Petri de Nobilibus Formis

Title

Petri de Nobilibus Formis

Description

;Peter from a noble form;, copperprint. Printed from Paolo Graziani (Italian, active Rome, 1577–84)

c. 1582

Artist

Lafreri (1512-1577)

Antonio Lafreri (1512-1577) was a Rome-based printer and publisher of French origin during the Renaissance. Lafreri was the first to publish volumes of geographic maps in a uniform- format, the so-called Lafreri atlases. Lafreri came from Franche-Comté and settled in Rome, where he acquired numerous copper plates from Marcantonio Raimondis. In the 1940s he published his own prints with views of ancient and modern Rome, and after 1548 over 130 of these engravings appeared under the title "Speculum romanae grandiaia" (A Mirror of the Splendor of Rome). The work was very well received by travelers and made Lafreri the first major graphics publisher. Around 1570, Lafreri published a collection of maps in the same format under the title Geographia, tavole Moderne di geografia de la maggior parte del mondo, while maps of different formats were combined in the then usual map collections. The title of his geography was engraved with the Titan Atlas of Greek mythology, which carries the globe on his shoulders instead of the sky.