The View Painter & the Eighteenth Century. 1

Defining Veduta

As most of the paintings shown today come under the category of “veduta,” it is worth defining for the uninitiated, I shall take the definition from The Oxford Dictionary of Art:

Veduta. Term (Italian: ‘view’) applied to a representation of a town or landscape that is essentially topographical in conception, specifically one that is faithful enough to allow the location to be identified (an imaginary but realistic-looking view can be called a vedute (for example Carlevaris, above) are called vedutisti.¹

1Ian Chilvers, Harold Osborne, Dennis Farr, The Oxford Dictionary of Art (OUP, 1988), 514.