DIORAMAS129clarifying the animal on grounds of a prescribed and formulated discursive
truth, thus fulfilling a precise and essential sociocultural role.
CLASSICAL ART: INSTITUTION AND IMPERIALISMThe predominance of vision in the epistemologies of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries simultaneously produced two different but related
exhibiting institutions: the natural history museum and the art salon.
Both institutions engaged in simulacral practices, but they differed sub-
stantially in the essence of the truths they claimed. Ultimately, they
overlapped in the intensity of a desire to own the real that was regularly
fulfilled in the fabrication of the fake. In Umberto Eco’s view, the diorama
had a superior layer of effectiveness in comparison to painting—the diorama
was more vivid and somewhat more apt at replacing reality altogether.^77
The preponderant quality that placed the diorama in an advantaged posi-
tion in the politics of hyperreality, according to Eco, is three-dimensional-
ity—the statuary, in general, has the edge.
Since 1735, the institution of the Salon at the Louvre in Paris became
pivotal in the operation of a new system of power relations between audi-
ences, art critics, art historians, the ruling classes, and artists.^78 Practices
such as collecting, previously associated only with the courtly elite, be-
gan at this time to surface in the newly configured power relations at play
in the functioning of the academy. Looking at the dioramas in natural
history museums and looking at art became central to the education and
moralization of audiences through the regular repetition of the icono-
graphical statements of classical art, the didactic language of choice of
the late classical and early modern age. The composure, clarity, stasis, and
rationalized attributes typical of Enlightenment utopianism embodied in
neoclassical art therefore functioned as a tool for the education and con-
trol of the masses.^79
By the mid-nineteenth century, technological advancements enabled the
inexpensive reproduction of classical sculptures, enhancing the visibility
and popularity of the artistic style as well as perpetuating a florid com-
merce in England.^80 Most producers and merchants of these objects were
initially based in Italy and France, where the sculptural production focused