Veduta | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

A veduta (Italian for "view"; plural vedute) is a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, more often, print of a cityscape or some other vista. The painters of vedute are referred to as vedutisti. This genre of landscape originated in Flanders, where artists such as Paul Bril painted vedute as early as the 16th century. In the 17th century, Dutch painters made a specialty of detailed and accurate recognizable city and landscapes that appealed to the sense of local pride of the wealthy Dutch middle class. An archetypal example is Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft. The Ghent architect, draughtsman and engraver Lieven Cruyl (1640–1720) contributed to the development of the vedute during his residence in Rome in the late 17th century. Cruyl's drawings reproduce the topographical aspects of the urban landscape. As the itinerary of the Grand Tour became somewhat standardized, vedute of familiar scenes like the Roman Forum or the Grand Canal recalled early ventures to the Continent for aristocratic Englishmen. By the mid-18th century, Venice became renowned as the centre of the vedutisti. The genre was pioneered by Luca Carlevarijs, and its greatest practitioners belonged to the Canal and Guardi families of Venice. Some of them went to work as painters in major capitals of Europe, e.g., Canaletto in London and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto in Dresden and Warsaw. In other parts of 18th-century Italy, idiosyncratic varieties of the genre evolved. Giovanni Paolo Pannini was the first veduta artist to concentrate on painting ruins. The Dutch painter Gaspar van Wittel (who worked in Rome, where he was known as Vanvitelli) and others painted veduta esatta, i.e. exact vedute, which was a topographically accurate depiction of a cityscape or monument and in which the human and animal figures played a secondary role. His collaborators included Hendrik Frans van Lint, who would become one of the leading vedute painters in the first half of the 18th century.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (4)

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used. In art, the term "painting" describes both the act and the result of the action (the final work is called "a painting").

Canaletto

Giovanni Antonio Canal (18 October 1697 – 19 April 1768), commonly known as Canaletto (kanaˈletto), was an Italian painter from the Republic of Venice, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school. Painter of city views or vedute, of Venice, Rome, and London, he also painted imaginary views (referred to as capricci), although the demarcation in his works between the real and the imaginary is never quite clearcut. He was further an important printmaker using the etching technique.

Cityscape

In the visual arts, a cityscape (urban landscape) is an artistic representation, such as a painting, drawing, print or photograph, of the physical aspects of a city or urban area. It is the urban equivalent of a landscape. Townscape is roughly synonymous with cityscape, though it implies the same difference in urban size and density (and even modernity) implicit in the difference between the words city and town. In urban design the terms refer to the configuration of built forms and interstitial space.