Colonia Agrippina.

Famous c.16th hand coloured engraved plan of Cologne from the most famous town plan series ever made.

This is first state, with four figures at lower left which were re-engraved to three figures in later states of the map.

Cologne was the home town of Braun and Hogenberg and the birthplace of the Civitates. Essentially a ground plan, the engraving also shows oblique elevations of the buildings. These are taken, not from a single viewpoint that would have over-emphasised the foreground, but from a fictitious moving vantage-point that leaves each building true to scale. If the ordinary dwellings are stylised, the city’s monuments are portrayed from the life. The cathedral, destined to remain unfinished for a further three centuries, and the city walls, since demolished to make way for the Ringstrasse, are clearly visible.

Occasionally a town may spring into being fully formed, the embodiment of a single design. Palmanova is one of the purest examples of a planned Renaissance town. Founded in 1593 on the renewal of hostilities between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Ottoman Sultan, the town was positioned on Italy’s north-east frontier as a fortified outpost to protect Venice.

The primary purpose of the radial-concentric design emphasised by the plan-view published in the Civitates was a military one. The use of artillery in siege warfare had rendered thick perimeter walls obsolete, and the defences of Palmanova depended instead on a series of bastions backed up by clear lines of covering fire from a central point. Aesthetics were also dear to the Renaissance mind, though, and Scamozzi’s arrangement of nine bastions (instead of eight) softens the rigid symmetry of earlier models.

From: Braun & Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum. Cologne

Following the original publication of Volume 1 of the Civitates in 1572, seven further editions of 1575, 1577, 1582, 1588, 1593, 1599 and 1612 can be identified. Vol.2, first issued in 1575, was followed by further editions in 1597 and in 1612. The next volumes appeared in 1581, 1588, 1593, 1599 and 1606. The German translation of the first volume appeared from 1574 on, and the French edition from 1575 on.