ABSTRACT
A city view is not what we think it is. Even when we live in cities for most of our lives, when we send postcards of them to our friends-Paris by night, or London in a fog-we affirm a longstanding and unconscious relation we have with urban space. The city view, as such, was born in the Renaissance. At a time when print culture, cartography, and literature developed together, the city view, a picture or topographic image of a city, became one of the most distinctive and popular products of the early modern period.1 Often called “town views” or “portraits,” these images were both cartographic and painterly, they measured the limits of the urban environment and rendered specific architectural features within the city. The town view produced a fantasy of spatial totality, in which engravers represented the city as if captured by a single glance from a vantage point high above the town.2 City views demonstrate the extent to which artists and engravers celebrated one of the great inventions of the Renaissance, namely, the development of linear perspective. One of the earliest printed world histories to include engravings, Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum [Nuremberg Chronicle] (1493) featured as many as 2,000 different town views, which although crude renderings of urban environments, provided the early modern reader with a means to imagine world history through the visual shape of cities.3 Sold as individual sheets, town views were also marketed as features that increased the value of early atlases and cosmographies from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (Basel, 1550) to Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1572) and Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570).
