Artistic depiction of mountain wave clouds: föhn clouds above Innsbruck

Abstract

The sixteenth century is notable for significant cartographical achievements such as the production of the first uniform atlases of the world; for example, the famous world map by Mercator in 1569. It also saw one of the first printed uniform collections of plans and cities of the world, the Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, which was published between 1572 and 1617. The Civitates Orbis Terrarum (henceforth COT), containing about 360 city maps mostly from Europe, forms a rich compendium of life in the sixteenth century (Skelton, 1965). It gives a visual printed record of the European Renaissance. One of the COT copper engravings shows a city view of Innsbruck situated on the river Inn with its surrounding mountains. In contrast with the original copper engraving, which shows a weakly structured sky, a coloured version of this copper engraving contains a naturalistically painted sky including mountain-generated fohn clouds appearing above the Inn valley. These details were implemented to add aesthetic interest to the drawing of the city and to give a more vivid impression of the place and its environment, of course, but they also add typical local atmospheric features to the view of Innsbruck. Clouds were part of the normal repertoire of Renaissance landscape painters and were used to strengthen aesthetically the dramatic context of the depicted situation. At that time the natural phenomena painted by artists, and recorded by chroniclers, were primarily very extraordinary events such as storms, lightning, floods and droughts. Less pronounced features received much less attention. A strong and gusty wind such as a fohn, with its typical lee-wave clouds, is meteorologically significant but its visual attraction might not have appeared to an artist as dramatic as other atmospheric phenomena. This might be one reason why mountain-generated clouds received almost no attention from the Renaissance period until the end of the eighteenth century. The coloured city view of Innsbruck is one of the rare examples of mountain-wave clouds appearing in a Renaissance piece of art. This artistic depiction of fohn clouds, which shows mountain clouds clearly related to a specific orography, is probably one of the few representations of them in artworks until the eighteenth century and possibly the first appearance of northern Alpine mountain wave clouds.