A View of Venice, edited by Kristin Love Huffman

A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City

edited by Kristin Love Huffman

Duke University Press 2024

A 2017 exhibition at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art showcased a remarkably grand work of Renaissance art: View of Venice, a massive woodcut print sponsored by German financier Anton Kolb and produced by the artist Jacopo de’ Barbari. The exhibition was eye-opening, using innovative ways to show visitors just how much detail is folded and re-folded into the print, and it spurred a symposium of scholarly work on everything about the work and the city it portrayed. This gorgeously illustrated book from Duke University Press is the long-awaited product of that symposium. 

In A View of Venice, readers get to hold and mull over that great exhibition in the unhurried privacy of their own homes. The book has dozens and dozens of details from the View, plus a fold-out reproduction of the View itself that of course can’t match the dining-room-table size of the original but can very much allow readers to study the mind-boggling amount of detail de’ Barbari worked into his one-of-a-kind production. 

As Kristin Love Huffman points out in her Introduction to the volume, the View is both a record of Venice at the precise time Kolb and de’ Barbari were portraying it and, thanks to the singular verve of the thing, also curiously a timeless view. Lost to history is any hint of the identities of what must have been a small army of people – mapmakers, cartographers, urban architects, local boosters, city buffs – who brought de’ Barbari all the information, more information than he could have gathered himself in a lifetime of schlepping around, about the location of every street and canal and square and church and bridge, all living and breathing together in such precise relationship to each other that large sections of the thing are virtually useful as maps of the present-day city. Anton Kolb, the money man, wanted the print to be the city iusta et proprimente, “exactly as it is,” and that’s exactly what he got.

A dozen scholars contribute essays here to flesh out every aspect of the View and its world, and it makes for fascinating if slightly uneven reading. Any gaggle of scholars is virtually guaranteed to subject the reader to some of the choice academese that makes so many professional studies unreadable, and this one is no exception. In “An Artist’s Address Book,” for instance, Giorgio Tagliaferro smartly writes about the resonances in the View of the fact that De’ Barbari not only depicted Venice but lived there. “The author has presented us with a view that does not simply register his perceptual experience of Venice but also conveys a vision of his own habitat,” he writes, before the full flux of academese overtakes him: “In fact, the View is not merely a topographical transcription but an evocative representation that elicits an embodied experience.”

But even such rare effusions scarcely dent the sheer interest of all these studies, from Cosimo Monteleone examining the influence of perspective studies done by Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti to other studies of individual neighborhoods and their waterways. All these elements combine to make one of the most remarkable Venice books in decades, the kind of thorough and detailed study of a city caught in time that scholars can only dream about for most other hinge-points in history. De’ Barbari’s View cost the hefty sum of three florins, and as these scholars make clear, there were plenty of buyers for something that must have seemed borderline miraculous in an era before photography. A View of Venice: Portrait of a Renaissance City is the definitive anatomy of that miracle.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News