View of Venice

Writing in Book II, ‘Di prospettiva’ (‘On perspective’), of his treatise on architecture (first published 1545), the Bolognese painter and architect Sebastiano Serlio is describing here the first of three main types of stage-set design for classical theatre: comic, tragic and satyric (or...

City views, by definition, require a city, or, at the very least, a town. More importantly, they require what Richard Morse once defined as the “idea of the city,” the belief that the city possessed special qualities and therefore constituted a subject worthy of artistic representation.Richard M. Morse,...

During the last quarter of the fifteenth century as the print began to claim some marginal prominence among the pictorial arts of Europe, printmakers gradually adopted the formal vocabulary of painters and sculptors. At the same time, they began to shed their anonymity as craftsmen. Although both woodcut and engraving aspired to the standards set by the ennobled arts, each printmaking technique did so by following its own path. On the one hand, the refinement of woodcut came about mainly through …