Venice from a bird’s eye view: the view of Jacopo de’ Barbari

What does it look like, a city as the crow flies, in a period when we painted what we couldn’t see, before the big wheels, the tall towers and the aircraft: say, in 1500? Let’s go and see in a city which is not just any city since it is experienced as a miracle, the most urban of cities in the site most resistant to urbanization: Venice, in 1500, in the heart of its lagoon, at the moment when everything is perhaps accomplished, when this “urban planning event” that Le Corbusier spoke of is completed. In 1500, the painter Jacopo de’ Barbari had a monumental plan of Venice engraved in six assembled boards of 4 m2. We see the city, the whole city, down to the smallest details, from a bird’s eye view. But where are the men? How can we bring the people onto this urban scene?

Historians certainly take the high ground, but looking at things from a high level, no, that’s not their style. Let’s go and see, at ground level, land, cross the city on dry ground, in the company of Claire Judde de Larivièreprofessor of medieval history at the University of Toulouse, who publishes Venetians!Venetians! Crossing a city (Venice, 1520) Editions du Seuil ; et Philippe Artièresresearch director at the CNRS, historian of ordinary writing, who publishes with Vertical A bout portant. Versailles, 1972. Both are joined during the broadcast by our member of the day, Manuel Charpy.

Explore the Venice of 1500, examine its streets and buildings

The plot of Venetians! Venetians! Crossing a city (Venice, 1520) by Claire Judde de Larivière follows a public crier whose mission, in January 1520, is to go and shout in more than 80 leagues from Venice the ban on throwing waste water directly into the canals and into the streets . This is to prevent this waste from spilling out, silting up the lagoon and preventing the ebb and flow of the Adriatic tide. Readers are thus invited to cross the city in the company of this character and thereby discover an everyday and ordinary Venice.

To guide us in this wandering, Claire Judde de Larivière has placed at the heart of her work the plan of Bird’s eye view of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari. This is a monumental woodcut, designed from 1498 to 1500 and published in 1500 by the publisher Anton Kolb. A real event in the representation of the city, should this plan be seen as a work, or a document? Claire Judde de la Rivière gives us the stakes of this debate which agitates historians: “ Some say that it is a map that was made according to the principles of scale perspective. Jacopo de’ Barbari is a Renaissance painter who was interested in these questions and therefore tried to represent it from a certain perspective and on a certain scale. But others say that it is first and foremost a work of art, since it does not respect the codes of perspective. Historian Deborah Howard says he crushed the perspective to make the city appear like a dolphin sitting in the middle of the lagoon. This serves to glorify this exceptional moment in the life of Venice, which was then one of the greatest maritime powers . In addition to the city, there are 500 boats represented all around. ».

Whatever it may be, whether it is a work or a document, this plan strikes the eye of Philippe Artières for the exhilaration of its detail, of its “ line that goes closest to the city “. Enough to allow us to “ zoom in on the smallest detailsunderlines Claire Judde de Larivière, but also to find a certain number of buildings which still exist today or on the contrary to go and see what has disappeared from this medieval Venice that de’ Barbari surveyed to carry out his plan ».

Topography of an accomplished city

The art historian Pierre Castel said that cities were painted from above before being able to fly over them. How was Jacopo de’ Barbari able to create the plan of a city whose specificity is not to have a hill, unlike Rome or Florence? For Claire Judde de Larivière, it is above all surveying work, measuring the city, in which the artist carried out for three years. At this time, in 1500, Venice was completed. The structure of urban space is densified and full. In short, “ the city has its shape », Tells us Claire Judde of Larivière. The only two spaces that are not built on in the city, to the west and to the east, are areas where waste continues to be dumped for which we no longer know what to do with.

The lagoon is also one of the subjects at the heart of this representation. Jacopo de’ Barbari represented it with extreme precision, since he ” was careful to distinguish the swampy areas where we could almost walk », underlines Claire Judde de Larivière. “ Moreover, in one place it represents a fisherman on foot who crisscrosses these marshy areas. And then, on the contrary, it represents much deeper areas which are these canals through which these countless boats pass. In the South-East, it represented a regatta. We see boats, Venetian boats and a race organized by fishermen or gondoliers of the lagoon ».

Where are the people?

Apart from the arsenal, apart from the lagoon, where are the Venetians whom the town crier in Claire Judde de Larivière’s book warns of the dangers threatening the city? The historian tells us about the place of the people in her research: “ What interested me was to think about this ordinary work of production, not only of the city as an architectural space, but also of the city as a social space. I therefore wanted to study the relationships that residents had with the production of this economic miracle, but also this urban miracle. And therefore to follow them in their daily life, where they live, where they work, where they eat, where they have fun. That’s what I’m trying to do in the book “. For Philippe Artières, making faces visible is the challenge of working on Jacopo de’ Barbari’s plan. In the eyes of the historian indeed, “ one of the very strong challenges of contemporary historiography is to make people see, make people hear and pay attention to what is not immediately on the portrait or on the painting ».

A true setting, could Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view be viewed as the still life of a city? Four years after having completed this plan, the painter signed Still life with partridge and iron glovesone of the first still lifes in art history. Claire Judde de Larivière finds “ the same attention to detail in the feathers, in the colors. So we can clearly see that he is attracted by this same representation of the ultimate detail. What is fantastic about the plan is indeed this constant play of scale between these micro territories ».

✉️ Mathieu Potte-Bonneville’s Postcard: leaving the ground, with The Legend of Zelda

During the show, we have the joy of receiving a postcard from the philosopher and director of the Culture and Creation department of the Center Pompidou, Mathieu Potte-Bonnevillein which he tells us about an event that occurred in the world of video games in 2023 and which, in his eyes, marks a date in the history of cartographic emotions:

“Climb, overlook, map. This solution, both clever and exhilarating, will be used in dozens of video games, forcing their designers to adorn their settings with peaks, belfries, buildings or even in “Horizon Zero Down”, one of my favorites, a dinosaur with a very long neck that you can climb up to. Things remained there, until last year and the new opus of the series “The Legend of Zelda”. This episode entitled “Teers of a Kingdom”, the character you play, Link, no longer climbs along the immense towers. He slides at their feet and triggers a mechanism under his feet that blows him vertically, as if l. The building was a blowgun aimed at the sky and propelling you so high that in the gliding flight that follows, you not only discover before your eyes the continent spreading out, but around you shocking fragments of islands celestial, vestiges of an archaic civilization where you are free to land and wander, without return, among the ancient ruins and the flowers beaten by the winds.”

The city through its photographs (or the impossible everyday): the intervention of Manuel Charpy, member of the show

Every week, a member of our academy of the invisible alerts us, at the end of the broadcast, to another type of image, related or not to the one in which we took a long walk, to give us news of our way of being in the world.

At the end of the show, Claire Judde de Larivière and Philippe Artières are joined by Manuel Charpya member of our academy of the invisible, who tells us about the dream sparked by the invention of photography of being able to capture urban life, represent the daily life of a city and its experience. However, these images are of little use to us when we work on everyday life, commerce, social practices, gestures, in other words the populated city. How can we explain this escape from reality? Extract :

“From the 1860s, we have access to something resembling the snapshot but the images are not richer because photography will capture the past, that is to say it will look for traces of the past in the present. Perhaps because there is an ancient pictorial tradition which consists of taking up pictorial motifs which have permeated our imagination. I am thinking in particular of the cries of Paris, these 19th century engravings that postcards reproduce. We also do bird’s eye views and panoramas to show a city of the past, a medieval city. Since “Notre-Dame in the Mist”, Paris seems completely medieval. […] The nature of the great photographic surveys from the 1850s also has to do with this. Whether it was Charles Marville, then Atget, then Balthus, and many other photographers, they were asked to go and record in the city what was going to be destroyed.”

Bibliography of the show:

• Claire Judde of Larivière, Venetians!Venetians! Crossing a city (Venice, 1520), Editions du Seuil2024.
• Philippe Artières, A bout portant. Versailles, 1972, Vertical editions2024.
• Gaston-Henri Niewenglowski, Applications of photographyParis, Garnier, 1907.
• Exhibition catalog » Views from above “, collective work under the direction of Angela Lampe, Edition du Center Pompidou-Metz, 2013.

Sounds broadcast during the show:

• Sound postcard from Venice, INA archive “The arts and men”, Saturday 06/30/1956
• François Chalin in the Metropolitain program of 11/28/2001, about the architect Corrodo Balistreri who, helped by his assistant and his esoterician wife, scrutinized for nine months with a magnifying glass the plan drawn up by Jacopo di Barberi in 1500 at the Correr Museum in Saint Mark’s Square.
• Sophie Ristelhueber’s INA Archive in 2009
• “Gondolier” sung by Dalida, 1958.
• “View from above” by Alex Firla, on the French Parade label.