1785
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Vue du Chateau et d'une Partie de la Ville de Versailles is a 1785 by Balthasar Friedrich Leizelt, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a hand-colored print of Versailles: the palace on the left, gardens stretching out, and the town in the distance. This wasn’t just a postcard. It was made to slide into a wooden box with a lens and mirror—like an 18th-century VR headset. When you looked through it, the flat print turned into a 3D scene. People gathered in parlors to marvel at these “optical views” the way we binge Netflix today. If you like the idea of art as gadget, look up *vue d’optique*.
This perspective view (often called a vue d’optique ,or optical view) is an example of a popular art and entertainment format during the second half of the 1700s in Europe. The hand-colored etching and engraving was made to be viewed with a special viewing device consisting of a convex lens and a mirror, so that scene appeared to be a three-dimensional image. Here, the viewer can enjoy a perspective view of the French Palace of Versailles. Such views—which were only made for a short time and largely disappeared with the advent of photography—appealed to both elite audiences, who viewed…
The text at the top of this print is printed in reverse so that it would be legible when looking through a special viewing device consisting of a convex lens and a mirror.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Balthasar Friedrich Leizelt was a German artist and copperplate engraver working from Augsburg.
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