This article approaches nineteenth-century visual culture through two artifacts: 1) the panorama, as a practice of modern domestication of nature and bodies; and 2) a novel built with paper and scissors and illustrated with clippings from European press by Soledad Acosta de Samper around 1880. Both are produced at a time when the visual image is particularly relevant and a part of a cultural strategy that, according to Paulette Silva, privileges collection, classification, and exhibition. This article starts with a theoretical approach to panorama, and then examines the way in which it is deployed as a technology of the gaze in Una holandesa en América, an illustrated novel in which the panorama is challenged in its imperial component and then reaffirmed within the creole project of nation building.