Search

In the long eighteenth century, Venice was memorialized in painted vedute, or viewpaintings, which became both a style and a subject matter, buoyed by the popularity of the tableaux as souvenirs for Grand Tour travellers. The veduta, along with its fantasy counterpart, the capriccio, re-created the view as well as the perceptual experience of the spectator, engaging the processes of visual apprehension involved in the incision of the image onto the retina. Vedutisti, or view-painters, would use the camera obscura to achieve verisimilitude in a painting, while enlarging known monuments so as to activate the sense memory of the viewer. The Venetian veduta, in cross-pollination with picturesque landscape painting, facilitated the transformation from nature to art within the eye, projecting the perspectivized two-dimensional visual field onto the three-dimensional visual world, making pictures of the world around us, transforming the way we view the landscape today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]