Like the Bayeux Embroidery of the later eleventh century, the incunabulum of 1493 known in English as the Nuremberg Chronicle 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. For example, the very same image of a cityscape was used interchangeably for both Damascus (Fig. 1) and Naples (Fig. 2) 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’. 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. 3). 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.

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. The investigation into whether the designers of the Bayeux Embroidery ‘had actual buildings in mind’ is a worthy endeavour, even if the paucity of remaining medieval structures, difficulty of interpreting the archaeological evidence, and routine adaptation of older pictorial images within the embroidery circumscribe the results. The analysis of the architectural representations on the embroidery cannot be approached solely with the expectation that it will provide empirical documentation of the buildings; the structures must also be considered in relation to the pictorial narrative as a whole.