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View of Venice

Jacopo de' Barbari

1500

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Renaissance Renaissance Cityscape

Dominant colour

View of Venice is a 1500 by Jacopo de' Barbari, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Jacopo de' Barbari
When & what style?: 1500 · Renaissance
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a huge, bird’s-eye map of Venice—canals, palaces, even tiny boats—all carved into six big wood blocks and printed in brown ink. This is the first printed city view that feels like a real place, not a sketch. It took years to carve, and the blocks were so big printers had to press them by hand. At the time, most woodcuts were small and simple; this one changed what prints could do. Look up the technique of woodcut next.

The story of this work

Overview

By the end of the 1400s, Venice had emerged as the major printing center in Europe, where books were printed in various languages to be shipped around the world. The city also became the great emporium for prints, and the woodcut developed beyond its humble origins as a popular art for devotional imagery, playing cards, and later for book illustration. View of Venice epitomizes this new ambitious scope for the woodcut, and is a landmark in the history of printmaking. This monumental print can be compared in scale only to a mural decoration and presumably served as a less expensive surrogate…

Did you know?

Before the conveniences of airplanes, photography, or even a hot air balloon this monumental bird's-eye view map of Venice made in 1500 documents every building, canal, alleyway, and square in the city.

Read the full account in the museum source.