The First Fisheye View? Vienna, 1529

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 567

This magnificent woodcut, The Siege of Vienna*, executed by Nicolaus Meldmann, was published in 1529/30 and depicts a view of the city of Vienna from an extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented perspective.  I've paid some attention to antique images that look straight down at things (Looking Straight-on At Things  and  Looking  Straight-Down on Things) and I can say that they are in general pretty uncommon--this is the first time though that I've noticed a fish-eye view looking straight down, an image conveying a 360-degree horizon-to-horizon landscape.  It is just simply phenomenal, even if a fair number of the buildings in town are missing and so on--the (unnamed) artist-on-the-spot actually climbed a high spire and made a number of sketches, extrapolating it all into this horizon-bending whole.  But the representation of the city wasn't the paramount concern in the print--it was the placement of what was going on outside of it that was important. And what was happening concerned all of Europe--it was the invasion by the Muslim Ottoman Empire, led by Sultan Suleiman I (the magnificent), and in 1529 they had made their way through Hungary and into central Europe, laying  seige to the principal city of Vienna with an army of 150,000 (or 300,00) soldiers. . It was the high point of the Ottoman expansion, as they were ultimately turned back by the Austrians in a determined and complex series of battles of mining/tunnels versus anti-mining and anti-tunnels (such battles being fought, still, deeply into World War I).  So this print was made for a wide audience of Europeans, trying to get a glimpse of the siege of Vienna and the positions of the Ottoman forces, knowing that the outcome of the siege could very well hold the fate of the rest of Europe.  

If you check out the other posts in this blog on "Looking Straight Down" you'll see a number of examples of early straightdownedness--none though approach the vast area that the artist of this print had taken under control and displayed. 

*I found this reproduction in Landau and Parshall's beautiful, attentive and intuitively incisive The Renaissance Print,1470-1550, published by Yale University Press in 1994.  It is a rich book, with very deep depth and a light touch, hard to do in an academic/historical work.  But they did it.