A Perspectival Investigation of Jacopo de’ Barbari's View of Venice

Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice, also known as Venetie MD, established a turning point in the history of urban mapping, attesting to the great skill achieved by artists and printers of the lagoon at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Scholars have long deliberated about the nature of this work: Is it a topographic city map or a work of art? Chapter 3 reconciles these two interpretations by situating de’ Barbari’s masterpiece within the scientific and artistic context of Renaissance Venice. It delineates the few but significant clues that art, mathematical, and perspective treatises, as manuscripts that circulated among artists and/or were published in the early sixteenth century, to demonstrate that the View of Venice constitutes both a scientific survey and an artistic masterpiece, linked together by a great invention of its time: the perspectiva artificialis.