Venetia. / L’Altra Parte della Piazza di S. Marco in Venetia. / Piaz[za] Marco di Venetia.

Description

Venice Complete: Merian’s Bird’s-Eye Panorama of the City with Murano, Burano, Torcello, and the Bucintoro, Bound with Two Views of San Marco.

This small booklet in decorative paper boards is a collector’s construction — three engraved views of Venice by Matthäus Merian, drawn from his publications of the 1630s and 1640s, assembled and bound together as a unified portrait of the city. The combination is well conceived. The large view, a spectacular double-sheet bird’s-eye panorama measuring 28 inches across when fully opened, gives Venice in its entirety: the islands, the lagoon, the harbor thick with shipping, the mountains of the Veneto rising in the background.

The two smaller views of the Piazza and Piazzetta di San Marco provide what the panorama cannot — the human scale of the city’s ceremonial heart, the campanile looming over the square, gondolas nudging the Molo. Together they constitute something richer than any single view could offer: a seventeenth-century portrait of Venice seen from three complementary distances.

The Views in Detail

Venetia (28 x 12 inches, double sheet). The panorama looks northward from a notional vantage point above the Adriatic, with Giudecca in the foreground and the city rising behind it. The Grand Canal winds through the city center, crossed by the Ponte di Rialto, before opening into the Canale della Giudecca, where the harbor is dense with sailing craft, merchantmen, and galleys. At the center of the composition, the Piazza San Marco is clearly identifiable, flanked by the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica; the Campanile rises alongside. In the Canale della Giudecca, Merian has recorded the Bucintoro, the gilded ceremonial barge of the Doge, rowed by 168 oarsmen, used for state functions and for the annual Sposalizio del Mare in which the Doge symbolically married the Adriatic. The barge shown is the third iteration of the Bucintoro, built for Doge Marino Grimani and completed in 1606.

Beyond the city, the lagoon islands are individually labeled: Murano to the north, Mazzorbo and Torcello beyond it, and San Giorgio Maggiore in the foreground. The Venetian coat of arms — the winged Lion of St. Mark beneath the asymmetrical Ducal cap — appears in the upper right.

L’Altra Parte della Piazza di S. Marco in Venetia (14.75 x 12 inches). This view takes the visitor inside the Piazza, looking east toward the Basilica from the square’s western end. St. Mark’s fills the background, its five domes and ornate facade rendered in careful detail. The Campanile stands to the right; the Procuratie line both sides of the square. Figures stroll and congregate across the open pavement in the foreground, giving the scene its social character. Smoke rises from chimneys visible above the roofline — a domestic detail that pulls the composition back from idealization.

Piaz[za] Marco di Venetia (14.75 x 12 inches). The companion view positions the viewer at the water’s edge looking north up the Piazzetta from the Molo, flanked by the two famous columns — the column of St. Theodore to the left, the winged Lion of St. Mark to the right — that mark the ceremonial entrance to the Republic. The Doge’s Palace occupies the right side; the Biblioteca Marciana the left. In the middle distance, the Basilica closes the view. Three gondolas with their gondoliers occupy the foreground waterway, grounding the monumental scene in the ordinary traffic of the city.

Historical Context

Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593–1650) was the greatest topographical publisher of the seventeenth century. Working from Frankfurt, he and his successors produced the Topographia series — a multi-volume documentation of European cities and territories, city by city, that remains an unparalleled visual record of the continent before the upheavals of the Thirty Years War and after. His bird’s-eye view of Venice, first published around 1635, stands among the finest representations of the city produced before the age of photography: detailed enough to serve as a historical document, composed with sufficient art to work as an image. Venice in 1635 was still among the wealthiest and most powerful cities in Europe, though the long decline from its mercantile peak had begun; the Ottoman wars, the rise of Atlantic trade, and the loss of Cyprus in 1571 had all taken their toll. Merian’s image preserves the city at a moment when its self-presentation remained magnificent — the harbor full, the ceremonies intact, the Bucintoro still on the water.

The two San Marco views are taken from the same publishing milieu, offering the paired perspectives — from within the Piazza and from the water — that characterize the thorough treatment of important monuments in Merian’s work. The present booklet represents a collector’s decision, probably made in the eighteenth century, to bring these three views into dialogue within a single binding.

The Binding and Publication History

The three views are bound in a small booklet (8 x 12.75 inches) in boards covered with Italian or German decorative paper, the pattern consisting of vertical stripes of floral vines in gray, brown, and pink on a cream ground — a style characteristic of eighteenth-century bookbinding papers. The large view folds into the booklet; the two smaller views are each folded once to fit. The binding appears to be a collector’s construction, assembled to preserve and house the three views as a set.

The bird’s-eye view of Venice was published by Matthäus Merian, Frankfurt, c. 1635, and appeared in the Topographia Italiae (first edition, Frankfurt, 1640) and subsequent editions. The two San Marco views are from the same publishing context. Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593–1650).