De' Barbari View of Venice, 1500

The story of this map

Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view of Venice is one of the wonders of early printmaking. Cut into six huge woodblocks and published by the German merchant Anton Kolb in the year 1500, it shows the entire city from an imaginary point high above the lagoon, every building drawn as if the artist had somehow flown over it. The blocks themselves still survive in Venice, but impressions from this first printing are extraordinarily rare.

The image rewards a slow look. The Grand Canal snakes through the middle in its familiar reversed S. Piazza San Marco, the Doge’s Palace and the great walled Arsenale are all there, along with hundreds of church towers and the tiled roofs of ordinary houses. Above it all Mercury, god of trade, presides over the city; below, Neptune rides a sea creature through the basin, and puffing wind heads mark the compass points around the edge.

This is Venice at the very peak of its power as a maritime republic, before the world’s trade routes shifted to the Atlantic. Little wonder the city has been drawn from above ever since, but never quite like this.

We print it as a wide panorama from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s superb scan. It belongs to our Antique Maps of Europe collection and looks stunning over a long console or above a bed, in black or oak. Each print is made to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: work from the museum's single full-resolution scan of the six-sheet woodcut, evening out tone across the sheet joins; crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, remove scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.