Striving to Observe all Things in Renaissance Italian Landscapes

A fable recounting the furtive measurement of Florence once circulated among Renaissance literati. Giorgio Vasari and Benedetto Varchi narrated how, over six months, the sculptor Niccolò Tribolo and watchmaker Benvenuto della Volpaia measured every corner of the city, at night and in secret. Their surveying records were transferred to three dimensions to produce a now lost wooden model, used by Pope Clement VII to follow the movements of Charles V’s imperial troops during the 1530 siege of Florence. Scholars often assess similar city reliefs in terms of early modern military planning and the development of modern surveillance technologies. My paper instead resituates Tribolo’s legendary topographical model among his related works in garden and grotto design. It investigates how Tribolo’s approach to surveying and modeling visible, hidden, and occluded landscapes reveals incipient period interests in disciplining the eye as an instrument that could be sharpened to gauge the limits of spatial perception.