Short answers, pulled from the story.
A cityscape is an artistic representation of the physical aspects of a city or urban area, including paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs. It is the urban equivalent of a landscape. The term townscape is roughly synonymous, though it implies a smaller or less dense urban setting.
One of the oldest known cityscapes is a fresco at the Baths of Trajan in Rome, dating from the first century A.D. It depicts a bird's eye view of an ancient city and is among the earliest examples of the form on record.
Jan Vermeer painted the View of Delft around 1660-1661. It is described as a quite accurate portrait of the city of Delft and is one of the most famous works produced when the cityscape became an independent genre in the Netherlands.
The cityscape became a recognized independent genre halfway through the 17th century in the Netherlands. Before that point, city views appeared mainly as backgrounds in portraits and religious paintings rather than as subjects in their own right.
At the end of the 19th century, impressionist painters expanded the cityscape to include suburban areas, industrial districts, building sites, and railway yards. Their focus was the atmosphere and dynamics of everyday urban life, rather than formal architectural subjects.
Well-known living cityscape painters include Rackstraw Downes, Antonio Lopez Garcia, and Richard Estes. Yvonne Jacquette is also notable for specializing in aerial cityscapes. These painters came to renewed attention with a revival of figurative art at the end of the 20th century.