As gold-ground painting waned in the quattrocento, Italian artists became increasingly interested in the potential of background as a representational space. Gentile da Fabriano, Carlo Crivelli, and Giovanni Bellini combined meticulously-rendered architectural details with evocative landscape imagery to represent multiple dimensions of the natural environment rendered as systems of functionally and visually interrelated parts: fields, buildings, and people organized and animated by the forces of God, Nature, and man. Existing interpretations of such background images often cast them as derivative of Northern art (charged symbolic landscapes) or as precursors of the landscape genre (naturalistic, objective representations). Resisting binaries of symbolism/naturalism, secular/religious, and content/ornament, this paper proposes to treat these backgrounds as ‘environments,’ a term that allows one to think critically about how backgrounds construct and determine pictorial meaning. Beyond a setting for narrative, background landscapes are complex systems that bring viewers into particular spatio-temporal proximity to depicted events.

This paper examines the multivalent functions of landscape at the margins of sixteenth-century maps and city views. As cartographic methods became more scientific in this period, marginal landscapes remained stubbornly pictorial, providing natural, unruly boundaries that frame manmade territory. Yet the mountains, grassy knolls, and forests at the margins of maps and city views are not neutral; in unacknowledged ways, they could extend, rather than delimit, the world of the map’s depiction. I consider the possibilities of marginal landscape in three prominent sixteenth-century examples: Jacopo de’Barbari’s 1500 View of Venice, with its Alpine horizon; Leonardo Bufalini’s 1551 Plan of Rome; and Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s 1571 Civitates Orbis Terrarum.

When Pope Urban VIII concluded the 1623 negotiations that would result in the devolution of Urbino to the papacy, he still had to wait for the elderly, heirless Duke to die before he could take possession of the territory. During those eight years of waiting, however, he could comfort himself with a sumptuous volume of over a hundred watercolor landscapes of the duchy, prepared for him by the painter and cartographer Francesco Mingucci. Paging through these views, the pope could access a direct and visceral sense of ownership and accomplishment.

This paper analyzes Mingucci’s paintings and his panegyric introduction in their political context, and offers the volume as an unusually concrete example of the idea that landscape views are simulacra of the places they depict. Mingucci’s bird’s-eye views and encyclopedic approach match his goals; taken together, the landscape images in the volume represent the state both literally and conceptually.