Fra Niccolò Guidalotto’s City View, Nautical Atlas and Book of Memories: Cartography and Propaganda between Venice and Constantinople

This paper focuses on three Venetian sources created in the Venetian embassy in Constantinople during the seventeenth century that include a painted city view of Constantinople, a nautical atlas, and an illustrated volume. It explores the medieval traditions of these sources from a comparative perspective and the connections between them: the nautical atlas served as the ideological, artistic and cartographic source for the later Constantinople panorama; and the book of miniatures described the author’s sojourn in Constantinople and the political events surrounding the creation of the panorama. In their splendid iconography, these sources combine between word and image and serve as fascinating examples of Venetian visual prop-aganda against the Ottomans during the War of Candia.