As a museum technique, dioramas have a chequered reputation. They are expensive to produce, inconvenient and cumbersome to store, and require special lighting and casework setups. If they are not very good, they can be disastrous. But at their best they are one of the most powerful techniques for emotional access and effective learning.
The use of dioramas may be an old museum technique, but they continue to fascinate. They are still popular attractions at many venues, and are major features at museums such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the recently revamped Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
They also provide inspiration for artists, such as those who took part in a touring exhibition in 2000 from the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Small World featured artists including Mark Dion and Mat Collishaw who used dioramas in their work. And dioramas are still being created by museums for a range of displays, especially those dealing with science, social history, natural history and warfare.
The work of one particular diorama-maker, Raphael Roussel, is especially interesting. The popularity of one of the Science Museum's most famous galleries - the Children's gallery - was mainly because of a series of 12 dioramas created by Roussel and his studio team. The dioramas were small-scale scenes showing transport throughout the ages.
The Children's gallery opened in December 1931 and was intended as an introduction for the public to the extremely didactic displays in the rest of the building. The use of dioramas was a novel display technique for the museum and they became a hit, generating an extra 100,000 visitors in three weeks.
Roussel had been trained by his water-colourist father Theodore, and decided that he wanted to specialise in diorama making. At the end of the first world war, he joined with other like-minded artists and worked on a number of dioramas for what became London's Commonwealth Institute.
The dioramas presented the visitors with a view through a window into a completely different world. They extended beyond the apparent edges of the normal line of sight, and showed lifelike scenes with as complete integrity as possible.
To achieve the illusion, the backdrop, sides and even the top merged into each other. The lighting was controlled by being integral to each diorama, and in the most impressive examples, the perspective was skewed from front to back. This was in contrast to scenic backgrounds where scale models could be set up in situ.
Roussel and his colleagues were responsible for more than 40 of the 100 or so dioramas recorded in the Science Museum's inventory. But investigating the development of dioramas at the Science Museum is difficult because the museum appears to have gone out of its way to render models and other 'non-real' items anonymous (taking the plaques off ship models, for example).
This is irritating for present-day curators and cultural historians. However, where the artist signs the diorama, this can be seen in negatives, if not in published prints, and the combination of photographs and correspondence records is helping to reassemble the story.
Only one diorama definitely by Roussel remains on show at the Science Museum. It is in the Agriculture gallery and shows medieval ploughing and other farming practices, as illustrated in the 14th century Luttrell Psalter, from the British Library.
Even the oxen and the plough are modelled with skewed perspective. The diorama is signed and dated 1951, but would appear to have been in the museum since 1944. The bulk of the agriculture collection was put into store during the second world war and not redisplayed until the new building was opened in 1951. And the only known photograph of the artist shows him touching up this diorama in 1958.
The museum owns another diorama on the same subject, obtained in 1979, and its contrast with Roussel's work is striking. In fairness to the other makers, the brief they were working to no longer exists, and other work by them shows that their skill was rather higher than this example might imply.
The later model shows medieval farming as tidy, clean, and orderly; neither humans nor animals were doing anything other than having a good time on nice flat fields under the eye of the church. This portrayal is toy-like by comparison with the Roussel, which may have been constructed with a similar audience in mind, but which manages to convey a greater depth of research and emotional engagement.
Finding out when the first diorama appeared in a museum is not straightforward, and there is not even a set definition of what a diorama is. Steve Quinn, the senior project manager at the American Museum of Natural History, is an expert in the history of habitat dioramas.
He says the term diorama was first mentioned by Louis Daguerre (inventor of the daguerreotype method of photography) in 1822. The word comes from Greek - dia meaning through and horama meaning as is seen. Daguerre used it to describe a full-size theatrical scenery spectacular viewed by audiences under various lighting conditions.
But it is tempting to look further back to find the first museum diorama and assign the honour to the American painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale in 1784. Peale's Philadelphia museum was a family-run business attraction that showed the natural history of America and portraits of the important men (exclusively) of the day.
The aim was to lay down a marker for science to be recognised as important. The stuffed creatures were shown against painted backgrounds, but more significantly, one area was given to a complete reconstruction of a habitat from the soil type upwards. The skewed perspective was restricted to the scenic background. Natural history habitat displays wrestle with the issue of showing specimens that are by definition life-size.
There are some truly spectacular examples of early dioramas in the Milwaukee Public Museum, where the earliest of the still surviving habitat scenes was constructed by Carl Ethan Akeley in 1890. Chicago's Field Museum also has some great examples, as does the famous Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.
Widening the definition of dioramas to include all landscape modelling, the story is rather more complex. Little landscapes are common sights in military museums.
Battlefield scenes predate the colossal Siborne models of Waterloo (the large one is at the National Army Museum, while the smaller version is at the Tower of London) and come right up to date with Warhammer World, the spiritual home in Nottingham of fantasy modellers trying to emulate creations such as the characters in the film trilogy The Lord of the Rings.
Model towns and cities have a longer tradition than natural history habitats, although surviving examples such as the Great Fire of London at the Museum of London and the little model villages at Bekonscot and Burton-on-the-Water date from later periods.
Dioramas are also represented in theatre sets, which were produced professionally and as toys for children from the beginning of the 19th century, if not earlier. Technological modelling as a hobby is a vast subject, covering railway layouts, military and naval battles, and providing scenery for ship and other models.
Relief mapping has its roots in contour representation, and the Science Museum has a couple of examples, ranging from the nine-foot high relief map of Italy, which was shown at a 19th-century geographical exhibition and acquired in 1895, to a contemporary plasticised fold-out piste map showing the routes in a European ski resort.
Fierce and enjoyable arguments can be had over which came first and where the derivation lies. But whatever their value, do dioramas have much of a future in museums now they have to compete with contemporary presentation techniques?
One way that museums are keeping dioramas relevant for today's visitors is by combining them with modern technology. A popular technique is to use audiovisuals. In the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History visitors can see film screened above the dioramas, while the anthropological museum in Alicante, Spain, uses panoramic projections with its dioramas.
Computer-generated features are also used. One of the highlights of the Manchester Science gallery at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester are the Pepper's ghosts - small holograms against various backgrounds that are used to recreate important events in the city's past.
More traditional dioramas are still being constructed, such as those showing the quayside at Time and Tide in Great Yarmouth, and scenes exploring the impact of the weather at Whatever the Weather opening next month at Sheffield's Weston Park Museum.
Steve Quinn from the American Museum of Natural History believes the popularity of natural history dioramas in particular is secure. 'I believe the reason they are so popular is that they evoke the same emotional response to viewing wildlife in nature. It's the same epiphany that occurs when one experiences beauty and wonder in the natural world.'
Can the same emotions be raised by dioramas with human subjects? Karen Wonders, in her study of habitat dioramas of 1992, says that 'attempts to recreate the human form fail to arouse the trompe l'oeil effect that is the aim of the habitat diorama. No matter how realistic a human model may be, there is always an intuitive sense of its falseness that prevents a real illusion from occurring in the mind of the viewer'.
Many, including me, would strongly disagree. But either way, dioramas are here to stay.
Jane Insley is the senior curator, engineering technologies, at the Science Museum, London. She would like to hear from museums and other institutions with dioramas on all subjects. Email jane.insley@sciencemuseum.org.uk
The use of dioramas may be an old museum technique, but they continue to fascinate. They are still popular attractions at many venues, and are major features at museums such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the recently revamped Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
They also provide inspiration for artists, such as those who took part in a touring exhibition in 2000 from the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Small World featured artists including Mark Dion and Mat Collishaw who used dioramas in their work. And dioramas are still being created by museums for a range of displays, especially those dealing with science, social history, natural history and warfare.
The work of one particular diorama-maker, Raphael Roussel, is especially interesting. The popularity of one of the Science Museum's most famous galleries - the Children's gallery - was mainly because of a series of 12 dioramas created by Roussel and his studio team. The dioramas were small-scale scenes showing transport throughout the ages.
The Children's gallery opened in December 1931 and was intended as an introduction for the public to the extremely didactic displays in the rest of the building. The use of dioramas was a novel display technique for the museum and they became a hit, generating an extra 100,000 visitors in three weeks.
Roussel had been trained by his water-colourist father Theodore, and decided that he wanted to specialise in diorama making. At the end of the first world war, he joined with other like-minded artists and worked on a number of dioramas for what became London's Commonwealth Institute.
The dioramas presented the visitors with a view through a window into a completely different world. They extended beyond the apparent edges of the normal line of sight, and showed lifelike scenes with as complete integrity as possible.
To achieve the illusion, the backdrop, sides and even the top merged into each other. The lighting was controlled by being integral to each diorama, and in the most impressive examples, the perspective was skewed from front to back. This was in contrast to scenic backgrounds where scale models could be set up in situ.
Roussel and his colleagues were responsible for more than 40 of the 100 or so dioramas recorded in the Science Museum's inventory. But investigating the development of dioramas at the Science Museum is difficult because the museum appears to have gone out of its way to render models and other 'non-real' items anonymous (taking the plaques off ship models, for example).
This is irritating for present-day curators and cultural historians. However, where the artist signs the diorama, this can be seen in negatives, if not in published prints, and the combination of photographs and correspondence records is helping to reassemble the story.
Only one diorama definitely by Roussel remains on show at the Science Museum. It is in the Agriculture gallery and shows medieval ploughing and other farming practices, as illustrated in the 14th century Luttrell Psalter, from the British Library.
Even the oxen and the plough are modelled with skewed perspective. The diorama is signed and dated 1951, but would appear to have been in the museum since 1944. The bulk of the agriculture collection was put into store during the second world war and not redisplayed until the new building was opened in 1951. And the only known photograph of the artist shows him touching up this diorama in 1958.
The museum owns another diorama on the same subject, obtained in 1979, and its contrast with Roussel's work is striking. In fairness to the other makers, the brief they were working to no longer exists, and other work by them shows that their skill was rather higher than this example might imply.
The later model shows medieval farming as tidy, clean, and orderly; neither humans nor animals were doing anything other than having a good time on nice flat fields under the eye of the church. This portrayal is toy-like by comparison with the Roussel, which may have been constructed with a similar audience in mind, but which manages to convey a greater depth of research and emotional engagement.
Finding out when the first diorama appeared in a museum is not straightforward, and there is not even a set definition of what a diorama is. Steve Quinn, the senior project manager at the American Museum of Natural History, is an expert in the history of habitat dioramas.
He says the term diorama was first mentioned by Louis Daguerre (inventor of the daguerreotype method of photography) in 1822. The word comes from Greek - dia meaning through and horama meaning as is seen. Daguerre used it to describe a full-size theatrical scenery spectacular viewed by audiences under various lighting conditions.
But it is tempting to look further back to find the first museum diorama and assign the honour to the American painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale in 1784. Peale's Philadelphia museum was a family-run business attraction that showed the natural history of America and portraits of the important men (exclusively) of the day.
The aim was to lay down a marker for science to be recognised as important. The stuffed creatures were shown against painted backgrounds, but more significantly, one area was given to a complete reconstruction of a habitat from the soil type upwards. The skewed perspective was restricted to the scenic background. Natural history habitat displays wrestle with the issue of showing specimens that are by definition life-size.
There are some truly spectacular examples of early dioramas in the Milwaukee Public Museum, where the earliest of the still surviving habitat scenes was constructed by Carl Ethan Akeley in 1890. Chicago's Field Museum also has some great examples, as does the famous Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History.
Widening the definition of dioramas to include all landscape modelling, the story is rather more complex. Little landscapes are common sights in military museums.
Battlefield scenes predate the colossal Siborne models of Waterloo (the large one is at the National Army Museum, while the smaller version is at the Tower of London) and come right up to date with Warhammer World, the spiritual home in Nottingham of fantasy modellers trying to emulate creations such as the characters in the film trilogy The Lord of the Rings.
Model towns and cities have a longer tradition than natural history habitats, although surviving examples such as the Great Fire of London at the Museum of London and the little model villages at Bekonscot and Burton-on-the-Water date from later periods.
Dioramas are also represented in theatre sets, which were produced professionally and as toys for children from the beginning of the 19th century, if not earlier. Technological modelling as a hobby is a vast subject, covering railway layouts, military and naval battles, and providing scenery for ship and other models.
Relief mapping has its roots in contour representation, and the Science Museum has a couple of examples, ranging from the nine-foot high relief map of Italy, which was shown at a 19th-century geographical exhibition and acquired in 1895, to a contemporary plasticised fold-out piste map showing the routes in a European ski resort.
Fierce and enjoyable arguments can be had over which came first and where the derivation lies. But whatever their value, do dioramas have much of a future in museums now they have to compete with contemporary presentation techniques?
One way that museums are keeping dioramas relevant for today's visitors is by combining them with modern technology. A popular technique is to use audiovisuals. In the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History visitors can see film screened above the dioramas, while the anthropological museum in Alicante, Spain, uses panoramic projections with its dioramas.
Computer-generated features are also used. One of the highlights of the Manchester Science gallery at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester are the Pepper's ghosts - small holograms against various backgrounds that are used to recreate important events in the city's past.
More traditional dioramas are still being constructed, such as those showing the quayside at Time and Tide in Great Yarmouth, and scenes exploring the impact of the weather at Whatever the Weather opening next month at Sheffield's Weston Park Museum.
Steve Quinn from the American Museum of Natural History believes the popularity of natural history dioramas in particular is secure. 'I believe the reason they are so popular is that they evoke the same emotional response to viewing wildlife in nature. It's the same epiphany that occurs when one experiences beauty and wonder in the natural world.'
Can the same emotions be raised by dioramas with human subjects? Karen Wonders, in her study of habitat dioramas of 1992, says that 'attempts to recreate the human form fail to arouse the trompe l'oeil effect that is the aim of the habitat diorama. No matter how realistic a human model may be, there is always an intuitive sense of its falseness that prevents a real illusion from occurring in the mind of the viewer'.
Many, including me, would strongly disagree. But either way, dioramas are here to stay.
Jane Insley is the senior curator, engineering technologies, at the Science Museum, London. She would like to hear from museums and other institutions with dioramas on all subjects. Email jane.insley@sciencemuseum.org.uk
