The Peregrinatio’s city views are helped along by their coarse use of elements of linear perspective, exemplified by the rendering of the Dome of the Rock (Templum Salomonis) in two-point perspective on the center stage of the View of Jerusalem (gatefold, figures 16, 84). The precinct around the Dome of the Rock, a plateau largely enclosed by porticos, walls, and buildings, is known as the Temple Mount in Judaism, for its legacy as the former (and future) site of the two destroyed (and to-be-restored) Jewish Temples. In Islam, it is the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) that Muhammad visited during the first part of his miraculous Night Journey (Koran 17:1). Italian experiments with perspective often worked with just such an octagonal shape isolated in a piazza; for example, the Second Temple inspired by the Dome of the Rock in Perugino’s circa 1480–82 Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter (figure 17) or Brunelleschi’s rendering of the Florence Baptistery, one of linear perspective’s most foundational moments. The orthogonals from the roof of the Al-Aqsa Mosque can be integrated into the Dome’s perspective scheme; they intersect those from the left of the Dome of the Rock at a rough vanishing point midway between the two buildings.
That is the extent of any diagrammable precision. The orthogonals of the roofs of the structures around the Christian Via Dolorosa loosely come together in a zone above the Dome, where they meet their counterparts from the other side of the city. There are pockets of apparent disorientation, for example at the far right corner of the Haram, where the rendering compromises the clean lines of the complex. There is also a tipping forward of the front of the city that can be taken as a tactic to elevate Golgotha, which lies toward the rear. Of course, the streets and buildings in situ, including the elements of the Haram itself, are not laid out in a clean rectilinear pattern, so that perfect convergence would have required the artist to willfully remap the city according to an ideal plan. The heterogeneity of the pictorial space does not betoken flaws in the execution of an ideal. As discussed in chapter 5, for example, the minarets on the north (right) side of the Haram were recorded in detail independently and inserted into the composition, to be absorbed by formal techniques for proposing a unified view. With Reuwich, heterogeneity does not fracture perspective; rather, perspective and the rhetoric of the ‘view’ coheres the heterogeneity of artistically assembled elements that represent the historically and geologically complex space of the city.
The effectiveness of the View of Jerusalem as a work of perspective does not, however, rely on the geometric discipline of true linear perspective. Its persuasiveness arises from the image’s ad hoc construction from a distinct perspective, and the text’s verbal scaffolding of this visually rhetorical structure. For the View of Venice (figure 1), the island of San Giorgio across the canal from the Doge’s Palace provided the standpoint; for the View of Jerusalem, it was a vantage on the Mount of Olives (figure 18), as explored in chapter 5. The images’ power comes not from intellectually principled and rigorously consistent geometry, but from the binding of panoramic views both to the material circumstances of a book and to a narrative context that insists on the images’ origin in an act of viewing.
Reuwich’s views are the first explicitly connected to an artist’s act of on-site looking, and the text is emphatic in establishing this relationship. Breydenbach does not just name Reuwich three times; he expounds his purpose in detail. The painter was brought along to portray the well-known cities skillfully (artificiose effigiaret) to the extent that it is possible to do so accurately (quoad magis proprie fieri poset) (7v, l. 7). In the German, the formulation that describes this drawing connotes a true relationship to the original (ab entwürffe, eygentlichen ab malet) (10r, ll. 23–24). The beginning of the Latin encomium to Venice repeats this in another form, advertising that the city “is portrayed here according to what was seen” or that the city, “[shown] here was afterward portrayed as it looks” (civitas veneciarum … hic sub aspectum consequenter effigietur) (10v, ll. 40–41). The first is preferable to match the present tense of the verb, but the German translator seems to have found ambiguity. He uses the same phrasing as earlier, but interjects an odd parenthetical gloss on the Latin consequenter: “the mighty city and dominion of Venice follows after this, accurately drafted by the learned hand of the painter (afterward and maybe on par with)” (eygentlichen [nach dem v eß mag syn vff eben] ab etworffen mitt gelerter handt des malers) (14r, ll. 28–30). The absence of an image is also used to bolster the artist’s credibility by seeming to demonstrate his willingness to withhold a picture rather than substitute someone else’s experience or imagination. Even though pilgrimage galleys generally stop at the “rich and mighty” city of Ragusa, a strong wind kept their boat from nearing that port. Consequently, there is no view of Ragusa in the Peregrinatio because the city “was not visible enough to us that it could be accurately drawn by the painter.”45
These passages also acknowledge the role of collecting and collating material, especially in the map, and together the praise of that work and the particular emphasis on the Holy Land sites support what the themes and organization of the volume also convey: the Map of the Holy Land with View of Jerusalem was the intended heart of the artistic program, even though the View of Venice filled more woodblocks. The Latin edition specifies that Reuwich depicted “the arrangements, positions, and forms of the succession of more powerful cities that make up the route of the passage by land and sea from the port of Venice and especially of the sacred sites in the Holy Land” (7v, ll. 4–7). The artist did not just portray these elements; he also “transferred them to his map, a work beautiful and pleasing to see” (7v, ll. 7–8). In German his subject is “the notable places on water and land … and especially the holy places around Jerusalem” (fol. 10r, 23–24).
These Animals Are Truly Depicted as We Saw Them
This verbal and visual strategy is not limited to the city views. The caption on Reuwich’s collection of animals reminds the reader that they, too, are supposed to be “truly depicted” as the pilgrims “saw them in the Holy Land” (figure 19).46 Seven examples of Holy Land fauna are brought together within a single frame above those words, which the presence of a unicorn (Unicornus) seems swiftly to belie. For today’s viewer this mythical beast is perhaps the first, most conspicuous sign that we might have reason to doubt the images’ claim to be based on an artist’s on-site transcription of what he saw, though we would be wrong to read its inclusion as a deliberate lie. Frederike Timm has pointed out that Reuwich’s views of Venice (figure 1), Parenzo, and Modon (figure 35) omit conspicuous fortifications and other structures erected before his arrival, while otherwise depicting the cityscape with unusual accuracy. The absence of the more recent structures suggests that woodcuts are based on acquired images drawn decades earlier. For Parenzo, a shift in the viewing angle suggests that Reuwich combined two views in order to create a more complete report.47 The ploy of explicitly excluding Ragusa is all the more notable, as the pilgrims do include views of Candia, which they saw from sea but where they do not seem to have landed, and Corfu, where they stayed for only a short while at anchor on the outbound journey and for a short winter’s overnight on the return trip.48 At issue here is not the original authorship of the drawings that underlie Peregrinatio woodcuts, but the intellectual and material labor of convincingly transforming heterogeneous materials into a unified body of work.
Elsewhere in the Peregrinatio, the author’s declarations in the text implicitly caption the views with the statement “The artist saw this,”
