This Newly Discovered 14th-Century Drawing of Venice Is the Oldest-Known Depiction of the Floating City

An art historian at the
University of St. Andrews in Scotland has uncovered the
oldest-known drawing of the city of Venice, dating back to the 14th
century.

Sandra Toffolo, an expert in
Renaissance history, came across the document in May of last year
while researching her upcoming book, “Describing the City,
Describing the State: Representations of Venice and the Venetian
Terraferma in the Renaissance,” at the Biblioteca Nazionale
Centrale in Florence. 

Examining the manuscript of
Niccolò da Poggibonsi, an Italian pilgrim who made trips to
Jerusalem between 1346 and 1350, during which he stopped in Venice
along the way, she found a faint pen drawing depicting Venice’s
famous canals amid gable-roofed buildings and steepled
churches. 

“The discovery of this city view
has great consequences for our knowledge of depictions of Venice,”
Toffolo said in a statement, adding that it “shows that the city of
Venice already from a very early period held a great fascination
for contemporaries.”

Found alongside markings on the
sheet of paper were a series of small pinholes, a clue that the
image was duplicated and shared. During this era, illustrations
were copied by pouring powder through such holes onto another
substrate, thereby reproducing the outline of the
original.

“There are several images in
manuscripts and early printed books that are clearly based on the
image in the manuscript in Florence,” Toffolo said.

Though the drawing is the oldest to depict Venice, there are
maps of the city that predate it. The oldest one, made by a
Franciscan friar, dates back to 1330.

The post This Newly Discovered 14th-Century Drawing of
Venice Is the Oldest-Known Depiction of the Floating City
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