Nullus in orbe Locus Baiis praelvcet Amoenis

Title

Nullus in orbe Locus Baiis praelvcet Amoenis

Description

Splendid bird's eye view of the city of Pozzuoli and the Gulf of Baia, in the background Ischia can be seen and below a legend with the most important places of the area. Furthermore, the view is framed by ornamental motifs such as cornucopias, fruits, putti, flowers and a title band.

c. 1580

Artist

Hoefnagel (1542-1600)

Georg Hoefnagel,(1542-1600) was a Flemish miniature painter and illuminator or book painter. He is known for his illustrations of natural history subjects, topographical views, illuminations, and mythological works. He was one of the last manuscript illuminators and made an important contribution to the development of topographical drawing. During his travels in Europe, Hoefnagels made many landscape drawings. These later served as models for engravings for Ortelius' Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570) and Braun's Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1572-1618). The Civitates orbis terrarum, with its six volumes, was the most comprehensive atlas of its time. Hoefnagel worked on the Civitates intermittently throughout his life, possibly acting as an agent for the project by commissioning views from other artists. He also produced more than 60 illustrations himself, including various views in Bavaria, Italy, and Bohemia. He enlivened the finished engravings with a mannerist sense of fantasy and wit, using dramatic perspectives and ornamental cartouches. Through topographical accuracy, he heralded the realistic trend in 17th-century Dutch landscape art. In 1617, his son Jacob revised designs by his father for the sixth volume of the Civitates, published in Cologne in 1618. Volume 6 contains a homogeneous series of images of cities in Central Europe (in Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, and Transylvania) that are very uniform in their graphics. The views are perspective and only in a few cases isometric, and are characterized by the accuracy of the indications, the particular attention to the faithful representation of the territory, the landscape, the road conditions, and the observational skill and refinement of interpretation. A topographical masterpiece is also the miniature of a "View of Seville" with rich framing in the Royal Library in Brussels. Hoefnagel was also instrumental as an illustrator for Georg Braun's views of cities and Abraham Ortelius' World Theater.

Historical Description

Pozzuoli was founded in 531 BC as Dikaiarcheia by a group of Greek colonists from Samos who had fled the tyranny of Polycrates. Dikaiarcheia, which had an excellent natural harbor, served as a trading port for the Greek colony of Kyme and was part of Magna Graecia. When the city became a Roman colony in 194 BC, it was renamed Puteoli. Due to its proximity to Capua and the Via Appia, the port continued to gain importance for trade and passenger traffic and was protected from the dangerous southerly winds by a breakwater at the beginning of the 2nd century BC. The grain supplies for Rome, which came by ship from Egypt via Alexandria, were landed here. Puteoli was Rome's most important port in Republican times and continued to play such an important role after the turn of the century, after the port in Ostia had been expanded by Emperor Claudius.