By drawing attention to the scholarly preoccupation with “real” buildings at the expense of understanding medieval representational strategies on their own terms, the case of the Nuremberg Chronicle’s cityscapes helpfully frames this study of the representations of architecture in the Bayeux Embroidery. Like the Bayeux Embroidery of the later eleventh century, this incunabulum of 1493 has been the subject of many claims about its utility as a document of contemporary architectural practices. On the one hand, there is the publisher Anton Koberger’s grandiose assertion that the 101 different sites it depicts will lead you to think that you are seeing these places “with your own eyes.” On the other hand, Koberger’s statement has to be qualified by the numerous instances of image recycling within the Chronicle. The very same image of a cityscape was used interchangeably for both Damascus (Fig. 52) and Naples (Fig. 53) as well as for eight other places, including the entire country of Spain, a fact that led Ernst Gombrich to refer to the Chronicle’s “indifference to truthful captions,” and Stephen Orgel to observe that “the imagined generic looks very much like the particular.” Nonetheless the thirty-two unique representations of towns presented within the Chronicle number among the first panoramic vistas ever made, as exemplified most spectacularly by the depiction of Nuremberg that extends over two folios (Fig. 54). Perhaps it is our own expectations of setting and place that make the apparent deception of the Nuremberg Chronicle’s repeating images so disappointing. Yet it is also possible to imagine how even the homographs might serve the broader purposes of the Chronicle in providing a visual organizational armature, in making the volume more beautiful, and in offering imaginative prompts for far-away places.

The investigation into whether the designers of the Bayeux Embroidery “had actual buildings in mind” is a worthy endeavor, even if the paucity of remaining medieval structures in general, and not one of the buildings identified on the textile, make it a challenging enterprise. In addition, the difficulty of interpreting the archaeological evidence, especially the timber structures thought to lie behind a number of the images, and the routine adaptation of older pictorial images within the embroidery further circumscribe the results.