Book review: Cities of the World

Abstract

Cities of the World Stephan Fussel TASCHEN GmbH Hohenzollernring, Germany 2008 504 £135 9783822852729 Google™ Earth has an ancestor, and one that for its time was just as revolutionary in reconceptualising the world. In 1572, the dean of the church St. Maria ad Gradus in Cologne, Georg Braun, became the editor of a series of atlases that set new standards in cartography: Civitates Orbum Terrarum (Cities of the World). Inspired by Sebastian Munster's widely read encyclopaedic, Cosmographia , he wrote the Latin cartouches and hired the artists and voyagers who contributed to the six volumes. Their travel sketches were turned into handsome copperplate engravings by the Flemish artist Franz Hogenberg, and include some exact copy by Georg Hoefnagel, son of an Antwerp diamond merchant who toured Europe in the mid-century, as well as by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Braun died in his eighties in 1622, the only one of the editorial team to see out the publication of the final volume in 1617. The editors of this new edition, Stephan Fussel and Rem Koolhaas, have had to track down the plates, which were often sold separately, and were lucky to find a well-preserved edition of the original in a Frankfurt museum. Now Taschen Verlag, one of the most successful new European publishers and perhaps not coincidentally located in the same city, has published in one massive and spectacularly beautiful volume the entire atlas of 564 cities. In 1572, Spain was the preeminent European power, and its territories extended up to what today is Belgium. The Duke of Alba was laying siege to Haarlem: Calvinist rebels had already gained control of large tracts of Holland and Zealand, and set up the Dutch Republic. Spanish forces in central America sacked the last remaining Inca city, Vilcabamba. John Knox died in Edinburgh. Most of Europe was still reeling from the effects of the Reformation, with the …