Early modern city views are often uncritically handled as documentary sources or one-sidedly seen as expressions of civic pride. In this rich study, Ryan Gregg presents another perspective, considering a large corpus of city views produced by a group of Antwerp artists as a visual translation of the imperial rhetoric of the Habsburg court and some of its vassals. While this central argument is developed throughout the study, this book is essentially a collection of four long essays on the same theme, each one taking a different approach. The strength of this study lies in the close reading of the city views themselves, whose visual strategies are explained through a thorough perusal of classical and humanist rhetorical texts. The historical contextualization of the artists and, perhaps more importantly, of the notion of Habsburg court artist, remains sketchier.
The first chapter is devoted to the career of Anton van den Wyngaerde, who produced panoramic views from cities all over Europe. It is documented that van den Wyngaerde made many of these views in the service of Philip II. Although archival evidence is lacking, Gregg suggests that van den Wyngaerde already worked for Charles V from at least the second half of the 1540s and maybe even much earlier. Central to his argument is the imperial message of the Genoa print (1553), a large panoramic view of the Italian port city, that is decoded as “an encomium to Habsburg rule” (69). While this reading is convincing, the reconstruction of a career in the footsteps of the ever-traveling emperor remains hypothetical and requires some juggling with chronologies. Must someone be a court artist in the strict sense of the word in order to put his art in the service of an imperial ideology? It is conceivable that van den Wyngaerde—as Gregg admits between the lines—worked for other patrons who also benefited from such discourses.
Chapter 2 considers the wider Antwerp school of city-view artists who were influenced by Albrecht Dürer and Jan van Scorel. Again, Gregg posits a moment in Habsburg history—namely, Charles V's entry into Rome in 1536—as the catalyst for the formation of the school. While this remains hard to substantiate, the common subjects and commonly used techniques attest to the mutual influences of artists like Anton van den Wyngaerde, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Jan Vermeyen, and later also Hendrik van Cleve III and Giovanni Stradano (alias Jan van der Straet).
Chapter 3 takes another angle by investigating how their artistic practice was informed by classical and contemporary rhetoric, especially by the notion of enargeia or vividness. Gregg analyzes how Giorgio Vasari, who employed Stradano for the decorations of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, made the city views of the Antwerp school part of his historiographic project. Although the depictions of Italian towns were based on thorough observation, they constructed rather than mimicked reality by combining multiple viewings into one ideal vision. In this process, the viewer was turned into an eyewitness of history and enabled to make his or her own judgment.
The final chapter operationalizes the ideas from the previous chapters with a very detailed reading of the city views in three rooms of the appartement of Leo X in the Palazzo Vecchio. In the late 1550s Stradano executed the Siege of Florence and views of towns now under Tuscan rule. In this chapter, the (Italian) historical context is well developed. Supported by the techniques of Stradano, Vasari developed a program that seduced the viewer into believing they could judge for themselves, while at the same time being presented with a firm apologetic case for the seizure of power by Cosimo I under Habsburg auspices. It is the strongest chapter of the book, as visual and literary analysis are laid upon a solid historical foundation. Moreover, more so than in the previous chapters, the reader is directly confronted with the rich visual material.
This book is an important contribution to the study of city views, as it shows how in Renaissance Europe many of these views offered vivid visions of princely dominion. In its contextual analysis this argument is better developed for the Medici than for the Habsburg court.
