Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?

ANNETTE ON THE ROAD A 19th century example of virtual reality on a historical theme has a bizarre history of its own, filled with escapes from reality

It’s the American Civil War! And look, there’s Tara! Kidding. The big house in Gone With the Wind was fiction, like Gone With the Wind itself . . and like this painting. Huge though it is, this scene is part of a much, much larger work of commercial art, designed to please its audience. Notice that while there are corpses, they are all intact: No decap…