Piazza San Marco. Detail, Jacopo de’ Barbari and Anton Kolb, View of Venice, c. 1497-1500.

Kristin Huffman, lecturing fellow of art, art history and visual studies, presented “A Portrait of a City: Jacopo de' Barbari's View of Venice (1500)” as part of the Cultural Heritage Imaging Symposium, April 6, 2019 at Florida State University.

Participating archaeologists, art historians, and digital artists presented their work in photogrammetry, digital animation, LiDAR scanning, and historical reconstruction. They addressed the vital role that digital technologies can play in deepening knowledge of the past, documenting cultural heritage, and enlivening contemporary artistic and museum practices. The presentations also drew attention to fundamental questions of authenticity, ownership, and reproduction inherent in the use of these new media technologies.

Huffman shared 3D models, macro photographs, and animated video clips created for an exhibition of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s large multi-panel engraved View of Venice of 1500. As Huffman pointed out, this complex reproduction was in its own time the pinnacle of advanced image technology in the service of cultural heritage.


Campo San Polo with colorization. Detail, Jacopo de’ Barbari and Anton Kolb, View of Venice, c. 1497-1500.

Huffman also recently published “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice (1500): ‘Image Vehicles’ and ‘Pathways of Culture’ Past and Present” in Mediterranea: International Journal of the Transfer of Knowledge 4 (2019): 165-214.

The essay focuses on the iconic and groundbreaking woodcut—Jacopo de’ Barbari and Anton Kolb’s View of Venice (1500)—and an interactive museum installation that Huffman first developed for Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. The exhibition uses the View as a point of departure for the development of multi-media displays about Early Modern Venice and the transfer of knowledge.


Gardens on the Giudecca with colorization. Detail, Jacopo de’ Barbari and Anton Kolb, View of Venice, c. 1497-1500.

Adopting Aby Warburg’s illustrative terminology, the essay extends understandings of the woodcut, namely its function as an ‘image vehicle’ and its invention and realization as a product of cultural pathways. This concept, ‘pathways of culture’, also relates to the digital methods and visualized media in the exhibition, where their application advances a new methodology in art history, just as Aby Warburg did in the early twentieth century. And like Warburg who privileged visual imagery and traced its ideological transmission with his Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-1929), the curatorial team of the exhibition uses and systematizes original visualization to drive the analyses of art, architectural and urban history in new and exciting ways.