Introduction: The View as an Urban Portrait

As an urban portrait, Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice describes the city’s unique forma urbis as it celebrates Venice and its architectural monuments. The composite bird’s-eye view permits more of the city to be seen, and visual enhancements and optical alterations enliven and enrich a viewer’s observations. This introduction first moves through the volume’s plates to discuss the significance of detailed sites highlighted throughout the woodcut print. It then considers the two parts of the volume as broadly conceived, offering a succinct description of each scholarly contribution. While the first part contextualizes the View as an advanced product of the artistic, humanist, and scientific culture of the Renaissance world, the second part relates the urban systems and lived experiences of early modern Venice—its topographic idiosyncrasies; its social, political, and economic infrastructures; and its cosmopolitan residents. As the essays in this volume highlight, the portrait of Venice documents places and spaces and calls attention to its own artifice as a Renaissance masterpiece. At the same time, the View celebrates a distinctive city and its self-constructed identity.