Pisavrum vulgo Pezaro.

Title

Pisavrum vulgo Pezaro.

Description

Bird's eye view of the harbour town of Pesaro in the Marche region on the Adriatic Sea. Splendid strong old colouring.

ca. 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

The city was founded in 184 BC by the Romans under the name of Pisaurum as a colony in the territory of the Picentes, a people who lived on the northeast coast during the Iron Age. Under Roman administration, Pesaro, a junction of the Via Flaminia, developed into an important center for trade and crafts. After the fall of the Western Empire, Pesaro was occupied by the Ostrogoths and destroyed during the Gothic War of Vitigis (539). Five years later, after the Byzantine reconquest, it was hastily rebuilt and formed the so-called Pentapolis, part of the Exarchate of Ravenna. After the Lombard and Frankish conquest of this city, Pesaro became part of the Papal States. During the Renaissance it was ruled successively by the houses of Montefeltro (1285-1445), Sforza (1445-1512) and Della Rovere (1513-1631). Under the latter family, who made the city the capital of their duchy, Pesaro experienced its greatest prosperity with the construction of numerous public and private palaces and the erection of a new line of walls (Mura Roveresche). In 1475 a legendary wedding took place in Pesaro, when Costanzo Sforza and Camilla d'Aragona were married.