The world lost one of its most gifted and prolific mapmakers when Heinrich Berann, the renowned Austrian panoramist, passed away December 4, 1999, at the age of 83. Intended as a tribute to Berann, this article discusses his work for the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), emphasizing particularly his artistic techniques and contributions to three-dimensional (3D) landscape visualization.
A rich partnership
Artists and the lands under NPS stewardship have had a long association. During the nineteenth century, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran heightened public awareness about the landscapes of the American West with paintings that portrayed nature in an exalted and romantic light. The interest generated by their art and other influences eventually led to land-protection legislation and then to formation of the NPS. A century later, the panoramas of Heinrich Berann harken back to the era of Bierstadt and Moran by depicting the park landscapes in an idealized manner.
After first contacting Heinrich Berann in 1972 to explore the possibility of creating park panoramas, the NPS began its formal association with him in 1987 with the publication of the North Cascades panorama. This was followed by panoramas of Yosemite (1989), Yellowstone (1991), and Denali (1994). During his 50-year career, Berann painted more than 500 panoramas. However, his NPS panoramas are noteworthy for their exceptional quality. Berann, the World’s foremost panoramic artist, was near the end of his career and at the height of his artistic prowess when he painted the world-class landscapes of these four U.S. National Parks. He retired in 1994 after painting Denali’s Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America—a fitting magnum opus to cap a brilliant career.
Panoramas and cartography
Panoramas are a unique variety of map that transcends the boundary between cartography and art. They are beautiful, enjoy widespread popularity with the public, and are excellent pictorial devices for visualizing landscapes—especially ski areas, for which the panorama has become the de facto cartographic standard. Despite this, the creation of panoramas has been eschewed by the mainstream cartographic community because of the highly specialized skills needed for their production and, to a lesser extent, concerns about their relaxed accuracy. Cartography’s lack of interest in panoramas is hardly surprising considering the discipline’s emphasis during the last several decades on the quantitative and theoretical aspects of map making. There simply has been a dearth of cartographers with the needed artistic skills and temperament to create panoramas. Thus, the business of panorama creation has been largely relegated to artists who have an affinity for landscapes, such as Berann. Ironically, the artists who create panoramas tend not to consider themselves cartographers—they prefer to be called panoramists instead—despite the fact that they graphically portray spatial relationships on the Earth’s surface. The number of active panoramists world-wide is rather small. Probably, most panoramists live in Austria, where, as of 1998, seven people painted panoramas on either a full or part-time basis (Vielkind, 1998).
Cartographers have not been entirely absent from panorama making, however. Hal Shelton, now retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, painted the elegant panorama “Colorado: Ski Country U.S.A.” and numerous ski-area maps in the 1960s. Other cartographers studied with Berann himself, including James Robb, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Michael Wood, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Wood painted the “Whisky Trail” and several other panoramas of the Scottish Highlands. In Switzerland, Arne Rohweder (Karto Atelier) and, in the U.S., Pete Powers (Terragraphics) are among the few trained cartographers who actively produce panoramas today.
The general schism between cartographers and panoramists—exceptional cartographer-panoramists notwithstanding—may be ending thanks to computers. Powerful microprocessors, abundant geo-data, and sophisticated graphical software programs now permit cartographers (and many others) to create 3D landscape visualizations that resemble panoramas. Moreover, interest in 3D mapping is growing rapidly and enjoying a renaissance, apparently because of the rapidly evolving discipline of multimedia cartography. Today’s cartographic researchers studying interactive spatial environments assume that 3D presentation is a superior method for visualizing many forms of geographic data, including landscapes. Because 3D landscapes are less abstract than their two dimensional (2D) counterparts, they are thought to be easier to visualize, especially by the growing numbers of people with limited map reading skills or the time needed to study maps.
As more multimedia cartographers rely on 3D map presentation, questions inevitably arise about optimizing the design of 3D landscapes. Careful examination of Heinrich Berann’s work answers or gives insights into some of these questions.
ABOUT BERANN
Berann’s lifestyle, ethos, and artistic training have roots in a former era. To appreciate fully Berann’s panoramas—especially amidst a digital revolution and in a new millennium—it behooves cartographers to know something about the man and his traditional qualifications for interpreting landscapes graphically.
A brief biography
Heinrich Caesar Berann was born in 1915 in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. Living in proximity to inspiring alpine landscapes exerted a lasting influence on his later development as a panoramist. All of his panoramas, even of foreign areas, tend to depict mountains in a style reminiscent of the Alps. Berann came from a family of artisans, and his grandfather was an art teacher. In spite of this, Berann’s father initially objected to his son’s artistic aspirations. This forced Berann to learn painting through self study (Troyer, 1999). From 1930 to 1933 he attended design school in Innsbruck and worked as a graphic illustrator during the economic depression of the 1930s. After World War II army service, Berann continued his art training in Vienna. He studied sculpture with Gustinus Ambrosi and anatomical art with Dr. Wirtingen. He never studied cartography, however.
From 1952 until his death in 1999 he lived and worked in Lans, Austria, a small village near Innsbruck. (Figure 1) Berann was married for 32 years to his first wife, Ludmilla, who died in 1974. In 1991, Berann married his longtime friend, Mathilde, who died unexpectedly in 1993. After this devastating blow Berann lost all desire to continue working as a commercial panoramist, and his health declined. His retirement years were devoted to painting fine art and listening to music (Schutzler, 1999). Berann is survived by daughters Angela and Elisabeth.
Berann’s commercial career started with the production of non-panoramic tourist posters of the Tyrol and Grossglockner regions of Austria, and these exhibit the art-deco influences of the period. His first panorama, produced in 1934, commemorated the opening of a mountain pass road near Grossglockner and won first prize in a competition. Winning the prize awakened Berann to the possibility of becoming a career panoramist—despite the vow he made as a youth “never to paint mountains” (Troyer, 2000). In 1937 he painted a panorama showing a tourist railroad in the Jungfrau region of Switzerland. During the next five decades Berann painted hundreds of panoramas, most depicting his native Alps, and he gradually improved his artistic style. His earliest panoramas were highly stylized compared to his later work, especially the distinctive treatment of clouds, which he perfected while on military duty in Norway and northern Finland during WWII (Troyer, 1999). Although Berann did not invent the panorama—bird’s eye views of cities and recreational areas have been common since the late eighteenth century—he has set the highest standard to emulate.
Fine art
As his career as a panoramist burgeoned, Berann also pursued his interest in fine art. His artistic expression often touches on religious themes and tends toward the baroque. Many of his pieces revel in the human form, especially female nudes, while other works are more abstract and splashed with vibrant color (see Hörmann, 1995, for examples). A deliberate symmetry exists between Berann’s passion for fine art and his pragmatic career as a panoramist, something he acknowledges by his choice of a personal emblem, which he calls “the balance” (Troyer, 1999). (Figure 1)
Balance emblem or not, Berann’s dual career was not an entirely neat and compartmentalized package. His prowess as a panoramist clearly benefitted from his passion and inborn artistic ability: similar skills are required for putting forms to paper, be they nudes or mountains. Cross fertilization occurred between his vocations. Berann’s fine art pieces became less impressionistic and more detailed later in his career because of the influence of cartography (Troyer, 2000). In 1963 Berann visited Nepal to prepare for painting the Everest panorama. There he came into contact with Hinduism, which had a profound and lasting influence on his art (Garfield, 1992), although he remained Roman Catholic in his religious beliefs. Conversely, the religious influence in Berann’s art is very evident in his distinctive depiction of the sky on panoramas. The arcing cloud formations on panoramas are a manifestation of Berann’s fascination with the “circle of life,” a theme that pervades his fine art (Troyer, 2000).
Berann’s dichotomous artistic output—commercial panoramas and high minded fine art—reflects the divisions within the modern art community as a whole. The study, “Most Wanted Paintings,” by the Russian emigré art team of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, helps put Berann’s work into a wider context. To date, they have conducted public opinion polls in 14 countries to learn about our likes and dislikes in paintings. Their polls purport to represent about one-third of the Earth’s population and all segments of society. Not surprisingly, the picture that emerges from this democratic sampling of humanity contradicts the tastes of the art establishment; abstract art, modernism, nudes, religious themes, and paintings containing messages were least popular. By contrast, there was an overwhelming cross-cultural preference for large-format, tranquil, realistic landscapes dominated by blue (Komar and Melamid, 1999). The world at large, it seems, is predisposed to like panoramas.
A rich partnership
Artists and the lands under NPS stewardship have had a long association. During the nineteenth century, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran heightened public awareness about the landscapes of the American West with paintings that portrayed nature in an exalted and romantic light. The interest generated by their art and other influences eventually led to land-protection legislation and then to formation of the NPS. A century later, the panoramas of Heinrich Berann harken back to the era of Bierstadt and Moran by depicting the park landscapes in an idealized manner.
After first contacting Heinrich Berann in 1972 to explore the possibility of creating park panoramas, the NPS began its formal association with him in 1987 with the publication of the North Cascades panorama. This was followed by panoramas of Yosemite (1989), Yellowstone (1991), and Denali (1994). During his 50-year career, Berann painted more than 500 panoramas. However, his NPS panoramas are noteworthy for their exceptional quality. Berann, the World’s foremost panoramic artist, was near the end of his career and at the height of his artistic prowess when he painted the world-class landscapes of these four U.S. National Parks. He retired in 1994 after painting Denali’s Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America—a fitting magnum opus to cap a brilliant career.
Panoramas and cartography
Panoramas are a unique variety of map that transcends the boundary between cartography and art. They are beautiful, enjoy widespread popularity with the public, and are excellent pictorial devices for visualizing landscapes—especially ski areas, for which the panorama has become the de facto cartographic standard. Despite this, the creation of panoramas has been eschewed by the mainstream cartographic community because of the highly specialized skills needed for their production and, to a lesser extent, concerns about their relaxed accuracy. Cartography’s lack of interest in panoramas is hardly surprising considering the discipline’s emphasis during the last several decades on the quantitative and theoretical aspects of map making. There simply has been a dearth of cartographers with the needed artistic skills and temperament to create panoramas. Thus, the business of panorama creation has been largely relegated to artists who have an affinity for landscapes, such as Berann. Ironically, the artists who create panoramas tend not to consider themselves cartographers—they prefer to be called panoramists instead—despite the fact that they graphically portray spatial relationships on the Earth’s surface. The number of active panoramists world-wide is rather small. Probably, most panoramists live in Austria, where, as of 1998, seven people painted panoramas on either a full or part-time basis (Vielkind, 1998).
Cartographers have not been entirely absent from panorama making, however. Hal Shelton, now retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, painted the elegant panorama “Colorado: Ski Country U.S.A.” and numerous ski-area maps in the 1960s. Other cartographers studied with Berann himself, including James Robb, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Michael Wood, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Wood painted the “Whisky Trail” and several other panoramas of the Scottish Highlands. In Switzerland, Arne Rohweder (Karto Atelier) and, in the U.S., Pete Powers (Terragraphics) are among the few trained cartographers who actively produce panoramas today.
The general schism between cartographers and panoramists—exceptional cartographer-panoramists notwithstanding—may be ending thanks to computers. Powerful microprocessors, abundant geo-data, and sophisticated graphical software programs now permit cartographers (and many others) to create 3D landscape visualizations that resemble panoramas. Moreover, interest in 3D mapping is growing rapidly and enjoying a renaissance, apparently because of the rapidly evolving discipline of multimedia cartography. Today’s cartographic researchers studying interactive spatial environments assume that 3D presentation is a superior method for visualizing many forms of geographic data, including landscapes. Because 3D landscapes are less abstract than their two dimensional (2D) counterparts, they are thought to be easier to visualize, especially by the growing numbers of people with limited map reading skills or the time needed to study maps.
As more multimedia cartographers rely on 3D map presentation, questions inevitably arise about optimizing the design of 3D landscapes. Careful examination of Heinrich Berann’s work answers or gives insights into some of these questions.
ABOUT BERANN
Berann’s lifestyle, ethos, and artistic training have roots in a former era. To appreciate fully Berann’s panoramas—especially amidst a digital revolution and in a new millennium—it behooves cartographers to know something about the man and his traditional qualifications for interpreting landscapes graphically.
A brief biography
Heinrich Caesar Berann was born in 1915 in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. Living in proximity to inspiring alpine landscapes exerted a lasting influence on his later development as a panoramist. All of his panoramas, even of foreign areas, tend to depict mountains in a style reminiscent of the Alps. Berann came from a family of artisans, and his grandfather was an art teacher. In spite of this, Berann’s father initially objected to his son’s artistic aspirations. This forced Berann to learn painting through self study (Troyer, 1999). From 1930 to 1933 he attended design school in Innsbruck and worked as a graphic illustrator during the economic depression of the 1930s. After World War II army service, Berann continued his art training in Vienna. He studied sculpture with Gustinus Ambrosi and anatomical art with Dr. Wirtingen. He never studied cartography, however.
From 1952 until his death in 1999 he lived and worked in Lans, Austria, a small village near Innsbruck. (Figure 1) Berann was married for 32 years to his first wife, Ludmilla, who died in 1974. In 1991, Berann married his longtime friend, Mathilde, who died unexpectedly in 1993. After this devastating blow Berann lost all desire to continue working as a commercial panoramist, and his health declined. His retirement years were devoted to painting fine art and listening to music (Schutzler, 1999). Berann is survived by daughters Angela and Elisabeth.
Berann’s commercial career started with the production of non-panoramic tourist posters of the Tyrol and Grossglockner regions of Austria, and these exhibit the art-deco influences of the period. His first panorama, produced in 1934, commemorated the opening of a mountain pass road near Grossglockner and won first prize in a competition. Winning the prize awakened Berann to the possibility of becoming a career panoramist—despite the vow he made as a youth “never to paint mountains” (Troyer, 2000). In 1937 he painted a panorama showing a tourist railroad in the Jungfrau region of Switzerland. During the next five decades Berann painted hundreds of panoramas, most depicting his native Alps, and he gradually improved his artistic style. His earliest panoramas were highly stylized compared to his later work, especially the distinctive treatment of clouds, which he perfected while on military duty in Norway and northern Finland during WWII (Troyer, 1999). Although Berann did not invent the panorama—bird’s eye views of cities and recreational areas have been common since the late eighteenth century—he has set the highest standard to emulate.
Fine art
As his career as a panoramist burgeoned, Berann also pursued his interest in fine art. His artistic expression often touches on religious themes and tends toward the baroque. Many of his pieces revel in the human form, especially female nudes, while other works are more abstract and splashed with vibrant color (see Hörmann, 1995, for examples). A deliberate symmetry exists between Berann’s passion for fine art and his pragmatic career as a panoramist, something he acknowledges by his choice of a personal emblem, which he calls “the balance” (Troyer, 1999). (Figure 1)
Balance emblem or not, Berann’s dual career was not an entirely neat and compartmentalized package. His prowess as a panoramist clearly benefitted from his passion and inborn artistic ability: similar skills are required for putting forms to paper, be they nudes or mountains. Cross fertilization occurred between his vocations. Berann’s fine art pieces became less impressionistic and more detailed later in his career because of the influence of cartography (Troyer, 2000). In 1963 Berann visited Nepal to prepare for painting the Everest panorama. There he came into contact with Hinduism, which had a profound and lasting influence on his art (Garfield, 1992), although he remained Roman Catholic in his religious beliefs. Conversely, the religious influence in Berann’s art is very evident in his distinctive depiction of the sky on panoramas. The arcing cloud formations on panoramas are a manifestation of Berann’s fascination with the “circle of life,” a theme that pervades his fine art (Troyer, 2000).
Berann’s dichotomous artistic output—commercial panoramas and high minded fine art—reflects the divisions within the modern art community as a whole. The study, “Most Wanted Paintings,” by the Russian emigré art team of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, helps put Berann’s work into a wider context. To date, they have conducted public opinion polls in 14 countries to learn about our likes and dislikes in paintings. Their polls purport to represent about one-third of the Earth’s population and all segments of society. Not surprisingly, the picture that emerges from this democratic sampling of humanity contradicts the tastes of the art establishment; abstract art, modernism, nudes, religious themes, and paintings containing messages were least popular. By contrast, there was an overwhelming cross-cultural preference for large-format, tranquil, realistic landscapes dominated by blue (Komar and Melamid, 1999). The world at large, it seems, is predisposed to like panoramas.
The term “panorama” was coined in 1792 by Robert Barker, who devised a series of six paintings of the London skyline, showing a 360-degree view from the roof of a tall building. The paintings were arranged on a curved surface surrounding the viewer to give the illusion of being immersed within the scene. Barker’s display was a success, and similar panoramas quickly became a popular novelty during the early-to-mid nineteenth century throughout Britain and France (Oetterman, 1998). Today, the Cyclorama at Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania, is one of the last surviving traditional panoramas in the U.S. Created in 1884, it is a 360-foot-long circular oil-on-canvas painting depicting Pickett’s Charge, the decisive moment in the Battle of Gettysburg. Barker’s original concept for the panorama is also recognizable today in cyberspace. Apple Computer’s QuickTime VR and similar applications enable users to navigate cylindrical 360-degree photographs and computer-generated 3D scenes, which are displayed on a flat computer screen instead of an encircling curved surface.
A Berann panorama, consisting of a single flat image, does not fit the original concept of the panorama developed by Barker. However, over time, the definition of a panorama has broadened.
Sometimes the multi-disciplinary heritage of panoramas creates confusion about their identity. When panoramas are viewed from very low elevations they become less map-like and more characteristic of landscape paintings. Several well known panoramas by Berann approach this nebulous threshold, including Denali and the Everest panoramas for the National Geographic Society. More problematic still, Berann’s panorama of “Reit im Winkl,” in the Bavarian Alps, clearly crosses into the realm of landscape painting. It depicts an otherwise typical panorama from a hillside vantage point that includes trees and pathways in the foreground (see Berann and Graefe, 1966, for example). Rather than exclude such low-elevation views from the panorama family, cartography should perhaps follow the example of remote sensing, which accepts images taken from all elevated platforms, whether on the Earth’s surface or in the sky.
Each Berann panorama is distinctive, but all share common characteristics. They are framed within a rectangular border, show terrain in perspective with simulated three dimensionality (2.5D), contain a horizon and sky, depict detailed surface features, and give uncommonly strong emphasis to artistic presentation and natural realism. When combined these characteristics yield a final product that is much more than the sum of its parts. Something truly magical happens. Readers feel drawn into the panorama as if they were flying high above the land. Alpine peaks project skyward, haze veils distant valleys, and storm clouds gather on the horizon, lending energy to the environment. The effect can be mesmerizing. And while a panorama often brings to the viewer intense visual pleasure, it also delivers a subtle yet more valuable gift. The preternatural topography in a panorama, artistically enhanced to minimize the disorder and distractions of nature, permits the reader to understand the land better.
