The Monumental City Book of the Renaissance in a Complete Contemporary Illuminated Copy with 363 Double-Page Engravings in French Morocco Bindings
[Braun, Georg and Franz Hogenberg]. Theatre des Cites du Monde. [The remaining volumes with varying titles.] Six volumes in two tomes. Cologne, circa 1575–1618.
One of the greatest illustrated books of the Renaissance and the first monumental city atlas in the history of printing: Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, presented here in the rare French translation of Hierosme van Belle and preserved in a complete contemporary illuminated copy with 363 imperial-folio double-page engravings depicting more than 500 cities from across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Bound shortly after publication in two magnificent contemporary French morocco bindings à la Du Seuil, the present example appears to be unique in its survival and ranks among the most beautiful known copies of the work.
Edition & Bibliographic Information
Six illuminated engraved title pages, 22 preliminary leaves, 363 double-page engraved views, including two large multi-folding panoramas with separate text leaves, two additional double leaves, and 32 index leaves. All leaves mounted on guards; indexes printed in double columns.
Illustrated with six etched architectural title pages and 363 double-page engraved city views, many multi-part, entirely illuminated in contemporary hand-colouring. Imperial folio (approximately 420 × 310 mm).
Contemporary reddish-brown French morocco bindings à la Du Seuil over six raised bands decorated with gilt fillets; spine compartments with delicate ornamental tools arranged in lozenge formations; covers with triple gilt fillet frames and corner fleurons; marbled endleaves and gilt edges throughout.
The bindings remain of extraordinary importance in themselves. According to available market records, no other complete copy in contemporary French morocco bindings has appeared on the market during the last century.
The Great Theatre of the World
When Georg Braun (1541–1622) and the engraver Franz Hogenberg (before 1540–1592?) began the project around 1572, nothing comparable had ever been attempted.
Produced across nearly half a century with the assistance of more than one hundred collaborators, the Civitates Orbis Terrarum became the monumental urban counterpart to Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas. If Ortelius mapped the world, Braun and Hogenberg sought to visualize civilization itself.
The work gathers together panoramic views, bird’s-eye plans, silhouettes, fortified cities, harbours, capitals, pilgrimage centres, trading ports, and colonial settlements from the entirety of the known world. Moscow, Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Goa, Calcutta, Mexico City, and Cuzco appear beside hundreds of European cities rendered with extraordinary richness and detail.
The panoramic view of Antwerp unfolds across an immense folding engraving nearly 78 × 52 cm, while the vast panorama of Kraków stretches to approximately 1.10 meters in width.
A Collaborative Monument of Renaissance Cosmography
The project assembled some of the greatest topographical artists and cartographers of the age.
Among the most important contributors was the cartographer Jakob van Deventer, who had fled to Cologne late in life and supplied many of the highly accurate city plans originally prepared for the Spanish crown. Georg Hoefnagel and his son Jakob travelled extensively through France, Spain, England, Flanders, Bavaria, Prague, Vienna, and the Ottoman-Hungarian frontier gathering visual material firsthand.
Braun himself openly encouraged readers to submit additional city views for future inclusion, allowing the work continually to expand over successive decades. The resulting structure became vast, cumulative, and encyclopedic, reflecting the evolving geography and political consciousness of late Renaissance Europe.
Despite the varied origins of the source material, Hogenberg succeeded in giving the engravings a remarkably unified visual language.
Cities Before the Thirty Years’ War
The historical importance of the Civitates can scarcely be overstated.
Many of the views preserve medieval urban structures before their destruction during the Thirty Years’ War or their later transformation through Baroque rebuilding campaigns. For numerous cities, the engravings remain among the most important surviving visual documents of their premodern appearance.
The geopolitical tensions of late sixteenth-century Europe are likewise visible throughout the work. Cities east of Vienna, particularly in Hungary, Croatia, and Transylvania, frequently appear as heavily fortified defensive centres reflecting the Ottoman threat and the military anxieties surrounding the “Long Turkish War” of 1593–1606.
Military events, volcanic eruptions, harbour traffic, executions, battles, and scenes of everyday labour all animate the cityscapes, transforming them into living historical theatres rather than static maps.
The Renaissance Invention of the Global View
The visual sophistication of the work is extraordinary.
Some views appear as pure silhouettes against the horizon; others unfold from elevated bird’s-eye perspectives approaching aerial cartography. The artists constantly experimented with scale, perspective, and spatial organization in order to render cities as coherent organisms embedded within surrounding landscapes.
Particularly remarkable is the sequence devoted to Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg observatory on the island of Hven. The Civitates gradually “zooms” from a cosmic-scale map of Denmark toward increasingly intimate views of the island, the observatory complex, and finally the scientific instruments themselves. The effect strikingly anticipates modern aerial mapping and reflects the Renaissance ambition to comprehend the world simultaneously from the furthest cosmic perspective and the closest empirical observation.
The work therefore functions not merely as a city atlas, but as a Renaissance cosmography — an attempt to represent the ordered totality of the world itself.
A Fully Illuminated Masterpiece
The contemporary illumination elevates the present copy into an object of exceptional magnificence.
Across six engraved title pages and 363 double-page views, skies shift from violet to rose, rivers deepen from pale blue into dark marine tones, landscapes extend in luminous greens and yellows, and the countless heraldic devices are painted with extraordinary precision. City roofs blaze in red while ships, carriages, costumes, banners, and market scenes animate the pages with remarkable vitality.
The colouring was executed with extraordinary patience and consistency throughout, producing what remains even today a remarkably vivid and immersive image of the world more than four centuries ago.
Provenance
European private collection.
Literature
Alden 575/7 (vol. I only); BM STC German 148 (this edition?); Brunet I, 1287; Cox III, 71, 168f., and 235; cf. Fünf Jahrhunderte 104 (Latin edition); Graesse I, 552; cf. Hiler 111, Lipperheide Aa 22, and Nederlandsch Historisch Scheepvaart Museum 104 (Latin editions only); Phillips 4105; Schmitz; Tooley 80, 161, 304, and 305; Vignau-Wilberg 2017.
For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 59:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II
