Carte de l’Empire d’Alemagne ave les Etats de Boheme.

Title

Carte de l’Empire d’Alemagne ave les Etats de Boheme.

Description

Map shows the south-western part of Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg, Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia), Switzerland and neighbouring France. Furthermore, a splendid title cartouche with the double-headed eagle.

ca. 1786

Artist

Rizzi-Zannoni-(Remondini) (1736-1814)

Giovanni Antonio Bartolomeo Rizzi , 1736 (Padua)- 1814 (Naples), was an Italian cartographer and geographer. Giovanni Rizzi-Zannoni studied at the University of Padua (1749-1751) and then traveled to Turkey and Russia. In 1753 he began his career as a geographer in Poland in the service of King August III . In 1756, he moved to Sweden and Denmark where he was responsible for geodetic measurements in the counties of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst (now in Germany . The next year, he entered service in Prussia and took part in the Seven Years War. There he was taken prisoner ,1757 in the battle of Rossbach and was then sent to Paris . He will stay there for more than twenty years. He then made a map of the Kingdom of Naples and was appointed First Hydrographer of the Depot of Maps and Plans of the Navy (1772-1775). Back in Padua in 1776, he began a geodetic and astronomical cartography of Italy, which was to remain unfinished and then published in his most famous work the Geographical Atlas of the Kingdom of Naples, which he completed in 1812. This atlas is the first attempt to create a large-scale cartography for the southern regions, measured geodetically and no longer based only on astronomical observations.

Historical Description

The concept of Germany as a distinct region in central Europe can be traced to Roman commander Julius Caesar, who referred to the unconquered area east of the Rhine as Germania, thus distinguishing it from Gaul (France), which he had conquered. In the High Middle Ages, the regional dukes, princes and bishops gained power at the expense of the emperors. Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformationagainst the Catholic Church after 1517, as the northern states became Protestant, while the southern states remained Catholic. The two parts of the Holy Roman Empire clashed in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). 1648 marked the effective end of the Holy Roman Empire and the beginning of the modern nation-state system, with Germany divided into numerous independent states, such as Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony.