A panoramic drawing of Dresden's Elbe Valley (1645) is at the center of this exhibition. This is a new acquisition of the Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett and it is a special testimony to the discovery of vision in the first half of the 17th century. The large-format drawing shows a surveyor at work in the foreground and served as a template for an engraving by Caspar Merian for his masterpiece "Topographia Germaniae".

Other cityscapes from city books, which became very popular from the second half of the 16th century until the 17th century, as well as depictions of the equipment of the Giant Hall in the Dresden Castle with Saxon vedutas complete the exhibition on early landscape representation and surveying.