Studies of Venice, including surveys of art, architecture, politics, and business, often hinge on an author’s understanding or characterization of Venezianità, or the concept of being Venetian. Bronwen Wilson directly addresses this facet of early modern Venetian studies in her erudite explication of the evolution of Venetian identity in an era featuring the dynamic growth of the printing industry and the increasing use of prints by illustrators and artists. For Wilson, Venetians learned to read images of Venice and Venetians themselves, as did the outside world, and, indeed, “may have come to see themselves as they were seen by others” (265). In other words, the power of printed images of cities, spaces, and individuals was in fact so strong that the prints ultimately transformed identities to conform to the two-dimensional, black-and-white woodcuts, etchings, and engravings issuing from the hundreds of presses operating in Renaissance Venice and elsewhere during the sixteenth century. Wilson’s argument is appealing due to the art-historical understanding of the impact images had and have on their audience as well as the influence circulated images have on manufacturers of future images. The World in Venice, however, suffers from the impossible task set by Wilson to find confirmation for...