Getty Museum

Entrée de l'eglise du St. Sépulcre.

Date

about 1818

Medium

Lithograph

Culture

French

Department

Prints

Institution

Getty Museum

> Around 1815, when Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was completing his art studies, he was introduced to the art of lithography, a relatively new printing process invented in 1796 by Alois Sennefelder. It, no doubt, commanded Daguerre's attention because of the fidelity with which a crayon or ink sketch could be duplicated on paper. While he failed to distinguish himself as a lithographer, prints like *The Entrance to the Church of St.-Sépulcre* do display a remarkable interest in geometry and perspective, as well as in the nuances of how light falls on buildings. Light and geometry would become important to photography two decades later. > > With lithography one could make and distribute many copies of a drawing relatively inexpensively to a much wider audience. These economic attributes would have been of great interest to Daguerre, who must have grown keenly aware of the importance of developing a group of followers when he opened his diorama in Paris in 1822. Embraced as a new form of entertainment, the diorama created impressive visual illusions in a theatre-like space using life-sized paintings and dramatic lighting effects but no actors. Without walking a step, the audience moved between multiple displays that took them from day to night in a church, for example, or from moments before the eruption of a volcano to the fiery lava flows that came after through the use of a mechanical rotational system. Adapted from Weston Naef, *The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection* (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 6. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.

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