JOHANNES BLAEU (1596-1673) Theatrum Civitatum et Admirandorum Italiae (Theater of the Cities and Marvels of Italy)

JOHANNES BLAEU (1596-1673) Theatrum Civitatum et Admirandorum Italiae (Theater of the Cities and Marvels of Italy) Amsterdam: Johannes Blaeu, 1663 - Novum Italiae Theatrum,. continens Regna Neapolis et Siciliae. (New Theater of Italy, Containing the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily) The Hague: Rutgeri Christophori Alberts, 1724. Together 3 volumes. Folio (22 x 14 inches; 20 3/4 x 13 inches). First two volumes: Text in Latin, mounted on guards throughout. General title-pages in Van der Krogt's variants 1B and 2B, half-titles, privilege leaf as found in variant B only. Additional engraved title-page to volume II (only, without engraved title-page to volume I, lightly browned and edges a bit frayed), 119 engraved plates of views, plans and monuments, comprising: 8 folding double-page plates, 76 double-page plates, 2 plates on one double-page, 25 full-page plates and 8 illustrations in the text, mounted on guards throughout, including plate 11 Bononia complete with the folding extension (the folding plate of Frascati a little creased at fold and with long tear affecting the image and another marginal tear to crease fold, but without loss, occasional light spotting and browning, heavier to about 11 plates, light marginal dampstaining throughout volume II, heavier and affecting the images in a few central gatherings). Contemporary Dutch gilt paneled vellum, all edges gilt (extremities rubbed, spines worn with considerable loss, lacking ties). Third volume: Letterpress title-page printed in red and black. Additional engraved title-page frontispiece, additional double-page engraved map of Italy by Sanson, published by Covens and Mortier, 2 double-page and folding, 26 double-page, and 11 full-page views in and around Naples and Sicily (some browning). Contemporary speckled calf, gilt (some surface tears, hinges a bit weak). Provenance: evidence of stamps removed from front pastedown and engraved title-page in volume II; with the large engraved armorial bookplate of John Holland, Heraldry Artist, BY WILLIAM HOGARTH, on the front paste-down of volume III. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST TWO VOLUMES OF BLAEU'S CELEBRATED BOOKS OF TOWNS AND MONUMENTS OF ITALY, accompanied and completed by the later 1724 edition of the third volume, containing spectacular views of Naples and Sicily. The first two volumes are the original Latin edition, with volume I as Van der Krogt's variant C (no priority assigned), containing 6 extra plates. The second volume is devoted to Ancient Rome, with splendid views of circuses, theatres, and amphitheaters. A large portion of this latter volume, dealing with Egyptian obelisks, is based on the works of Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). These volumes are VERY RARE, only “About 75 copies (single volumes included) are known.” The Blaeu family firm was founded by Willem Janzoon Blaeu (1571-1638) in 1596. He was eventually joined by his sons, Cornelius (1616-1648) and Joan (1596-1673). The firm became the most productive cartographic establishment in the Netherlands until it was destroyed by fire in 1672. The elder Blaeu initiated the great series of atlases that culminated in the "Atlas Maior", in which Joannes Blaeu incorporated much of the geographical knowledge bequeathed him by his father. With the engraved armorial bookplate of John Holland, by William Hogarth (1697-1764) who as one of the great exponents of cartoon, caricature and moralizing painting, was the originator of the celebrated "A Rake's Progress" (1734). He is known to have engraved three ex-libris (bookplates) of which the one for John Holland, as here, heraldry artist, is the most important. This is the rare first state of the plate, of which the shield was re-engraved to reduce the lion rampant's size and that of the fleur-de-lys. The second state is illustrated in the catalogue Ex-libris o el arte de identificar sus libros, Bogotá, 1988. Though more formal than much of Hogarth's work, this print shows the sureness of line and perfection of composition characteristic of his art. Previously in the Summers collection. 2i/3. William Hogarth (GB, 1697-1764), JOHN HOLLAND, C3, 107 x 103, c.1735. F15102. Viz. ELJ Vol. iii p. 1, BNL #55; Van der Krogt 43:211.1L and 43:211.2L; Koeman Bl 97. Original book collation and cataloging by Kate Hunter. Additional details provided by Alison Petretti. # 72lib919 Johannes (Joan) Blaeu (c. 1596/1599 to 1673) was the eldest son of Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571 to 1638), the founder of one of the most consequential cartographic establishments in the history of European publishing. Upon his father's death in 1638, Joan Blaeu expanded the family's atlas program with extraordinary ambition, ultimately producing the celebrated Atlas Maior (1662 to 1665) in eleven or more folio volumes, which remains among the most comprehensive and beautifully produced atlases of the seventeenth century. As a contemporary observer noted in the scholarship on the Blaeu firm, the elder Blaeu "aimed at the full description of heaven, earth, and water," and Joan continued to pursue this encyclopedic goal throughout his editorial career. The Theatrum Civitatum et Admirandorum Italiae represents the crowning contribution of the Blaeu firm to urban topography and the visualization of the Italian peninsula. It is the first monumental town book entirely covering Italy, preceded only by the modest "pocket-size" Italia Hodierna by Jodocus Hondius Jr. (1627) and produced in likely competition with Johannes Janssonius, who in 1657 published the Theatrum Praecipuarum Urbium, which included a volume devoted to Italy. In its scope and grandeur, the Blaeu work surpassed all predecessors. Joan Blaeu's original plan was extraordinarily ambitious. He originally intended to publish two parts, each containing five separately bound volumes. The first part, Civitates Italiae, would treat the cities of Italy, while the second, Admiranda Urbis Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome), would describe the monuments of Rome. The project was not fully realized in his lifetime. He ultimately published only three volumes in 1663: the volume on the cities of the Vatican State (Part 1, Volume 1), an incomplete volume on the cities of Naples and Sicily, and a volume on the circuses and theatres of Rome (Part 2, Volume 1). The three volumes that did appear in 1663 were issued together and are today treated as a set, though the Novum Italiae Theatrum (the Naples and Sicily volume) was sometimes bound and sold separately and carries its own title. After Blaeu's death, his heirs brought out two additional volumes dated 1682, focused on the cities of Piedmont and Savoy. These were reprinted by other publishers in 1693 and 1697. In 1704 or 1705, the Amsterdam-based publisher Pieter Mortier obtained a large portion of the copper plates of Blaeu's Italian city atlases, reprinting the Blaeu maps in a four-volume atlas issued in three languages, namely Latin, French, and Dutch. Many of the copper plates were changed or improved and given Mortier's imprint; some were completely retouched, and new copper plates were engraved in Mortier's own atelier. This Mortier publication, the Nouveau Theatre de l'Italie (New Theater of Italy), achieved wide circulation and was itself reprinted in a virtually identical edition by Rutgeri Christophori Alberts at The Hague in 1724 to 1725. The first edition volumes are exceptionally rare; only about 75 copies, including single volumes, are known to survive. The intellectual and visual sources underlying the Theatrum Civitatum are diverse and reflect the collaborative networks that sustained Dutch publishing in its golden age. During his youth, Joan Blaeu had traveled extensively in Italy, establishing reliable contacts along the way. Around 1660, when his plans for an Italian city atlas began to take shape, he sent his son Pieter to Italy to breathe new life into these contacts. The main supplier of the illustrations and texts was the Italian philosopher and lawyer Carlo-Emanuele Vizzani (1617 to 1661). The texts on the reverse of the maps and prints also refer to other sources, and there is evidence that Blaeu had to rely on older works due to a lack of up-to-date information, including the town maps from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg. The significance of these Italian-Dutch contacts in the creation of Joan Blaeu's Theatrum Italiae was conceived to exploit the phenomenon of the Grand Tour, the ceremonial journey through central Europe undertaken by young men of the upper classes, by offering a glimpse of the country's most appealing sights and locations. Blaeu relied on his son's eyewitness accounts gathered in Italy around 1660, on a network of collaborators, including Vizzani, and on earlier cartographical sources, such as Braun and Hogenberg's Civitates Orbis Terrarum, for the city plans and urban views. The first volume, dedicated to the cities of the Papal State, is illustrated by 77 plates depicting city plans and bird's-eye views of the main cities of central Italy, and is dedicated to the Papal State. The engraved frontispiece carries an allegorical representation of the Church, and the text, printed in Latin, accompanies each plate on the verso, providing historical and topographical commentary drawn principally from Vizzani's contributions. The cities depicted range from the great urban centers of Bologna and Ferrara to smaller hill towns such as Urbino, Orvieto, and Loreto. The bird's-eye views, executed with the high precision characteristic of Dutch copperplate engraving, typically show the city from an elevated, slightly oblique perspective, rendering street grids, major buildings, fortifications, and surrounding landscape in meticulous detail. The inclusion of compass roses and staffage figures in the foregrounds of many views reflects the tradition established by the Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572 to 1617) of Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, the foundational printed atlas of world cities, which Blaeu drew on both directly and compositionally. The second and most intellectually ambitious volume is the Admiranda Urbis Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome). Each section is separately paginated: Roma Vetus (54 pages), De Circis et Ludis Circensibus Romanorum (40 pages), De Obeliscis (315 pages), and De Amphitheatris Theatris Forumque Spectaculis (50 pages). The section on obelisks utilizes sixteenth-century plates from Domenico Fontana's description of the raising of the Obeliscus Vaticanus. This volume is unusual among seventeenth-century city atlases in its focus not on contemporary urban fabric but on the antiquities of ancient Rome. The plates of the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, the Theatre of Marcellus, the amphitheaters, and the fora would have served the Grand Tourist as a portable visual encyclopedia of Roman antiquity, offering reconstructed views of monuments as they were believed to have appeared in their original splendor alongside views of their ruined present state. The treatment of Egyptian obelisks in Rome constitutes the most expansive section of the volume and reflects the broader seventeenth-century fascination with classical archaeology and Egyptology. A large portion of this volume dealing with Egyptian obelisks is based on the works of Athanasius Kircher (1602 to 1680). Kircher, the German Jesuit polymath resident at the Collegio Romano in Rome from 1635, had published his Obeliscus Pamphilius (1650) and his monumental four-volume Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652 to 1654), in which he attempted to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. Kircher's erudition encompassed a number of subjects, and he was regarded at the time as the leading expert on Egyptian hieroglyphics. His dedications inscribed on the obelisk plates link his scholarly authority directly to the Blaeu publication. Kircher was, of course, ultimately wrong in his hieroglyphic interpretations, a fact demonstrated only with the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the Blaeu-Kircher partnership gave the Admiranda Urbis Romae a scholarly prestige that distinguished it sharply from mere pictorial atlases. The use of Domenico Fontana's plates documenting the 1586 re-erection of the Vatican obelisk by Pope Sixtus V, reproduced in the De Obeliscis section, placed the Blaeu volume in direct dialogue with one of the most celebrated architectural and engineering feats of the Counter-Reformation papacy. Fontana's own publication, Della Trasportatione dell'Obelisco Vaticano et delle Fabriche di Sisto V (On the Transportation of the Vatican Obelisk and the Buildings of Sixtus V, 1590), had already established the obelisk as a charged symbol of papal triumphalism and urban renewal. By incorporating Fontana's imagery into the 1663 atlas, Blaeu situated the obelisks of Rome within a continuous narrative that moved from Egyptian pharaonic origin through Roman imperial appropriation to Counter-Reformation Christianization, a narrative framework that resonated deeply with seventeenth-century humanist and theological scholarship. The third volume, issued in the same year as a complementary publication, is titled the Theatrum Civitatum Nec Non Admirandorum Neapolis et Siciliae Regnorum. It is the complete third part of Blaeu's towns and monuments of Italy and is regarded as a rare preliminary edition. It includes the letterpress title, dedication, and beautifully engraved maps. The third volume contains spectacular views of Naples and Sicily, including two double-page and folding plates, twenty-six double-page plates, and eleven full-page views of Naples and Sicily. The kingdom of Naples and Sicily, then still under Spanish Bourbon sovereignty, was a region of extraordinary archaeological and scenic richness. The views of the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius, Messina, Palermo, and the surrounding volcanic landscape represented a distinctive contribution to the corpus of Italian topography. The inclusion of Sicily was significant: the island had appeared only rarely and inadequately in earlier northern European atlases, and Blaeu's engravers, working from sources supplied through his Italian contacts, provided images of a landscape that was simultaneously antique, Baroque in its urban monuments, and dramatically natural. For many northern European viewers, these plates constituted their primary visual encounter with the southernmost reaches of the Italian peninsula. The Theatrum Civitatum holds a foundational position in the history of Italian topography and the documentary record of the seventeenth-century urban landscape. Several of which deserve emphasis. First, the work constitutes a precise visual record of Italian cities at a moment of considerable Baroque urban development. Rome under the papacies of Urban VIII, Innocent X, and Alexander VII had undergone a dramatic physical transformation. Piazzas had been reshaped, new churches commissioned, and ancient ruins increasingly systematized as part of both scholarly and devotional culture. Blaeu's plates of Rome's antiquities, however schematic in their reconstructions, reflect the state of contemporary archaeological knowledge and helped to codify a visual vocabulary for the ruins that would prove enormously influential. Second, the Theatrum sat at the intersection of two powerful cultural forces: the Dutch golden age tradition of precise topographical engraving, and the Italian tradition of the veduta (view), which was at this moment being transformed by printmakers such as Giovanni Battista Falda and Lieven Cruyl into a commercial and artistic genre of great sophistication. The rivalry between Lieven Cruyl and Giovanni Battista Falda was set against the context of the rivalry between the two branches of the De Rossi publishing clan, and Falda's 1676 map set a benchmark in the competitive landscape of Roman printmaking. Cruyl's innovative perspective techniques contrasted with Falda's idealized portrayals of Roman architecture. Blaeu's publication contributed to this competitive environment by establishing a Northern European standard for the representation of Italian cities that publishers on both sides of the Alps had to reckon with. Third, the volume's treatment of ancient Roman monuments provided a scholarly template for the documentation and interpretation of antiquity that anticipates the great archaeological publications of the eighteenth century. The long-term trajectory from Blaeu's Admiranda Urbis Romae through the view publications of Falda and Cruyl in the 1660s and 1670s to the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the mid-eighteenth century represents a continuous and self-conscious tradition in which Blaeu's work participated as a primary node. Piranesi's Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome), begun in the 1740s and 1750s, and his Le Antichita Romane (The Roman Antiquities, 1756) are the most celebrated products of this tradition, but they emerge from a print culture that Blaeu and his contemporaries had helped shape. Fourth, the work served a practical cultural function as a surrogate Grand Tour. The circuses, obelisks, and theatres treated by Blaeu in his Admiranda Urbis Romae were among the highlights that Grand Tour travelers sought out, and viewing the plates offered a preliminary or supplementary encounter with monuments that many readers would never see in person. Architects and patrons in northern Europe who could not travel to Rome used such atlases to study ancient and modern buildings; the plates of Roman temples, circuses, and amphitheaters furnished design vocabulary that circulated through European architectural practice. Figures such as Inigo Jones in England, who had traveled to Italy but worked in a milieu in which Italian architectural publications circulated widely, represent the kind of practitioner for whom such volumes were cultural necessities. The commercial success of the Theatrum Civitatum was sufficient to sustain multiple reprints over more than sixty years. The great success of the work gave rise to further reprints, including that edited by R. Alberts and published in 1724 to 1725. Pieter Mortier reissued all the Blaeu maps of the Italian town atlas in an atlas comprising four volumes, amending and retouching several of the Blaeu maps, putting his name on nearly all of them, and adding engraved numbers. This longevity in print is itself a measure of the work's authority; the atlas continued to be purchased, consulted, and displayed well into the eighteenth century. The provenance of surviving copies also attests to the work's prestige. The large engraved armorial bookplate of John Holland, Heraldry Artist, by William Hogarth, appears on the front pastedown of the third volume in at least one known copy. This association with Hogarth, one of the most important figures of eighteenth-century English visual culture, is a reminder of how widely these volumes traveled and of the diversity of their ownership. The Theatrum Civitatum et Admirandorum Italiae thus occupies a position of singular importance in the history of Italian topography: as the first comprehensive town atlas of Italy, as a record of the seventeenth-century urban landscape from the Papal State to Sicily, as a monument of Dutch printing culture and its engagement with Italian humanism, and as a widely disseminated visual authority whose plates shaped how educated Europeans imagined, studied, and eventually depicted the cities, ruins, and landscapes of the peninsula for generations to come. REFERENCES CONSULTED Connors, Joseph. “Giovanni Battista Falda and Lieven Cruyl: Rivalry between Printmakers and Publishers in the Mapping of Rome,” in Piante di Roma dal Rinascimento ai catasti, ed. Mario Bevilacqua and Marcello Fagiolo, Rome: Artemide, 2012, pp. 218-31. Koeman, Cornelis. Atlantes Neerlandici. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1967 to 1985. Vol. 3, pp. 332 to 338 (Bl 72, Bl 73). Moorman, K. "Discovering Rome through Joan Blaeu's Admiranda Urbis Romae: The Creation of the Town Atlas of Rome (Amsterdam, 1663) in the Light of Italian-Dutch Relationships in the Seventeenth Century." MA thesis, Leiden University, 2014. Published with the support of the Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut Rome. Cremonini, Silvia. Blaeu: Theatrum Civitatum et Admirandorum Italiae. References cited in Antiquarius (Milan) catalogue entries, pp. 49 to 52, 83 to 90. Van der Krogt, Peter. Koeman's Atlantes Neerlandici.New Edition. 't Goy-Houten: HES & De Graaf, 1997 to present. Utrecht University Library, Special Collections. "Italian Town Atlases by Blaeu." https://uu.nl/en/utrecht-university-library-special-collections/collections/maps-and-atlases/town-plans/italian-town-atlases-by-blaeu.