Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 'View of Venice' (1500): Image Vehicles Past and Present

Kristin Love Huffman

doi:10.21071/mijtk.v4i0.11530

Abstract

This essay focuses on an iconic and ground-breaking woodcut – Jacopo de’ Barbari (c. 1460/70–1516) and Anton Kolb’s View of Venice (1500) – and an interactive museum installation that I first developed for Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. The exhibition uses the View as a point of departure for the development of multi-media displays about Early Modern Venice and the transfer of knowledge. Adopting Aby Warburg’s illustrative terminology, the essay extends understandings of the woodcut, namely its function as an ‘image vehicle’ and its invention and realization as a product of cultural pathways. This concept, ‘pathways of culture’, also relates to the digital methods and visualized media used in the exhibition where their application advances a new methodology in art history, just as Aby Warburg did in the early twentieth century. And like Warburg who privileged visual imagery and traced its ideological transmission with his Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1929), the curatorial team of the exhibition uses and systematizes original visualizations to drive the analyses of art, architectural and urban history in new and exciting ways.

Highlights

The ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’: an art historical methodologyAt the end of his career as an art historian, Warburg created the Mnemosyne Atlas, a visual itinerary of his interpretation and thematic understanding of the
This essay focuses on an iconic and ground-breaking woodcut – Jacopo de’ Barbari (c. 1460/70–1516) and Anton Kolb’s View of Venice (1500) – and an interactive museum installation that I first developed for Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art
For literature related to the View, see: JAY ALAN LEVENSON, Jacopo de’ Barbari and Northern Art of the Early Sixteenth Century, Ph.D

Summary

The ‘Mnemosyne Atlas’: an art historical methodology

At the end of his career as an art historian, Warburg created the Mnemosyne Atlas, a visual itinerary of his interpretation and thematic understanding of the. In 1929 Warburg presented a lecture with the Atlas’s panels, each with a variety of arranged images, at the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome, material that guided subsequent generations of art historians through the reconceptualization of the field.17 His visually driven narrative of pictorial forces offered a different model with which to explain the evolution of western art. The late fifteenth-century cultural context in which the View materialized demonstrates the applicability of Warburg’s use of images, in particular the Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), and Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001), three art historical titans directly inspired by Warburg, form part of the genealogy of the field. The View – in both its medium and pictorial content – is a quintessential image vehicle

The exchange of knowledge in printed form

Art history and digital methods