Few images, if any, are as iconic—even synecdochic—of life, culture, and politics in Renaissance Venice than Jacopo de’ Barbari’s monumental View of Venice. The Italian artist’s six-sheet woodblock print showcasing a bird’s-eye-view of the city and its lagoon was produced circa 1497–1500 with the support of the German publisher Anton Kolb. It stood as the largest print produced in Europe at the time (1.35 × 2.75 meters) whose magnitude and inventiveness were recognized by the Venetian government’s granting to Kolb of one of the earliest known copyright permissions for a printed image. Marveled by commentators since its inception for its at-once synoptic, multifocal aerial veduta of the city as well as the minutely detailed portrayal of the urban landscape, Barbari’s map emerged as the topic of serious scholarly investigation roughly one hundred years ago, most notably in Alvise Zorzi’s Venezia scomparsa (1922), and has generated an enormous literature since. Kristin Love Huffman’s lengthy and elegant new edited volume of essays, A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City, nevertheless presents a trove of fresh insights on Barbari and his most famous print. It not only stands as the most comprehensive book to date on this topic but also promises to serve as the definitive text on the subject.

The genesis of Huffman’s volume lies in two projects she curated: the international collaborative digital humanities enterprise Visualizing Venice and the 2017 exhibition A Portrait of Venice: Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of 1500. An integral theme in those projects and one Huffman emphasizes in her text is how interpretive richness and novelty are achieved when innovative methodologies are brought to bear on traditional media. Huffman enlists a distinguished set of contributors from an array of fields to fulfill this multidisciplinary interrogation involving the production, function, and reception of Barbari’s woodblock print. Beyond leading specialists on Venetian Renaissance art and architecture, varied essays from musicology, civil engineering, political economy, gender studies, urban studies, media studies, and environmental history illuminate the interrelated dimensions of Venetian life underpinning the woodcut’s imagery.

In general, the essays proceed from the long-held theoretical assumption that the print operates not as objective cartography, but instead as a highly mediated artwork promoting Venetian commercial, political, and maritime superiority—in sum, a manifesto of the “myth of Venice.” As Huffman states, the View thus animates “its tension between perceived realism and idealization” (2). Optically, many views are altered or combined to produce an image that more legibly showcases conspicuous landmarks throughout the city, such as the Piazza San Marco, Arsenale, and Mercerie, along with prominent palazzi, giardini, and campi. The editor also proposes to consider anew and clarify two long-standing conundrums about the iconic print, “the exact ‘how’ and ‘why’ it was made” (3).

This expansive collection of twenty-three somewhat terse essays, each roughly ten pages long, is divided into two main sections, the first titled “The View as a Printed Cartographic and Artistic Visualization,” and the second, “The View as a Reflection of Venice and Venetian Life.” The contributions are bookended by an introductory essay by Huffman and an eloquent epilogue by Tracy E. Cooper. Within the first part, the authors mine the mathematical, commercial, cartographic, and perspectival attributes of Barbari’s View to evince how acumen in these arenas were particularly prized in Venetian culture at this time. While impossible to dutifully summarize each essay and its carefully poised arguments, particularly noteworthy amongst these contributions in part one is Valeria Cafà’s fascinating study examining the wood blocks (matrices) used to print the View, material artifacts rarely discussed in relation to the print. Another fresh perspective is Giorgio Tagliaferro’s theorization of the View as a semi-biographical portrait of Barbari and his artistic network. Little remains known hitherto about Barbari’s activities in Venice, although Rangsook Yoon’s essay in this section outlines what is certain. Therefore, Tagliaferro’s examination of vedute imagery as interpersonal markers reaffirms speculation that Barbari was of Venetian birth, a fact the map evidently then signposts. 

Essays in part two embark on the well-trodden path interrogating the View’s visual density alongside the “myth of Venice,” that is, the city and its inhabitants’ miraculous nature that allowed them to remain unconquered for over one thousand years. Several studies in this section compellingly refocus upon traditionally marginalized yet poignant features of the printed map, as Patricia Fortini Brown does with her marvelously conceived investigation of the over two hundred fifty Venetian wellheads dotting Barbari’s archipelago. This eco-critical turn rediscovering Venetians’ strategic manipulation of their aqueous environment, initially propelled by Élisabeth Crouzet-Pavan’s, Venise triomphante: les horizons d’un mythe (Albin Michel, 1999) and Karl Appuhn’s A Forest on the Sea. Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), is a theme taken up as well in the present volume by Richard Goy.

A propitious feature of A View of Venice is its handsome package and modest price tag which will undoubtedly encourage a wide readership and accessibility amongst anyone intrigued by early modern Venice. In addition to the full-color illustrations in each essay and handful of selected details from Barbari’s woodblock print, a high-resolution reproduction of it is included as a foldout plate—thus skirting the dilemma of presenting the panoramic map across a two-page spread and breaching the visual unity of its design. The aforementioned Visualizing Venice project serves as a digital companion to the textual studies in Huffman’s volume and is intended to enable a deep dive into the primary archival materials at hand.  

Several infelicities evident in the text, however, bear mention. The chief shortcoming falls upon Huffman’s own introductory essay which offers surprisingly sparse review of the copious literature on Barbari and his famous woodcut. No discussion is present here of the historiography of the print, previous publications, or the state of the field and literature on the topic. Huffman’s Introduction inserts merely two footnotes: one a laundry list—albeit useful—of publications on Barbari’s View, the other a technical explanation on the Venetian calendar. While her fluent prose demonstrates clear knowledge of primary and secondary sources, this lack of scholarly apparatus acknowledging the shoulders her work stands on is scant. This tendency persists in her other essay, “The View and Its Relevance Today: Venice Then and Now,” included as Appendix 1, where a sole footnote appears.  

Much more useful in this regard is Cooper’s literature review contained in her epilogue which outlines how the assembled authors’ contributions reshape our understanding of Barbari’s print in relation to previous studies and charts a trajectory for future investigations. Given its indispensability, one wishes therefore that Cooper’s essay had been conceived instead as a prologue, rather than a post-hoc assessment of the preceding text. Moreover, several curious editorial decisions were made in Appendices 2 and 3, which, regrettably, merely reproduce or transcribe—rather than translate—archival documents pertaining to Kolb.

Additionally, one wonders whether, in the age of macrophotography and ultra high-resolution digital scans, such as those reproduced of the View in Huffman’s text, such contemporary viewing procedures affording limitless legibility, infinite detail, and granular observation misconstrue—or even pervert—the visual consumption of the woodcut early modern audiences experienced. Surely, only a privileged minority inspected this notoriously expensive artwork at close range with the degree of scrutiny enabled by current imaging tools—and never in the manner of “microexamination” (309), as Cooper terms it, possible at present through modern optical interventions. Magnifying technologies existed and were readily available in sixteenth-century Europe, but not to the maximal degree Huffman touts as a key 21st-century hermeneutic to recovering the woodcut’s true meaning. A fascinating potential study, though missing from his volume, would be to examine how understanding and interpolation of the cartographic view evolved in relation to parallel optical technologies.

Despite these quibbles, Huffman and the contributors achieve a volume likely to become the standard reference text for Barbari’s print and are to be applauded for the energy they bring to such an oft-reproduced image. One key revelation in this vein is Karen-edis Barzman’s essay on the Venetian state’s overriding “mapping impulse” (to borrow a phrase from Svetlana Alpers) in the Quattrocento leading up to the conception of Barbari’s project. Barzman’s study goes a long way in explaining the primary motivations and audiences for the print, adducing through archival discoveries how the Serenissima was long-intent upon capturing Venetian geographical data through an analog proto-GIS system.

It is genuinely revealing how the volume critically plumbs overlooked yet consequential details of the print, mining meaning not only from details once construed as frivolous minutiae, such as belltowers (Jonathan Glixon), marginalia (Anna Christine Swartwood House), vessels (Monique O’Connell), gardens (Ludovica Galeazzo), canals and bridges (Julia A. DeLancey) but also further multitudinous features of the urban fabric virtually invisible heretofore in scholarship on the print. Huffman duly emphasizes how the critical approaches of the contributors effectively mirror in spirit the cutting-edge enterprise of Kolb and Barbari that wielded broad networks of knowledge alongside the new tool of the printing press in order to reconceive how the city envisioned itself and its place in the world.