The complete silhouette illustration by the German Symbolist master Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, assembled as one ultra-wide image. “Per Aspera Ad Astra” (“Through Hardship to the Stars”) is a complex, striking and joyful work defying easy explanation. Diefenbach himself was an untethered, original thinker–Theosophist, Symbolist, Naturist, Himself-ist–perhaps best summed up in the paradox that virtue pushed past reason becomes vice. The silhouette procession of children, animals and much more was originally a 68 meter long frieze, designed in 1875 and executed by Diefenbach’s protegé Hugo Höppener (“Fidus”) while Diefenbach was in a sanitarium. It was adapted into a book of 34 illustrations by 1893, scans of which can be found on the Commons along with more of Diefenbach’s work.
The images for download here are from these scans, matched and straightened nondestructively with hand cleanup, into a 2.9GB greyscale 172,058 x 2,473 px Large Document Format file.
The scrolling YouTube video (above) is probably the easiest viewing method right now. Be sure to set the quality to full 1080p60 and go fullscreen.
The TIFF is 110MB, full sized (172058 x 2473 px) and may be compatible with more software. I’d recommend downloading the zip file, as trying to render the TIFF might crash your browser.
The PNG is full sized and only 67MB, but may be harder to decompress. Same browser warnings.
The JPEG is 6MB, scaled down to 64,000 x 920 px (the max for the file format).
Information in English is hard to find. “Per Aspera Ad Astra” sometimes seems to be confused with “Kindermusik” (“Children’s Music”) a different series sharing themes and at least one figure. Diefenbach spent many of his later years on Capri, where there is a museum dedicated to his surviving works. (Too few, sadly.) His reputation improved by the passing century, the original 68 meter frieze of “Per Aspera Ad Astra” is now on display in the town of his birth at the City Museum Hadamar.
Please note that this assembled version should not be considered a “transformative work” for purposes of copyright, so the image files here are in the public domain. I don’t currently have the storage and bandwidth on SpaceToast.net to host the original file, but if you’d like to work with it please contact me through the About page and we’ll figure out a way to get it to you.