An extraordinary feat between art and cartography: the map of Venice by Jacopo de' Barbari

On display in Vicenza is one of the most famous maps ever made in history, the extraordinary perspective view of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari (Venice, 1460/1470 - 1516), the protagonist from October 22, 2021 to April 18, 2022 of the exhibition Venice, what a feat! The Great Perspective View by Jacopo de’ Barbari, scheduled at Intesa Sanpaolo’s Gallerie d’Italia in Palazzo Leoni Montanari. The exhibition dossier, which aims to emphasize the extraordinary and unique nature of the artist’s cultural enterprise as a synthesis of the Venetian Renaissance, is organized in collaboration with the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice and is part of the program of the 1600th anniversary celebrations of Venice.

The exhibition project, curated by historian Angela Munari and historical geographer Massimo Rossi, compares, for the first time, two “states” (i.e., versions) of Venice MD, that is, two versions of the great woodcut of the view of Venice, considered one of the greatest masterpieces of urban cartography of all time because of its considerable size, richness of detail, and quality of drawing and execution. The very title of the exhibition, Venice, what a feat!, is already intended in its premises to restore to the public the image of the city as an extraordinary human and cultural work, in its capacity as urbs and civitas. The aim of the exhibition is to offer an overall picture of the history of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s veduta prospettica Venetie MD, with particular regard to the first and third states of the work. Through the documents, the visitor will have the opportunity to walk through the city, starting from Rialto and the Marciana area, and then traversing the entire urban core, dwelling on some of the details related to the life and activities of one of the major cities of the 16th century. Special attention is paid to details, allowing the city’s unified and multifaceted reality to emerge paradoxically. The bird’s-eye view is a continuous glide over cues of everyday life. It is therefore, about inviting the visitor to enter an “ordinary” Venetian day in the 1500s, participating not as a spectator but as a protagonist in the ferment of the city to grasp its complexity. The exhibition also offers insights and cultural-historical anchors on the two exemplars of de’ Barbari’s work and other documents on display to support the evolution of cartographic production, to understand the before and after de’ Barbari.

Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view is a woodcut printed on six sheets from six pearwood matrices and measures approximately 134.5 x 282 centimeters. The matrices are preserved at the Museo Correr in Venice. The work, commissioned by Anton Kolb, required 3 years of work by a team of cartographers and engravers. The map amazes but also stimulates curiosity about the purpose for which such a work served in the year 1500: the view in fact, in addition to being a masterpiece of art and cartography of the Renaissance, turns out to be a unique and unrepeatable visual and historical document for urban planning and building knowledge of the city in a specific year, 1500, thus rising to an emblematic image of Venice> in the mythography of the city itself at the height of one of the most shining moments of its civilization, in the midst of the transition from a mercantile to a land-based economy. The veduta also marks a milestone in the history of descriptive geometry, a momentous step toward a new translation of urban space.

Considered from the outset a masterpiece of xylographic engraving, the city is outlined and described so minutely, even by means of place names, and is reproduced so faithfully that it is still considered an essential historical source today. The typical fish-shaped outline of the historic center can be distinguished there, the islands, grounds, gardens, fields and campielli, calli, canals, bridges, buildings, fondaci, stores, even those on the water, hospitali, churches and bell towers, convents, oratories, scolette, squeri, and monuments are drawn verisimilarly. There are numerous urban elements that have disappeared or completely changed today, for example, in the center of the depiction the then wooden Rialto Bridge and St. Mark’s Square. Buildings are rendered with rich detail: towers, battlements, chimneys, loggias and altane (liagò and diagò), cavanas, walls, palisades, wells, cisterns, and sottoportici. People in the act of working, boating, fishermen making the city come alive. Specific figurative details on the theme to navigation are also recognizable: ships, boats and burchi, or transport boats. In addition to the city and lagoon landscape, the mainland with the towers of Marghera and Mestre is also described, albeit briefly, as well as the beginning of the piedmont area, particularly to the north and Serravalle, a crossing point for merchants from northern Europe. The view is then enriched by perimeter figurative elements: at the top Mercury with a caduceus supported by a cloud bearing the inscription “MERCVRIVS PRECETERIS HVIC FAVSTE EMPORIIS ILLVSTRO”; below it the inscription “VENETIE” and the year mark “MD.” Eight heads, intent on blowing, personify the different winds. Towering over the basin of St. Mark’s is an imposing Neptune, characterized by the trident, riding a dolphin. These are also details that allowed the attribution of the view to Jacopo de’ Barbari, as they are stylistically close to his graphic production: the caduceus is present in numerous engravings as Jacopo de’ Barbari’s signature, so much so that the artist is remembered as the “Master of the Caduceus.”

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More than twenty specimens have survived of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view, documenting at least three different main states (versions) of the woodcut, recognizable in particular by the different configuration of the bell tower of San Marco. On display are a first state belonging to the Fondazione Querini Stampalia and a third state from the Intesa Sanpaolo collection, consisting of six sheets and twelve smaller sheets, respectively. In the first state, dated October 1500 (Mazzariol-Pignatti 1963, Schulz 1990, Romanelli 1999), the top of the campanile is formed by a lowered roof covering a terrace-loggia; this appearance is what the campanile must have looked like after lightning struck and severely damaged it in August 1489. The second state, published around 1514, shows the bell tower after the reconstruction of the top was carried out, a reconstruction that was completed in 1514; the spire has the familiar pyramidal shape, at the apex of which (located, however, in the adjacent sheet) the statue of the angel is visible.

The third state, ascribed to the second half of the 16th century by Schulz, returns the steeple to the appearance it had before the 1514 reconstruction. This was due to the fact that updating the view was difficult due to the extensive and important urban and architectural changes that had taken place in the meantime; therefore, an attempt was made to restore the work to its original state, also reinserting the tile with the inscription “VENETIE MD” that had been removed when the second state was published. However, the improper restitutio was conducted without the necessary accuracy, so much so that the figure of the angel located at the top of the bell tower remained in the upper adjacent sheet. This third edition of the work was conducted with the explicit intent to “historicize” the image of the city, to bring it back to the ideal model that it represented, and at the same time established, at the beginning of the century. Of the third state of the view a tangled web is woven over the centuries, marked by different print runs, from the 16th to the 19th, always from the original woods. In particular, in 1838, the Municipality of Venice decided to restore the matrixes of the veduta, for the printing of some copies to be donated to Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria, who was visiting the city. It appears that the specimen on display belongs to one of these.

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An extraordinary feat between art and cartography: the map of Venice by Jacopo de' Barbari

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