panorama, or “moving picture,” was finished.

Like modern-day moviegoers, the audience would have paid their admission and taken their seats to see and hear the exploits of Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian who at the time was making headlines across Europe and the subject of the painting.

Garibaldi was leading an army through Italian cities in an attempt to create a single nation, and a narrator would have recited his major victories as different segments of the painting were revealed.

“In the 1860s, Garibaldi was the man of the hour. Everyone was reading about what he was doing in Italy at the time,” so if you wanted to make money as an artist, you could paint some colorful scenes of this person, create a story, and charge admission,” explains Peter Harrington, a curator at Brown University, where the painting now resides.

The university acquired the painting two years ago and is now making this example of 19th-century mass entertainment widely available to the 21st-century public for the first time — online.

Over the summer, the university library hired a firm to create a high-quality digital version of the painting. Exactly 91 photographs were taken of the panorama and they were then melded into one, continuous image.

The library unveiled the panorama on its Center for Digital Initiatives webpage last week, the centerpiece of a project on Garibaldi and his role in the Risorgimento, or unification of Italy. The project, which can be viewed at http://dl.lib.brown.edu/garibaldi/, coincides with the bicentennial of Garibaldi’s birth this year.

“If we had been given this painting 30 years ago, before the digital age, it would have been collecting dust in storage in the back of the library stacks and every 10 to 15 years we might unroll it,” says Harrington.

The Garibaldi Panorama is a massive watercolor completed in 1860 by John James Story and Henry Selsun, two Nottingham-based artists whose other works are unknown. Measuring 4 1/2 feet high and 273 feet in length, it is among the longest paintings in the world, according to the university.

The panorama, which currently is stored in a climate-controlled room in the University’s library annex in Cranston, is painted on both sides and is made up of a number of very long segments of canvas paper connected to form one continuous length. Its 42 chronological scenes trace Garibaldi’s life from childhood through his Italian campaigns in 1860.

Like other panoramas, the painted landscapes progress seamlessly into one another so that the transition from one event or time period isn’t always clear. The opening scene, for example, depicts a 13-year-old Garibaldi saving friends who had fallen off a sail boat in rough seas, and moves fluidly into a sea battle off the shores of Montevideo, Uruguay, during Garibaldi’s years in South America as an adult.

Much of the action in the painting takes place in 1860, when Garibaldi, who died in 1882, was crisscrossing Italy with his army, known as the Red Shirts, and fighting the French, Austrian, and Spanish armies, all of whom had carved out pieces of the former Roman Republic over the years.

The narrative ends with Garibaldi’s triumphant entrance into Naples into 1860. A scene depicting an injury Garibaldi sustained in a later battle was added in 1862, two years after the panorama was first displayed.

Harrington says the painting reached American soil sometime in the year that last scene was added.

A recent U.S. ÉmigrÉ from England named Anthony Burford purchased the painting from Story. Passed down through the Burford family, it resided in attics and cellars, largely out of public view for over a hundred years.

Harrington contacted James Smith, a New York plastic surgeon and one of Burford’s descendants, when he heard that Smith was looking to part with the painting. Smith, who died in 2006, donated it to the university in October 2005 after having the painting independently appraised at $2 million.

Panoramic paintings like the Garibaldi Panorama flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, says Harrington. But while the majority of them were large, fixed paintings completely exposed from beginning to end, the Garibaldi Panorama was designed to be displayed one scene at a time.

Affixed at both ends to two rollers, the painting was unrolled slowly as a narrator described each vignette to the audience. Harrington says there is only one other moving panorama in New England, at the Saco Museum in Maine. That one illustrates the 17th-century novel The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come.

There would have likely been other moving pictures of Garibaldi at the time in other places, says Harrington, but so far the university believes it has the only one still in existence.

Because the moving paintings were presented often, they were subject to a lot of abuse, and the Garibaldi Panorama was no exception, showing signs of wear and tear when the university inherited it, said Harrington.

“The idea was to digitize it so we don’t have to show it anymore. It’s very delicate and it’s just not practical to put it on display,” says Harrington.

Right now, viewers can see a moving version of the panorama online, or take it scene-by-scene, with the option to magnify each in great detail. Harrington says the goal is to add audio narrative, in English and Italian, to the Web site, so that viewers can hear the text that was originally read when the panorama was presented.

pmarcelo@projo.com