Bird’s‑eye views
The Art Market: sparkling results at Christie’s, online overload and 16th century Venice.
By Georgina Adam
The Financial Times Weekend
The map, atlas and rare book dealer Daniel Crouch has scored a major sale shortly after setting up on his own in Oxford at the end of last year, selling a very rare map of Venice — the only known example not already in a museum — to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for “a seven-figure sum”.
The huge woodcut map was made in 1500 and presents a birds-eye view of La Serenissima. Its creator, Jacopo de Barbari, documented every building, canal and open square by dint of climbing every bell tower in the city: so exceptional was the result that it was the first image ever to be copyrighted.
The map goes on show in Minneapolis from February 6 in its exhibition ‘Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting’, which includes the two Titians from the collection of the Duke of Sutherland. One, “Diana and Actaeon”, was bought by the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland for £50m; the other, “Diana and Callisto” is coming up for sale at the same price in December 2012.
Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper.