Venice, Print and the Early Modern Icon, Chorographic Impressions: Early Modern Venice through Print

Bronwen Wilson*

1

'Without any doubt, [Venice] can be called the theatre of the world.'[1] So claims the Venetian guide to the visitor in Francesco Sansovino’s dialogue, Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia, published in Venice in 1561. The city as a theatre was an early modern topos; atlases and books of city maps, for instance, contained the cosmos, and viewers could leaf through pages depicting the particulars of a place as if changing scenes. In Venice, however, the concept resonated with widespread perceptions of the city as a stage teeming with foreigners; as Giulio Ballino explained to readers of his book of city maps, Venice was 'inhabited by an infinite multitude of people who come together for commerce from various nations, in fact from all the world. They use all languages and are dressed in different ways.'[2] At the end of the fifteenth century, Venice was the capital of a vast empire, a mercantile centre, and a departure point for travellers to the East. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, the city’s dominant trading position was being usurped as the centre of European economic activity was shifting toward markets outside the Mediterranean. In spite of waning power on the international political stage — indeed, as if responding to this — printmakers drew attention to the singularity of the city’s topography and its inhabitants. By projecting diverse ideas about the city into woodcuts and engravings, Venice and Venetian social types were transmuted into urban icons.

2

Figure 1With more than 450 printers, publishers and booksellers in the area, printmakers looked beyond the local market to an international one.[3] For example, Giacomo Franco capitalized on the presence of foreigners for the coronation of the dogaressa in 1597; the procession was a rare ceremony, not seen since 1557, and the spectacle offered the opportunity to sell engravings.[4] In one of these prints, Franco has framed a bird’s-eye view with a cartouche in which figures of the doge, the elected figurehead of the republic and his consort appear together. Juxtaposed with the stunning cityscape in the print, the doge and dogaressa contribute to an ideal image of Venice in which domestic, political and geographic order overlap.[5]

3

By the end of the century, when this print was made, the bird’s-eye view with its legend to the city’s districts had become emblematic of the republic. So too had its representatives: not only the doge and dogaressa, but also the senator, rettore (governor), courtesan and virgin. These were the leading actors in a larger cast who had become icons of the city. Recognizable because of their distinctive costumes, these social types expressed a range of ideas associated with the city. Scholars have drawn attention to the costumed figures, often shown in couples, which sometimes frame geographical maps in the seventeenth century.[6] But it is the earlier history of these chorographic details that is of concern here. Since borders between countries were subject to change in the sixteenth century, these were rarely demarcated in printed maps.[7] Instead it was cities that provided a stable point of reference. Costume books followed this lead, emulating atlases in scope, but focusing on civic or regional costumes. Print fuelled interest in cities by making comparisons between them easy, a practice encouraged by the publication of series of maps and costumes.[8] These were pan-European phenomena and the focus on Venice therefore brings forward conventions that are characteristic of the imagery in general. The lagoon city also stands out from other centres; the iconic status of the imagery discussed here was magnified by the city’s singularity: its stunning cityscape and pivotal geographical location, its constitution and its reputation for liberty and licentiousness.

4

The efficacy of prints and the changes I ascribe to them depend on their dynamic relation with social experience, and this is important for the larger study from which this essay comes.[9] Of particular interest here, however, are structural and representational considerations: how the translation of concepts into visual images, the materiality of print and repetition intersected. The novelty of the technology and its conventions — the production of multiples, the combination of prints into series, an international market, the graphic nature of the medium, and emphasis on form — are key elements in the changes described below. Moreover, the medium — typically reduced in scale and portable — contributed to the process of condensing a range of meanings into images, a process that underpins iconicity as described here. Through repetition — both the practice of copying models and widespread circulation in woodcuts and engravings — a range of ideas could be distilled into a visual image.

5

An icon, traditionally a portrait, carries, or contains, the presence of the sitter through the icon’s likeness to an original (the face of Christ in Veronica’s veil, for example, a miracle-working image, or an image that appears miraculously). In his important study of icons, Hans Belting concludes by noting that in the sixteenth century the function of the image changes: 'The new presence of the work succeeds the former presence of the sacred in the work…[Instead of the sacred,] it is the presence of an idea that is made visible in the work: the idea of art, as the artist had it in mind.'[10] In this new early modern context, the subject matter of a work was becoming subordinated to how it was represented, to the concept and style of the artist. One corollary of this change, as the imagery considered here suggests, was a new concept of the icon; instead of a miracle working image, or copy of a holy image, the icon became a sign. The development of print is key here, since the new media of woodcuts and engraving were at the heart of this transformation. And yet resemblance — the likeness of the icon to the original — did not disappear with what Belting describes as the modern era of art, or Michel Foucault defines as the classical age of representation. Instead, as the bird’s-eye view and costume figures suggest, resemblance remains important to the icon’s semiotic efficacy.

6

Located at the crossroads between East and West, Venice was a destination for foreign merchants and pilgrims like Canon Pietro Casola, who wrote of his impressions when embarking on a pilgrimage in 1494. For Casola the city appeared both
Figure 2'well ordered and arranged' but also impossible to perceive as a whole: 'I cannot give the dimensions of this city, for it appears to me not one city alone but several cities placed together.'[11] Casola’s reflections convey the visitor’s conflicting experiences of the cityscape: on the one side, the numerous islands and seemingly incomprehensible network of canals, alleys and bridges experienced by the pedestrian, and, on the other side, the vista of the whole seen from the city’s bell towers. These fundamentally different ways of perceiving Venice were brought together in the single remarkably coherent image designed by de’Barbari.

7

With its date boldly stamped at the top of the print—'At Venice 1500'—the famous woodcut declares its own historical importance, as if predicting its archetypal status among printed views of Venice, and even city views in general.[12] In his appeal to the Venetian Senate to waive export duties, the publisher Anton Kolb extolled the 'new art of printing', proposing that his immense woodcut would propagate the 'fame of this most excellent city.' Covering nearly four square meters, the print was a representational triumph, both for its size and its meticulous detail.[13] The viewer is projected to a vantage-point previously inconceivable.

8

At close range, it is the spectacular detail of the urban topography that comes into focus
Figure 3. As one moves toward the surface of the print, the viewpoint shifts toward the south, and the cityscape reveals itself. With its striking naturalism, contemporaries could have recognized each house and every contrada, the parish or district, which identified every resident in the city.[14] The viewer’s physical movement across the vast surface of the print, glancing from place to place, corresponds with the temporality and particulars of lived experiences of the city through which identity is constituted by the accretions of perceptions absorbed through looking. Yet, the replication of elements such as windows throughout the city constructs an image of uniformity. Of course there are strategic exclusions and emphases, such as the orientation and axis established by the figures of Mercury and Neptune that direct the viewer to the political and commercial centres at San Marco and Rialto. Nevertheless, the claim is one of homogeneity. The eye-witness experience of the city resembles republican space as understood by contemporaries in which the mobile spectator moves from place to place, free from the surveillance of the prince.

9

The woodcut is overlaid with inscriptions and toponyms that play with the viewer’s perception of surface and depth. For example, the Ducal Palace both resembles the real government building and it is identified by the letters
Figure 3PA LA CI VI. Carved into the woodblock, the name draws attention to the function of the map as a text.[15] The use of toponyms would have taught viewers how to interpret the woodcut, to recognize the relation between the name of a parish and its appearance, between signifier and signified, between naming and seeing. The combination of image and text also mobilizes the observer’s movement across the surface of the picture plane.

10

Moving away from the surface,
Figure 2by contrast, the evidentiary quality of the cityscape dissolves. It is the city as a whole and the classical frame, with its heroic gods, that comes into focus, arresting the viewer’s gaze. The vast lands of the Terraferma—the Venetian mainland seen at the top—have been compressed to a thin band at the horizon, the whole protected by the fortress of Alps that isolates the historical centre in the foreground. Seen from this Olympian point of view—almost perpendicular to the city—the topography appears in plan, the city unpopulated, its geographic contours fixed in time. The name and date, carved into the pear woodblock like an epitaph, point to the picture’s status as a sign.

11

This synoptic structure of the bird’s-eye view would have encouraged viewers to move between the general and particular, the 'harmonious totality' that Louis Marin identifies with utopic description.[16] The point of utopia, for Marin, is its existence as representation, as a fiction that rationalizes rather than reconciles historical contradictions.[17] And indeed the two systems that operate in the de’Barbari view can never be synthesized; it is impossible to perceive the topographical particulars and the contours of the city at the same time. There are social reasons why this is important, but for the purpose of this essay, the woodcut, with its combination of local detail and unified whole, emblematizes the relation between the individual resident and the collective, the ideological key to the city’s political and social geography.

12

Sources available to de’Barbari include world maps that were often illustrated with anthropomorphic winds. For example, twelve human faces, their cheeks inflated, blow toward the continents of the world in a page from the first Italian edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia,
Figure 4initially published by Nicolo Todescho in Florence around 1480. Another type appears in the woodcut of the cosmos printed in Hartman Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle (Weltchronik 1493), a book that Kolb was selling in Venice before 1499.[18] A patch of land identified as terra is surrounded by concentric circles illustrating the planets, with God enthroned at the top. Four life-like wind gods fill the corners of the page. This cosmological model was typical of medieval mappaemundi in which Jerusalem was situated at the centre of the universe to signify the pilgrim's journey to the Holy Land.[19]

13

Figure 2In the Kolb and de’Barbari woodcut, the classical frame has subsumed the theological one: the islands of Venice have been substituted for earth, and the diagram of the planets reconfigured as a wind rose. Both the cartographic and the cosmological model have been translated into an image of Venice as a world unto itself, the centre of the universe toward which the winds blow. The landscape emerges from the water, as if conjured from the sea by the eight wind gods that circle the islands, as if a priori to the artist’s work. Instead of the artist transcribing the city, Venice appears from the sea miraculously as if fully formed, like Venus—with whom the city is compared—exposing herself.[20]

14

The extraordinary verisimilitude of
Figure 5 the woodcut and the absence of a document identifying de’Barbari have contributed to questions about the extent of his involvement in the
Figure 6project. Nevertheless, his self-reflective engagement with the medium and the use of naturalism is evident in the work in several ways, and one is significant for understanding the iconic function of the map. Perhaps, as has been suggested on the basis of a posthumous portrait of de’Barbari, the face of the Greek wind god on the upper right is a self-portrait.[21] More certainly, the naturalistic physiognomy functions as an analogue for the mimetic accuracy of the cityscape and the mirror image of the printmaker’s work. Furthermore, with this face in the image de’Barbari evokes Ptolemy, whose parallel between geography and the portraitist became a commonplace in the Renaissance. For Ptolemy, the geography of the world was analogous with the human face, and its cities, comparable with facial features: 'The aim of the chorographer is to represent only one part, as if one were to imitate or to paint only one ear, or an eye. But the aim of the geographer is to consider the universal whole in the guise of those who describe or paint the entire head.'[22] Remarkably, de’Barbari has combined both visual metaphors in the same bird’s-eye view as we have seen: the geographer who delineates the entire human face, and the chorographer’s devotion to the eye or the nose seen in the windows and alleys. In this synoptic image, then, Venice was envisioned as both a face and a close-up.

15

The map brings together a range of visual ideas to produce an idealized portrait of the city floating in the lagoon that protects its liberty and sustains its prestige as a trading emporium. This image became the archetype for subsequent maps of Venice, and yet the sheer audacity of the representation — artistically and technically — precluded direct emulation in scale or detail.[23] The immense size of the original woodcut, whose six large sheets would have been displayed together on a wall, was dramatically reduced in the maps that followed, and details of the topography were selectively expunged. Engraving provided the means for this transformation, thereby eclipsing the use of woodblocks for maps.[24] Condensed into ever smaller formats, city views had become portable and they could be bound together in series and incorporated into books.

16

Paolo Forlani’s map marks a critical point of change, when the temporal embodied experience of looking at the city is cleaved apart from the spatial representation. Forlani calls attention to the convenience of the small form and fine detail enabled by copper engraving in his map of the city from 1566; indeed, in the text he invites comparisons with the print’s predecessors, a reference to the de’Barbari map. The two metal plates could be printed on a single large sheet, a dramatic reduction from the six (and sometimes twelve) sheets required for the six blocks of de'Barbari's woodcut.[25] The impressive legend—with hundreds of references—was also intended to facilitate the viewer's vicarious experience, a feature explained the following year by Leandro Alberti on the verso of his map of Venice in his Isolario:

we have supplied in part with this legend, a letter or number that corresponds to the church, or other thing that one wants; that number or letter then, one will find in the figure, and where it is, will be the place looked for; and conversely, having found the letter or number in the figure, and then located it in the legend, one will be able to know what place it is.[26]

The canals, like those in the Forlani map, are identified by Roman numerals in the legend and they progress sequentially around the islands, enabling the viewer to circumnavigate their contours. The Arabic numerals identify the city's contrade but these bear little relation to movement through the city. One can locate a number in the map, and then find the name of the parish in the list, but unless one is familiar with the city, it is much harder to start with a number from the legend and find it in the map. Despite Alberti's emphasis on the reciprocity between the image and the legend, then, the engraving would not have assisted visitors trying to navigate the alleys of Venice. However, it does compensate, as he notes, for the fact that it is impossible to picture all the bridges, churches and details in a small format. Thus in contrast to de’Barbari’s woodcut, in which all these features would have enabled viewers to traverse the surface of the picture and to recognize their parish, a viewer of Alberti’s or Forlani’s map mediates between the image and the text. Moreover by abandoning verisimilitude in favour of visual clarity, they direct viewers to particular sites. The graphic precision of the medium and the didactic authority of the legend became mutually sustaining.

17

Coupling the unique physical body of the city with its unparalleled political institutions was a familiar refrain, and one that circulated throughout Europe in the introduction to Contarini’s De magistratibus et republica Venetorum (1543).[27] For Contarini, it was the well-ordered institutions of the republic that enabled imperfect humans to subordinate their individual interests to the public good. These ideals were explicitly linked to the urban fabric of Venice where the 'beauty and splendor' of the city's landscape were celebrated as physical manifestations of 'its excellent government'.[28]

18

This political ideal and the mechanisms of the legend work together with the bird’s-eye view published in the first volume of Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg's Civitates orbis terrarum (1572).[29] An elegant cartouche located in the middle of the legend contains a group of costumed figures.
Figure 7It is a section of a procession, copied from a much longer series of figures, with the crucial figures of the doge and senators: representatives of the monarchical and oligarchical components of the mixed government, and also members of the ruling nobility. The grand chancellor, who precedes the doge, represents the citizen class, and thus serves as a gesture toward those more elite Venetians who were constitutionally excluded from the government. Flanking the cartouche is the legend; the system of contrade has become emblematic of the resident’s fixed, immutable place in the Venetian mondo, a sign of the city’s unique social and political geography. Still anchored to de’Barbari’s cosmological ideal, the bird’s-eye view contributes to an image of Venice as an autonomous and well-arranged universe.

19

No longer a portrait of the city, the three registers of the print function allegorically; to adapt William Empson’s definition, the print impresses on the viewer the sense that the three levels 'correspond to each other in detail and indeed that there is some underlying reality, something in the nature of things, which makes this happen . . . But the effect of allegory is to keep the . . . levels of being very distinct in your mind though they interpenetrate each other in so many details.'[30] With the cleaving apart of time and space—registered, in part, in the legend and the iconic view of the city’s contours—what was once the mobile eye of the person in the street has been transformed into a process of interpretation on the part of the viewer situated outside the frame. While Venetians were preoccupied with the complex details of rank and order, for the wider European audience to whom the Civitates was addressed, the engraving would have exported a myth of the city in which the individual districts were transmuted into the astounding cityscape through the wise stewardship of the government. The bird’s-eye view has become a sign for Venice, an image that supplements the narrative it accompanies.

20

Figure 8 This iconic function is illustrated in one last example; a miniature image of the city appears on the frontispiece of Giacomo Franco’s Habiti delle donne veneziane, a series of engravings that illustrates Venetian female social types and rituals.[31] The bird’s-eye view is now framed in a circular cartouche that resembles a convex mirror.[32] Emphasizing the desirability of the object, the mirror reflection focuses on the act of viewing, as if reflecting the image of Venice in the eye of the beholder. The frontispiece thereby allegorizes the Olympian view of the geographer’s eye.

21

In one of the dedications Franco explains his new concept, highlighting the startling impact of the world's expanded geography:

Here...is the design…of the marvelous city of Venice in spherical form, a real portrait of the world…similar to the orb of the earth…One sees, even outside of the contained body of Venice, the Giudecca, in a guise that resembles the new world;… the districts [contrade] are in such a number, as are the provinces of the world.[33]

Franco has rotated the bird’s-eye view of Venice about seventy-five degrees to the east and projected it on to a sphere, transforming the islands of Venice into the continents of the world. Giudecca with its terra incognita to the west represents the new world of America; Dorsoduro and San Polo are Europe; Cannaregio and Castello stand in for Asia and Africa respectively. Rialto occupies the position of Venice on world maps as the crossroads between continents. And San Marco is located on the crest of the globe, at the centre of the Venetian world, sited as the New Jerusalem. Through print, the city was re-envisioned: seen from the outside in. Readers open the book to see local costumes and customs, to see the world in Venice.

22

Thus far I have suggested how the bird’s-eye view was transformed into an icon, a sign that resembles the original but that also mobilizes the observer’s interpretative skills. First, the embodied experience of moving through the city, made possible in the de’Barbari woodcut by its vast scale and mimetic realism, moved outside the frame, into the legend and details that surround the image. [34] By the beginning of the seventeenth century, with Franco’s map, the mere form of the islands had became a symbol for a constellation of ideas delineated in earlier maps: the relation of the parts to the whole, the well-ordered city, the city as a world unto itself. In Franco’s map the movement of the body has migrated, as it were, into a new series: the costume book. In city maps, as we have seen, the traditional value of resemblance remains crucial for the image’s status as an icon; even though it is reduced in scale and detail, the likeness still refers back to the series of images and associations that are condensed into it. This holds true for the costume illustrations as well. However, in contrast to the changes that occurred in printed maps, the images in costume books remained remarkably constant; here it is the focus on the contours of the figures, their social meaning and the dissemination of copies that forged their iconic status.

23

Printmakers in the Veneto were particularly
Figure 9 enthusiastic for this new genre; nine costume books were published there between 1540 and 1610, about one third of those produced in Europe.[35] Cesare Vecellio, for example, whose famous books were published in Venice in 1590 and 1598, reproduced some 600 costumes from around the world.[36] He used as many as 60 plates to illustrate the attire of Venetians, the city where he lived himself. Vecellio was among those who presented a different costume on each page but several illustrators engraved multiple costumes on folded folio sheets in an atlas-like format. For example, both Abraham de Bruyn and Jean-Jacques Boissard used the large sheets to demonstrate that costumes from a given centre could be identified on the basis of shared visual characteristics.[37]

24

A variety of attire was also depicted on single sheets, and I use Ambrogio Brambilla’s folio engraving here to introduce some of the visual strategies that are also characteristic of printed series
Figure 11.[38] Female figures are arranged in four horizontal rows that begin with three examples from Rome and conclude with Indiana and Calicvtica. Throughout the sheet, the 28 figures are identified by labels and the same profile is used for each place of origin, thereby setting the sartorial characteristics into relief. The standard format not only designates costume as the marker of difference, but also calls attention to similarities among Italian and European costumes. Fantastic headwear and hemlines, such as the endless brim sported by Egyptia and the three-tiered tower on Arabia, highlight peculiarities imagined for distant lands. The relation between the contours of the costumes and the composition of the sheet as a whole would thereby have highlighted bonds with neighbours. Viewers from Venice, for instance, would have identified more easily with Roman or Florentine attire than with the more articulated gestures and garments worn by those from distant lands. The conventions would have enabled Italians to compare their dresses to those of other locales, screening out the details that protruded beyond the contained contours of those costumes found in European centres.

25

In the sixteenth century, as demonstrated by hundreds of printed illustrations, it was less the body than what was worn over the skin that served as the locus of alterity. The necessity of this representational strategy is pointed out by Nicolas de Nicolay, geographer to the French king, in his Navigations et pérégrinations orientales. First published in Lyon in 1567 following Nicolay’s extensive travels through the Ottoman Empire, the book was enormously influential; all subsequent illustrators replicated the costumes and poses. The book contains 60 'portraits' of men and women from a diversity of regions that the author claims were drawn from life. The costumes are highlighted by the absence of any setting, and the placement of the figures close to the picture plane. These sartorial differences, as Nicolay stresses in his preface, were all the more significant in view of the natural order of the world. In contrast to animals, which 'are confined according to species...and elements that are natural to them', humans are able to extend their domain, discovering a world beyond 'the country of one’s birth...in all those habitable lands and navigable seas'. 'This is great evidence', explains the author, 'that man is the only animal that was made for all the world.'[39] In the wake of discoveries of worlds unknown to Europeans, then, and in striking contrast with the regional variations seen in flora or fauna, the contours of the human body, unexpectedly, and perhaps surprisingly, appeared to be universal. In order to clarify differences — the 'customs and habits of foreigners' — Nicolay and others turned to costume to construct a global morphology of humans.

26

Copying and tracing models were
Figure 12common by printmakers, but in the costume books, these practices contributed to the meanings and didactic effects of the images; the repeated experience of seeing the same images would have trained viewers to recognize the type.[40] For example, Abraham de Bruyn's Virgo Veneta, one of four female Venetian costumes in his Omnium pene Europae, first appeared in the 1577 edition in Cologne. In 1581 De Bruyn’s illustration was copied by Jean-Jacques Boissard in his series that was printed in Lyon
Figure 10. In turn, Boissard’s figure was traced, to which the identical scale and mirror image of the copy attest, by the engraver of a printed Album Amicorum. This album, a form of traveller’s journal to which I will return, was first published in Leuven in 1599 and subsequently reprinted in 1601 and 1605. Even the Venetian artist Vecellio adopted the figure for his woodcuts, using the familiar silhouette for both the Venetian Virgin and the Bride before her marriage.[41]

27

Copying was not always slavish however.
Figure 13For example, Pietro Bertelli, whose first volume of costumes was published in Padua in 1589, played with the perceptions of foreigners whose chronicles record their fascination with female types. The Venetian Virgin was much discussed and in Figure 12 Bertelli plays with the contradictory image of marriageable girls who 'do walke abroad with their breastes all naked',[42] but also 'go about', as another visitor exclaimed, 'so completely covered up, that I do not know how they can see to go along the streets'.[43] Depicted as a kind of carapace, Bertelli’s Virgin is less a body in clothes, than a body of clothes. As these examples indicate, the Venetian Virgin signified a civic social type, and that idea circulated through print.

28

Orderly classification of peoples from around the world required a systematic format and illustrators had a variety of sources on which to draw. Artists’ model books are one example as sheets from a fifteenth-century north-east Italian manuscript demonstrate. On one page, six famous men are arranged on two rows and identified by labels. They are positioned equally close to the picture plane and apart from each other with no background, a convention that enabled artists to copy the figures into different contexts.[44] In the costume books, by contrast, these conventions facilitated classification and supported claims to objectivity and encyclopaedic knowledge. De Bruyn makes the analogy with scientific illustration explicit in the preface of his costume book.[45] Moreover his own zoological engravings demonstrate that it was form and surface patterns that were used to classify fauna.[46]

29

Print media were also ideal for representing the characteristic features of plants, and botanical illustration evolved to facilitate the identification of flora in the field.[47] Here, too, artists drew on general
Figure 9 characteristics instead of particulars; the portrait of a type was delineated with graphic precision and identified by a name. Botanical illustrations also found their way into emblem books, a genre that was popularized by Andrea Alciati whose collections of symbols and pithy statements appeared in 75 editions before 1570.[48]
Figure 14A variety of foliage is depicted on pages toward the end the 1564 edition of his Diverse imprese accommodate a diverse moralità. Here the analogy between flora and costume figures is particularly striking. Each tree has been extracted from the ground, identified with a label and brief verse, and surrounded by an elaborate frame. This format is emulated in many costume books including Vecellio’s woodcuts, where the figures stand alone, cut from their urban context as if plants pulled from the ground.

30

These sources contributed to the pictorial strategies and conventions used by printmakers for costume books more broadly. However some Venetian figures clearly resonated more than others, as evidence from travellers to Venice illustrates. Earlier I noted that artists like Pietro Bertelli were responding, in part, to the impressions of visitors that circulated in chronicles. The Venetian Virgin was iconic because the social type had become a topos, a figure that stands in for that other rhetorical commonplace: liberty. 'Preserved' from foreign domination, as one contemporary put it, the city was 'verginea.'[49] The Virgin was only one of the Venetian types who became an icon; the Doge, Dogaressa, and Courtesan were also ubiquitous in printed costume books and albums of travellers from north of the Alps.

31

In contrast to printed costume books, which offered the viewer vicarious travel, the Album Amicorum, or Stammbuch (friendship album), was typically small and oblong and carried by its owner, often students from Northern Europe, who journeyed to universities away from home.[50] Alciati’s Emblemata was one of the most popular books for albums and editions were printed with blank sheets to collect signatures of friends, coats of arms and also costume illustrations. Many books offered religious inspiration and moral guidance, such as Philipp Melanchthon's Loci communes theologici, while others were bound from blank pages.[51] On one level, students could reflect on the motivational ideas conveyed in the pictures, texts, and comments inscribed by their professors and colleagues; as one publisher advertised, the reader 'will see himself in it as in the Socratic mirror, and will find what defects in himself he must improve.'[52] He also noted that Schädtbücher (books causing mischief) might be a more accurate description than Stammbücher. In fact ludic content appears frequently in the imagery and the list of signatures could be used for drinking games. Sociability was important and the books functioned as passports, since an illustrious signature could open doors.[53] Signatures of friends—presented in the company of emblems, costumes, allegories, portraits, comic figures and famous sites—asserted a relation between the visible and intellectual worlds in which their owners lived.

32

The prominence of vestments from Venice, where there was no university, offers clues with which to understand the function of costume illustrations more generally. Illuminated in brilliant gouache colours, and typically accompanied by a motto and signature, the images convey the impression they are painted from life, as if figures seen in the flesh by the signatory or the owner. However, to use the case of the dogaressa as an example: her popularity in the images bore little relation to the real experiences of visitors, since between the public festivities for the coronations of Zilia Dandolo Priuli in 1557 and Morosina Morosini Grimani in 1597, when most of the manuscript and printed illustrations considered here were made, there was no wife of a doge to be seen. Figures of the dogaressa in two albums illustrated here demonstrate that artists were copying the same models; the style of the illustrators varies, but the clothing, poses and gestures attest to the use of shared prototypes (compare figures 15 and 16).
Figure 16
Figure 15Similarly, Vecellio’s woodcut of the Venetian Cortigiana replicates the gestures, attire, and silhouette seen in an
Figure 17illuminated example. Like the printed books,
Figure 9manuscript costumes were also drawn from memory and copied from earlier models. The professional quality of many of the painted illustrations indicates they were produced by document illuminators and printmakers for whom the use of pattern books was a familiar workshop practice.[54]

33

Emblem books were used for albums, as noted above, and the concept sheds light on how social types—people—could become urban icons. In emblem books, abstract concepts are personified by a person, typically a woman, whose costume and attributes are explained in an accompanying text. There is of course a long history of personifying virtues and vices, but emblems in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century are often complicated allegories, a
Figure 18new visual language that needed the text as a key. Emblems were frequently illustrated in friendship albums, usually without this text since the owner would have learned the more cryptic details which he could then explain to inquiring friends. In an Album Amicorum, figures of Detractio and Veritas are painted on the verso and recto of two pages and thus stand across from each other. The moral contest is clear to the uninitiated observer, since the billowing garments of one figure reveal substantial flesh, whereas the other is decorously clad in a toga. On the level of their attributes, however, the emblems address a more knowledgeable viewer. Veritas carries a burning heart to signify her virtue; the two-faced figure of Detractio sprouts a slanderous tongue from the back, and her calumny is concealed by a mask.[55] Instead of recognizing the referent through its mimetic resemblance to something else, 'the emblem', as Alain Boureau explains, 'invented a relation between the concrete and the abstract, between the visible and the intelligible.'[56] By formalizing an idea, legend or experience into an image, the emblem shifted the locus of meaning away from 'resemblance to representation'.[57] Boureau has also called attention to the communal and political function of emblem books. He attributes their success to the ways in which they distilled experience into visual images, thereby enabling the world to be classified and ordered.[58]

34

The costume figures, which were collected in albums alongside emblems, operated in a similar way. Earlier I proposed that the Venetian Virgin functioned as a symbol of the city’s own virginal state; the Virgin had become a sign for an abstract idea, a sign that also prompts a chain of associations with moral values, such as chastity, and also desire and beauty, all ideas that could be paralleled with the city itself, which the Virgin resembled by metonymy. The costume images are symbolic, but the process is short-circuited, as it were, since the referent — the social type — is present in the picture. Thus the icon works on two levels: as a representation, since political, moral and civic concepts have been translated into emblems, but also like a portrait, because the icon resembles people who were understood to inhabit the city.

35

Thus for northerners, who collected Venetian costumes in their albums, what mattered was more likely the figure’s allegorical function. The dogaressa was a 'walking Idea',[59] 'a feminine symbol of domestic virtue', the apex of patrician luxury, constancy and the ideal wife.[60] The veiled virgin and the courtesan were equally popular among owners of albums. Where the courtesan, in Margaret Rosenthal's words, 'embodied the city immersed in luxury, spectacle, disguise, commercialization, voluptuousness, and sensuality', the virgin signified Venice’s immaculate origins, chastity, and republican longevity, all preserved from foreign domination.[61] Thus the dogaressa, Virgin and courtesan, in tandem with the male types — doge, senator and rettore — responded to the image of Venice as it was perceived by foreigners, as modest, veiled, concupiscent, exotic, sober and austere.[62] By collecting foreign types alongside the signatures and arms of their associates, these albums would have enabled travellers to shape their own experiences of the world into a moral cosmography.

36

Figure 1Understood in this context, the function of illustrations in printed costume books and in maps come into sharper focus. In Giacomo Franco’s map, as we saw at the beginning of this essay, a cartouche containing the doge and dogaressa sits below a bird’s-eye view of Venice. The engraving commemorates a specific event, and thus contemporaries would have identified the doge as Marin Grimani, who the likeness resembles, and his consort, Morosina Morosini. But the couple can also be understood, as I suggested, as an emblem of the domestic and political order that underpins the civic harmony represented in the map and legend.

37

In costume books the figures are not supported by the urban framework for which they stand in and the resulting legibility contributes to their efficacy as symbols. The city views that make up the six volumes of the Civitates orbis terrarum (1572-1618) referred to earlier are an exception that proves the rule. Many contributing artists incorporated figures in the foreground that were copied from costume books.[63] To make the geographical fit clear, illustrators employed a number of devices to make the forms of local attire analogous with those of the topography. The plan of Cologne, for example, features a river that runs horizontally along the upper part of the sheet. The city extends in a wide arc below the river and a small half-circle of the urban structure appears above. This distinctive plan has been paralleled for formal effect by the prominent wide circular collars worn by a man and two women pictured on the lower left. Francis Hogenberg’s view of Piazza San Marco is another example from the Civitates in which local apparel and architecture are made to resemble each other. Here the artist has drawn analogies between the domes of the church, the turbans of Muslim visitors and the breasts of the courtesans in the foreground. The parallels are subtle, but consistent; throughout the atlases of the Civitates illustrators adjusted the costumes, architecture, topography and even local livestock to demonstrate geographical commensurability.

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By bringing together bird’s-eye views and costumes, Giuseppe Rosaccio’s 1607 engraving Abiti antichi et moderni d’Italia illustrates the shared conventions of both.
Figure 19'Ancient and modern costumes' fill the upper right of the sheet and city views border the lower edge.[64] The arrangement draws attention to variations between vestments and headwear, and between coastlines and fortifications. The chorographic grid of details, like the serial format of books of city views and costume books, would have encouraged observers to compare the examples with each other and thereby to learn the salient features of each. Rosaccio’s caption describes the figures as abiti, the contemporary term for costume. Derived from the Latin habitus, or aspect, the word signified the ways in which apparel invested bodies with meaning through the quality of the fabric and the tradition and conventions attached to dress.[65] The word is also defined as contegno, meaning attitude and behaviour and thereby conveying those attitudes to which people are inclined habitually or innately. Abiti, then, identified those aspects of clothing that were aligned with place, and these were the ideals inscribed in the costume prints: the social roles and characteristics that distinguished regional diversity across time.

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In this essay I have been emphasizing the visual strategies that developed in these early prints to engage viewers in new ways. Maps and costume books constituted a sudden and pervasive experience with alterity that redefined the relation of Europeans to their place in the world and forcefully shaped their perceptions of it. In the printed maps the increasing emphasis on information surrounding city views prompted the viewer to mediate between the text and the image. The impact of this exchange would have depended upon the novelty of the repeated experiences of looking at images in tandem with the didactic effect of the visual conventions. These strategies forged the iconic status of both the bird’s-eye view and costume figure; by translating embodied experiences of the city into images, prints condensed particulars into visual ideas.

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These prints communicated concepts about the republic to foreigners, but this process was also a reflexive one, a process that would have altered Venetians’ perceptions of their place in the city. Evidence of such effects, or resistance to them, requires situating printed imagery within the wider representational and social system in which they operated; urban planning for example, and efforts to legislate the appearances of Venetians and foreigners in the city through sumptuary legislation and the Inquisition, were among those experiences that overlapped with visual imagery. This social history is beyond the scope of this essay, but I hope to have shown that this reciprocity is inscribed in the images, in the iconography and forged through the medium. Projected outside the city, but tethered to it by the toponyms and social categories that identified their place within it, Venetians may have begun to recognize themselves in the picture. Inhabitants may have identified with the images, resisted them or been excluded by them, but it is this double-sided operation that emerges as characteristic of the early modern urban icon.

[*] I am grateful to Villa I Tatti where I was a fellow when writing an earlier version of this paper for the conference, Urban Icons, organized by Vanessa Schwartz and Philip Ethington at the University of Southern California in 2004. I have continued to benefit from their intellectual energy and enthusiasm when revising this essay, and I thank them both, warmly and sincerely, for their insights and suggestions. The comments of readers for this journal were also much appreciated. My thanks to Megan Kendrick for her work on the project.

[1] Francesco Sansovino, Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia libri due. etc. (Venice, 1561), dedication. All translations by author unless otherwise noted.

[2] Giulio Ballino, De' Disegni delle piu illustri città, & fortezze del mondo (Venice, 1569).

[3] Ester Pastorello counted 453 printmakers and sellers. Tipografi, editori, librai a Venezia nel secolo XVI (Florence, 1924). On printmaking in Venice see Michael Bury, The Print in Italy, 1550-1620 (London, 2001); Gert Jan van der Sman, 'Print publishing in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century', Print Quarterly, 16 (2000), 235-47; Christopher Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-Century Venice and Rome (Leiden, 2004). For analysis of print in Rome and Amsterdam, see Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City out of Print (Minnesota, 2002), and Angela Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood and the City (Aldershot, 2003).

[4] Carlo Pasero, 'Giacomo Franco, editore, incisore e calcografo nei secoli XVI e XVII', La Bibliofilia, 37, 8-10 (Aug.—Oct. 1935), 332-56.

[5] The engraving of the city had been cut years earlier but the entrepreneurial Franco used the event to sell maps that were out-of-date.

[6] Valerie Traub, 'Mapping the global body', in Peter Erickson and Clarke Hulse (eds.) Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, 2000).

[7] John Hale, Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York, 1994), 20.

[8] Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum 1572-1618 (Amsterdam, 1965) is the most famous. Several collections of Italian city views include Leandro Alberti, Descrittione di tutta Italia (Venice, 1553), and Pietro Bertelli’s Teatro urbium italicarum (Venice, 1599) and Teatro delle città d’Italia con le sue figure intagliate in rame & descrittioni di esse. (Vicenza, 1616).

[9] Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City and Early Modern Identity (Toronto, 2005), chapters 1 and 2.

[10] Hans Belting’s emphasis in Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago, 1994), 459.

[11]Pietro Casola, Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage to Jerusalem In the Year 1494, trans. M. Margaret Newett (Manchester, 1907), 125-6.

[12] On the influence of the map see Giocondo Cassini, Piante e Vedute Prospettiche di Venezia (1479-1855) (Venice, 1982), 44.

[13] See DeborahHoward, 'Venice as a dolphin: further investigations into Jacopo de’Barbari’s view', Artibus et historiae, 35 (1997), 101-11. On the eye-witness style see Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, 1988). On the print and for bibliography see Jacopo de’Barbari et al., A volo d'uccello, Jacopo de'Barbari e le rappresentazioni di città nell'Europa del Rinascimento (Venice, 1999); Wilson, World in Venice, chapter 1. On the extraordinary size of the paper, see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (New Haven, 1994), 16-17.

[14] Elizabeth Crouzet-Pavan, 'Sopra le Acque Salse': espaces, pouvoir et société à Venise à la fin du Moyen-Âge 2 vols. (Rome, 1992), 84.

[15] See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1988), 92.

[16] Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (New Jersey, 1984), 53, 71.

[17] Ibid., 53. On the de'Barbari view as a utopian image, see 208-9.

[18] ‘De sanctificatione septime diei’, in Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik (Nuremberg, 1493). For the sale of copies: Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 43.

[19] Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World (Berkeley, 1994).

[20] On Venice personified as a woman see David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), 26-46, 100-108, 114-117.

[21] Giuseppe Mazzariol and Terisio Pignatti, La pianta prospettica di Venezia del 1500 disegnata da Jacopo de' Barbari (Venice, 1962), 8, 10.

[22] Girolamo Ruscelli’s translation of Ptolemy, Geografia di Glaudio Tolomeo Alessandrino (Venice, 1598), 1.

[23] Although dozens of views of Venice followed, the image was not copied closely until 1635 when it was engraved on a much reduced scale by Matteus Merian and published in Cologne. On maps of Venice see Juergen Schulz, ‘The printed plans and panoramic Views of venice 1486-1797’, Saggi e memorie di storia dell'arte, 7 (1970); Giuliana Mazzi, ‘La Cartografia per il Mito: Le immagini di Venezia nel Cinquecento’, in Lionello Puppi (ed.), Architettura e Utopia nella Venezia del Cinquecento: Mostra, Venezia, Palazzo Ducale, Luglio-Ottobre 1980, (Milan, 1980), 50-68 ; Denis Cosgrove, ‘The myth and the stones of Venice: an historical geography of a symbolic landscape’, Journal of Historical Geography, 8, 2 (1982), 145-69; Giandomenico Romanelli and Susanna Biadene, Venezia Piante e Vedute: Catalogo del fondo cartografico a stampa (Venice, 1982).

[24] On the technological and aesthetic considerations of copperplate engraving see David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors & Consumers. The Panizzi Lectures, 1995 (London, 1996), esp. ‘Lecture I’.

[25] On Paolo Forlani’s engraving of Venice, published by Bolognino Zaltieri in 1566 see David Woodward, The Maps and Prints of Paolo Forlani: A Descriptive Bibliography (Chicago, 1990); Woodward, Maps as Prints; Cassini, Piante, 58-61.

[26] Leandro Alberti, Isolario Appartenenti Alla Italia (Venice, 1567). Translation by author.

[27] Gasparo Contarini’s text was published in the vernacular in 1544. La Republica, e i magistrati di Vinegia ... nuouamente fatti uolgari, etc., trans. E. Anditimi (Venice, 1544).

[28] Elisabeth Gleason, 'Reading between the lines of Gasparo Contarini's treatise on the Venetian State', in Ellery Schalk (ed.) Culture, Society and Religion in Early Modern Europe. Essays by the Students and Colleagues of William J. Bouwsma, (Historical Reflections, 15, 1 (Spring, 1988), 254, 256-7.

[29] Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates; Lucia Nuti, Ritratti di città: visione e memoria tra Medioevo e Settecento (Venice, 1996); Cassini, Piante, 66-7.

[30] William Empson refers to two levels in The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1995), 346-7; Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, 1970), 70.

[31] Giacomo Franco, Habiti delle donne veneziane intagliate in rame nuovamente da Giacomo Franco (Venice, 1614). The city view appeared on several frontispieces; see for example Gasparo Contarini, De magistratibus & republica Venetorum libri quinque (Leiden, 1643).

[32] Anna Omodeo noted the resemblance to a convex mirror, Mostra di stampe popolari Venete del '500 (Florence, 1965), 37.

[33] Franco, Habiti delle donne, dedication. Translation by author.

[34] Broadsheets, in which the map functions as a sign for the historical text, are an important step in the process outlined here. See Wilson, World in Venice, chapter 1.

[35] See Wilson, World in Venice, chapter 2.

[36] For a translation of Vecellio’s 1590 edition, see the forthcoming book by Margaret Rosenthal and Ann Jones.

[37] Abraham de Bruyn, Omnium poene Gentium Imagines (Cologne, 1577).

[38] On the print, see Wilson, World in Venice, 74-6.

[39] Nicolas de Nicolay, Les Quatre premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations orientales (Lyon, 1568), preface.

[40] On the exactly reproducible statement see Williams M. Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

[41] Vecellio, De gli habiti, 124v and 125v.

[42] Thomas Coryat, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), 261.

[43] Casola, Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage, 145.

[44] The manuscript (Rome, Istituto Nazionale della Grafica, inv. no. F.N. 2818-2833) is catalogue number 35 in Robert Scheller, Exemplum: Model-book Drawings and the Practice of Artistic Transmission in the Middle Ages (ca. 900—ca. 1470), trans. Michael Hoyle (Amsterdam, 1995).

[45] Abraham de Bruyn, Omnium pene Europae, preface.

[46] [Twelve plates of animals and insects, with descriptions in Latin verse. Engraved by A. de Bruyn.] (Antwerp? 1583?).

[47] See David Landau and Peter Parshall on the status of botanical illustration as ‘a kind of index or benchmark for the truthful imitation of nature in general’. Renaissance Print, 245-59, esp. 256.

[48] Andrea Alciati, Diverse imprese accommodate a diverse moralità (Lyon, 1564) [British Library MS, Egerton 1215].

[49] Girolamo Priuli, I diarii (1494-1512), ed. Arturo Segre (Bologna, 1921-41), tome 24, part 3, vol. IV, p. 325.

[50] The Album Amicorum, a Netherlandish term, first appeared in the 1550’s among students, many from Wittenberg, embarking on academic peregrinations to universities in Bourges, Orleans, Besançon, Paris, Leuven, Leyden, Padua, Bologna and Siena. The first extant album appeared in 1554, although one example has a signature that is dated 1548. Max Rosenheim, ‘The Album Amicorum’, Archaeologia , 62 (Oxford, 1910), 252-3. Also see Margaret Nickson, Early Autograph Albums in the British Museum (London, 1970), 20-1; Hans Bots and Giel Van Gemert with Peter Rietbergen (eds.), L'Album Amicorum de Cornelis de Glarges 1599-1683 (Amsterdam, 1975), viii.

[51] Rosenheim, ‘The Album Amicorum’, 253.

[52] Stamm - oder Gesellenbuch (Frankfurt am Main, 1583), preface. Cited in Ilse O'Dell, ‘Jost Amman and the Album Amicorum. Drawings after prints in autograph albums’, Print Quarterly, 9 (1992), 31, trans. Vera Kaden and Dr Kurt Ostberg. On the moral value of the books see Nickson, Early Autograph Albums, 9-10.

[53] Bots, Van Gemert and Rietbergen (eds.), L'Album Amicorum, xi.

[54] Rosenheim traced more than 50 document illuminators and woodcutters in Nuremberg between 1550 and 1600, some of whose marks appear in the albums. 'The Album Amicorum', 259.

[55] Cesare Ripa describes Detraction in Iconologia: or, Moral Emblems (London, 1709) p. 22, fig. 86.

[56] Alain Boureau, 'Books of emblems on the public state: côté jardin and côté cour', in Roger Chartier (ed.), The Culture of Print: Power and the uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge, 1989), 264.

[57] Ibid., 266.

[58] Ibid., 266 and n. 17.

[59] On the changing of personalities into allegories see Fletcher, Allegory, 26-8.

[60] As Ernesto Masi described the dogaressa, she was the 'simbolo femminile della virtù domestica'. Cited in Pompeo Molmenti, La dogaressa di Venezia (Turin, 1884), 9.

[61] Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco. Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Chicago, 1992), 2.

[62] On politics, toleration, liberty and licentiousness, see Willliam Bouwsma, 'Venice and the political education of Europe', in John Hale (ed.), Renaissance Venice, (London, 1974), esp. 461.

[63] R. A. Skelton in Braun and Hogenberg, Civitates, xiii.

[64] The only known copy of the engraving is at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. See Roberto Almagia, Monumenta Italiae Cartographica. Riproduzioni di carte generale e regionali d'Italia dal secolo XIV al XVII (Florence, 1929).

[65] Dizionario dell Lingua Italiana (Florence, 1971), 9.