The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of April 26, 2024

View of Venice

View of Venice

1500
(Italian, 1440/50-before 1515)
Italy, early 16th Century
woodcut from six blocks on six sheets of paper
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1949.565.1
Catalogue raisonné: Kristeller 33a
Location: not on view

Description

By the end of the 15th century, 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 simple pious imagery, playing cards, and later for book illustration. View of Venice epitomizes this new ambitious scope for the woodcut. This monumental print can be compared in scale only to a mural decoration and presumably served as a less expensive surrogate for paintings. The six sheets that make up the design would have been pasted either onto a canvas or the wall itself, resulting in the survival of few fine impressions like this one. The goal of the print was to depict Venice as seen from above. No single vantage point would have been sufficient, so a large team of surveyors climbed various towers and tall buildings to record small sections of the city. These individual views were combined to form the map that follows a single, though inconsistent, system of perspective. Unprecedented for its exactness of detail and difficulty of execution, View of Venice represents the first attempt to render the image of a city according to the laws of geometry.
  • Prince Liechtenstein
  • Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014. Mentioned and reproduced: P. 349
  • Grand Scale: Oversize and Composite Prints from the Age of Titian and Dürer. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (January 31-April 26, 2009).
    Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting. National Gallery of Art, Landover, MD (organizer) (June 18-September 17, 2006).
    Against the Grain: Woodcuts from the Collection. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 17-November 9, 2003).
    35th Anniversary Exhibition. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 20-September 30, 1951).
  • {{cite web|title=View of Venice|url=false|author=Jacopo de' Barbari|year=1500|access-date=26 April 2024|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1949.565.1