of urban topography aligns with the view from a single, identifiable vantage. From written testimony of pilgrims traveling with him, we can corroborate his presence at that vantage and pinpoint the date when the tour group looked down at the city to collect indulgences. And we know he considered the view as an innovating publisher because the book issued under his name tells us that the trip was in part intended as a research and reconnaissance mission to gather fresh and reliable material. We come to believe all these things first and foremost, however, because the view of Jerusalem and the other illustrations in the book have been designed to convince us that they are true.
To persuade, the Peregrinatio uses first a new kind of visual rhetoric—the emerging genre of the ‘view’—that here takes on special functions when inflected by the text and conjoined to another nascent media format, the printed book. More specifically, while the wider genre of the view looks out on any expansive landscape or vista, the Peregrinatio’s views of Venice, Modon, Candia, Rhodes, Parenzo, Corfu, and Jerusalem belong also to the subgenre that pictures cities and towns. While they are not the first examples of the city view in the west or even in the north, they are among the very first, made at a time before the city view or the city plan had coalesced as a genre, with shared purposes, conventions, and meanings. The type of city view showing a panorama that transcribes observed urban topography seems to have crystallized in the 1480s with the almost simultaneous creation of several views of Italian cities. A forerunner from circa 1466–86 is the painted Tavola Strozzi, which depicts a panorama of the return to Naples in 1465 of the victorious Aragonese fleet after the Battle of Ischia (figure 14). A woodcut view of Florence with a chain around its edge remembers a lost engraving by Francesco Rosselli, dated to the artist’s stay in the city between 1482 and 1490 (figure 15). From 1484 to 1487, Pinturicchio frescoed the Villa Belvedere at the Vatican with a series of views of Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Rome, and Venice, now largely destroyed. Correspondence and other written testimony attest the loss of further examples, most importantly one view of Venice (Venetia in disegno) reported to have been created by Gentile Bellini for Mehmed II and another (retracto) drafted by his father, Jacopo Bellini, and retouched by Gentile in 1493 for Francesco II Gonzaga.37
Although the Peregrinatio’s illustrations belong to this development chronologically, their eccentric context opens their meaning beyond what is typical for this particular category. Juergen Schulz developed the term “emblem” to describe how the medieval progenitors of city views symbolized moral values rather than communicating topographical information or conveying a portrait likeness. Maps and seals represented cities as a compact grouping of structures, usually conventional but occasionally with recognizable components. Schulz’s term “emblem” serves as both a functional and formal description.38 Even with the introduction of a new style that presented cityscapes with atmospheric or linear perspective as if seen from a fixed, open vantage, city views were still regularly instrumentalized for political purposes, if not also for moral or religious ones.
The political content of maritime triumphal entries could not be clearer, though the Tavola Strozzi, likely displayed in the home of Filippo Strozzi, would also have advertised his personal triumph in helping finance the 1464 flotilla while making his fortune in exile in Naples.39 In addition to a view of Otranto (where Mehmed II’s forces were repelled from Italy in 1481), Filippo’s inventories record three views of Naples, none of which definitively match the Tavola Strozzi, and he commissioned a fourth as part of a lettucio, sent as a gift to King Ferrante.40 David Friedman has argued that the View of Florence with a Chain encodes rhetoric in praise of the city. The exaggerated prominence of the Duomo at the center of the image, for example, evokes Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and the Florentines’ conception of their city as a New Jerusalem with the cathedral at its heart. Reuwich’s treatment of the Temple as the Dome of the Rock may have influenced Rosselli.41 Pope Innocent VII’s motivations for commissioning the Belvedere cycle remain murky. He may have wanted to revive a classical form of villa decoration as well as make a political statement about his authority to marshal the forces of rival Italian city-states.42 If the Belvedere cycle did have political meaning, then it would join the other three Italian images in breaking from the emblem format, while still remaining tied to its basic conception as a work of civic or personal and familial promotion.43
Reuwich certainly used his images to convey political messages, as we will see in chapters 3 and 5 for the View of Venice, View of Rhodes, and View of Jerusalem. Since the beginning of its development, however, the overarching genre of the ‘view’ has also carried an authorial voice within it that the Peregrinatio brings strongly to the fore. Picturing or writing about the view from a mountain or other commanding vantage has a long history, as an expression of the subject’s experience of vision and of man’s relationship to the built and natural environment.44 While people of all eras have climbed mountains and gazed out at the vista, in the Middle Ages they did not publicly relish that kind of view as an important category of experience or as an appropriate subject for literary or visual representation. In our era, the view from above, photographed from a skyscraper or by a satellite, can recapitulate the power of technology and rationalized systems, like modern cartography, to provide an overarching, abstract, and seemingly neutral representation of space. For the Romantics, the view could offer a privileged moment of revelation by bringing the subject in contact with the sublime. Beyond different periods’ particular articulations of the genre and the issues it evokes, the view plays a fundamental role in the overarching history of Western art since the Renaissance. One of the core histories of that tradition describes an ongoing exploration of the interplay between mimesis and the viewing subject, brought together in the format of the painting that posits a slice of the world constructed as a slice of the viewer’s field of vision.
The meanings of the word “view” reflect this conflation of an act of seeing—an instance of sight or an individual’s field of vision—with the object of sight—the prospect seen or depicted in a picture. These are then further entangled with the multiple uses of the word “perspective”: it describes both an individual’s view (with emphasis on how a particular vantage delimits the field of vision) and the artistic techniques by which such a view is represented, in particular atmospheric and linear perspective. And, of course, both words can refer literally to sight centered in the eye or metaphorically to mental or spiritual attitudes or cogitations. Within this rich semantic arena, the Peregrinatio’s woodcuts make most potent use of the intersection of “view” and “perspective,” of the way in which an image of a vista, a ‘view,’ can point back outside its frame to the artist’s or viewer’s implied standpoint, his “perspective” or point of view.
The mathematical system that is the technique of linear perspective relies on this link between the artist’s standpoint and the image, and the manipulation of linear perspective has provided a basic means for investigating and expressing the relationship of viewer and viewed. The development of the pictorial genre of the ‘view’ in the fifteenth century dovetails, then, with another of the century’s most vigorous artistic experiments, the development of linear perspective. Both are often analyzed in terms of their ability to deliver heightened mimesis, just as the achievement of the Peregrinatio’s images has been measured against their topographical accuracy. But the genre of the ‘view,’ the technique of linear perspective, and the Peregrinatio’s woodcuts also generate meaning in this other way, by exploring the dyad of viewer and viewed—or rather, the triad of the viewing artist, the viewing reader of the Peregrinatio, and their shared view of the people, places, and animals depicted. Embedded in a book, the Peregrinatio’s images speak also with an author’s voice to a reader across a text, and it is this overlay of author-artist, reader-viewer, and text-image that
