Vienna: Measurement

Characteristically, the Enlightenment encouraged the accurate measurement of the world and Bellotto’s views indeed reflect this ambition. Like contemporary surveyors and mapmakers, he used high vantage points, sighting devices, and geometric projection to record the modern city with empirical precision. Instruments such as the graphometer shown here, the sighting boards used and depicted by the Imperial cartographer Giovanni Jacopo de Marinoni in De re ichnographica (1751), and Joseph Liesganig’s triangulated map of Vienna’s surroundings all reveal a shared pursuit—to translate space into knowledge. Bellotto’s paintings, though not strictly topographical, belong to this same world of observation and calibration, where artistic vision meets scientific inquiry.