Lodovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione […] di tutti i Paesi Bassi

Guicciardini, Lodovico. Descrittione […] di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania Inferiore. Antwerp, Willem Silvius, 1567.

The famous first edition of Lodovico Guicciardini’s monumental description of the Netherlands, illustrated with five double-page maps and ten extraordinary double-page city views depicting the flourishing cities of the Low Countries on the eve of the Eighty Years’ War.

One of the great geographical and topographical books of the Renaissance, the work survives here in a richly and sensitively contemporary coloured copy whose maps and city views remain among the most visually compelling representations of the sixteenth-century Netherlands ever printed.

Edition & Bibliographic Information

¶6 A-D6 E-F4 G2 H-I4 K6 L4 M2 N-P6 Q4 R2 S6 T-V4 X6 Y-Z4 Aa8 Bb-Cc6 Dd2 Ee-Ff4 Gg-Ii6 Kk2 Ll6 Mm-Nn4 Oo6 P4 P[2]6 = 12 leaves, pages 1–296 with numerous pagination irregularities, and 10 index leaves printed in double columns.

Illustrated with large architectural woodcut borders on title and following leaves, including the arms and portrait medallion of Philip II of Spain; one double-page engraved map of the Netherlands; four double-page provincial maps; ten double-page city views and plans in woodcut; double-page views of Antwerp Cathedral and Antwerp Town Hall; all executed in extraordinarily differentiated contemporary hand-colouring. Further illustrated with fourteen ochre-coloured arabesque chapter borders and numerous woodcut initials. Folio (323 × 216 mm).

Nineteenth-century half calf over five gilt-decorated raised bands with gilt spine title. Binding worn and stained; interior only lightly foxed; contemporary ownership inscription on title rendered illegible.

The Netherlands Before the Catastrophe

Guicciardini’s book preserves a vision of the Netherlands at the precise moment before political collapse and religious war transformed the region forever.

The work appeared in 1567, immediately after the iconoclastic uprisings of 1566 had swept through Antwerp and other cities of the Low Countries. Churches were desecrated, artworks destroyed, and tensions between Spanish authority and Protestant reform escalated rapidly toward what would become the Eighty Years’ War.

Yet remarkably little of this looming catastrophe is visible in the book itself.

Instead, Guicciardini presents an image of prosperity, civic order, commercial wealth, and urban magnificence. The cities of Flanders, Brabant, and Holland appear vibrant and harmonious, filled with churches, harbours, markets, canals, fortifications, and bustling citizens. The effect is almost painfully nostalgic in retrospect: a vision of an “ideal world” immediately before its descent into violence and fragmentation.

An Italian Merchant Discovers the Netherlands

The author himself was uniquely positioned to write such a work.

Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589), nephew of the famous historian Francesco Guicciardini, arrived in Antwerp as a young Florentine merchant tasked with rescuing the failing northern branch of his family’s trading enterprise. The business collapsed nonetheless, but Guicciardini remained in Antwerp and gradually entered its cosmopolitan humanist circles.

He became associated with figures such as Abraham Ortelius and increasingly devoted himself to scholarship, geography, and historical writing. His Descrittione emerged from more than a decade of work and sought to describe the Netherlands not as isolated provinces, but as a coherent cultural and geographical whole.

This was a profoundly modern intellectual move. Earlier chorographies had largely treated provinces individually; Guicciardini instead attempted to construct a unified vision of the Netherlands itself.

The First Great Printed Views of Dutch Cities

The illustrations transformed the book into one of the masterpieces of Renaissance topography.

Cornelis de Hooghe’s maps and city views represent the first time Dutch and Flemish cities were depicted on such a scale and with such visual ambition in a printed book. Some appear as panoramic vedute, others from daring bird’s-eye perspectives, and still others as almost vertical plan views approaching modern cartography.

The provincial maps of Brabant, Holland, Flanders, and Hainaut accompany magnificent city views of Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Ghent, Bruges, Liège, Leuven, Ypres, Mechelen, and ’s-Hertogenbosch.

Antwerp occupies a particularly privileged position within the work as Guicciardini’s adopted home and the commercial centre of the Netherlands itself. The city is visually celebrated through separate double-page representations of its cathedral and town hall, symbolic respectively of spiritual and civic order. Particularly remarkable is the engraved view of the town hall populated with countless tiny peaceful citizens moving through its square.

Only a few years later, during the “Spanish Fury” of 1576, Antwerp itself would be devastated by fire, massacre, and plunder.

A Renaissance Vision of Order

The Descrittione is therefore more than a geographical survey.

It represents one of the final Renaissance attempts to imagine the Netherlands as a unified political and cultural entity governed through civic harmony, commerce, and peaceful coexistence. Guicciardini consciously chose approximately 1560 as the idealized “reference point” for his account, even though the political situation had already begun to deteriorate by the time of publication.

The book became enormously influential, appearing in numerous expanded editions and translations. Its maps and city views circulated independently, were copied repeatedly, and helped define the visual identity of the Netherlands for generations.

The Italian first edition of 1567, however, remains exceptionally rare, particularly in such beautifully preserved contemporary colouring.

Provenance

Contemporary ownership inscription on title later deliberately obscured.

Literature

Adams G 1540; Bagrow/Skelton 492 and 497; BM STC Dutch 90; Brunet II, 806; Cockx-Indestege et al., no. 360; Funck 325; Graesse III, 178f.; Nederlandsch Historisch Scheepvaart Museum 86; Parent 290; Schottenloher, Bibliographie III, 31576ab.

For a fuller scholarly description and illustrations, see Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, number 57:
Wunderkammer Catalogue 90, Volume II