Diorama
/ˌdaɪəˈrɑːmə/noun
A three-dimensional scene with modelled figures set against a painted background, or the boxed miniature version of the same.
The Greek roots
Literally: “seeing through”
The story of the word
Louis Daguerre, later of the photographic process, opened his Diorama in Paris in 1822 with Charles Bouton. It was not a model at all but huge translucent paintings lit from front and back, so that shifting the light turned day into night or set a chapel on fire while the audience sat in a rotating auditorium. The name says through-view because the light came through the canvas. Museum habit reduced the word to the little glass-fronted case of stuffed animals.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1822
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Her class built a diorama of a rock pool out of a shoebox.
The museum's diorama of the ice age has not been touched since 1958.