The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of April 24, 2025

A grid of six woodcuts that combine to display a vast view of Venice from above. The buildings of Venice are intricately drawn out, surrounded by a body of water. At the edges, there are images of deities and many heads in clouds.

View of Venice

1500
publisher

Anton Kolb

(German, 1474–1566)
(Italian, 1440/50-before 1515)
Italy, early 16th Century
woodcut from six blocks on six sheets of paper
Overall: 132.7 x 277.5 cm (52 1/4 x 109 1/4 in.)
Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund 1949.565
Location: not on view

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.

Description

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 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 only 12 impressions of the original edition like this one, and only three in America. The goal of the print was to depict Venice as seen from above. No single vantage point would have been sufficient, so Jacopo de' Barbari and a 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 which 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. The view also highlights the seafaring trade activities of Venice, depicting Mercury, god of commerce, presiding over the city, while Neptune, god of the seas, keeps watch over the entrance to the city's Grand Canal.
  • ?-?1947
    Prince of Liechtenstein, Vienna
    1949-
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Francis, Henry. "Venetian Art and Its Field of Influence." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 38, no. 2 (February 1951): 21-27, 30-35, 38-40 Mentioned: p. 21-22; Reproduced: p. 30-31 www.jstor.org
    The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958. Mentioned and Reproduced: cat. no. 628, 629 archive.org
    The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966. Reproduced: p. 90 archive.org
    The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969. Reproduced: p. 90 archive.org
    The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978. Reproduced: p. 103 archive.org
    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
    Rosen, Mark. "A Sea of Marble: the Sculpted Topographic Views on the Façade of Santa Maria del Giglio in Venice." Artibus et Historiae: An Art Anthology 88, v. 44 (2023): 181-207. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 191, fig. 14
    Ganz, David. "Naissance de l'Eau. Les Mosaïques de Saint-Marc et L'Écosystème de la Lagune Vénitienne." Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 55 (June 2024): 123-137. Reproduced: p. 126; Mentioned: p. 126-127, fig. 4
  • 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).
    Views of Venice. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (March 11-April 26, 1953).
    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=Anton Kolb, Jacopo de' Barbari|year=1500|access-date=24 April 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1949.565