GENUA
£395
Stunning panorama of Genoa from Braun Hogenberg's Civitates.
Excellent colour
Slight printers crease otherwise very good condition.
Genoa, mistress and queen of Liguria, illustrious city in Italy, provides a safe anchorage for ships with her huge harbour on the coast of the Ligurian Sea. The city has a poor and barren soil, a fact that has produced shrewd and prudent merchants. These latter have raised it to such prosperity in goods and wealth that in all Italy there is barely another city before whose gates lie so many country estates, built purely for leisure and with incredible pride. It can be judged from this that the Genoese parade their wealth ostentatiously: not without reason does the city [...] bear the epithet "the proud".
COMMENTARY BY BRAUN: "Genoa, the capital of Liguria, is a powerful, proud and very ancient city. [...] It has an extremely well fortified and safe harbour and is also famous for its honest merchants. In all periods it has produced excellent merchants who deal by water and land in all things. [...] It currently recognizes the King of Spain as its supreme lord and is ruled by a duke who is appointed afresh every year."
The trading port and city of Genova is presented from an ideal, elevated viewpoint from the south. The layout of the city can be clearly seen as it slopes down to the sea. In the centre stands the Romanesque cathedral of San Lorenzo, built in the 13th century. Higher up the hillside lies the Palazzo Ducale, here still as a medieval complex from the 13th century. The approximately 80-m-high lighthouse (La lanterna) on the left is another symbol of the city. Genoa's economic importance is underlined by the volume of shipping in front of the port; the New World was discovered in 1492 by the Genoa born Columbus. 1407 saw the founding in Genoa of the Banco di San Giorgio, which lent money to various monarchs in the early modern era and thereby earned Genoa an exceptionally important position within the network of Europe's ruling houses.
code : M3619
Cartographer : BRAUN & HOGENBERG
Date : 1575 Cologne
Size : 16.5*48 cms
availability : Available
Price : £395
Georg Braun (1541-1622) and Frans Hogenberg (1535-1590) were co-publishers of the monumental Civitates Orbis Terrarum, “the earliest systematic city atlas” (Koeman), published from 1572 onwards. Designed as a companion to Ortelius’ world atlas the Theatrum, this enormous work, which was expanded to six volumes by 1617 incorporating over 500 plans and views, must be viewed as one of the most ambitious book producing ventures of all time, and certainly, with Ortelius’ Theatrum and Blaeu’s Atlas Maior among the greatest achievements in the history of cartography.
Braun compiled the accompanying text, printed on the reverse of the engraved sheets, while the plans were engraved by Hogenberg, who had also prepared some of the maps for Ortelius’ Theatrum. Hogenberg used generally up-to-date and accurate maps, surveys and reports from local sources to compile this collection of plans and bird’s-eye views of all the major towns of Europe, some African, Middle Eastern and Indian towns, and the New World cities of Mexico and Cusco. One of the major contributors was Georg (or Joris) Hoefnagel, who supplied some 63 manuscript drawings, the vast majority from personal observation.
