National Theatre

This guide to Panama City's National Theatre follows Roberto Lewis, a Panamanian painter working in a Paris studio in 1905, tasked with painting a dome ceiling for a building he had never stood inside. It traces the technique he borrowed from an old master, marouflage, and the puzzle of cutting his allegory of the Birth of the Republic into curved sections that could bend to fit a dome across the Atlantic. It follows the canvases' journey by steamship to Colon, where Lewis waited to finish the job himself.