Polna vulga Poln insign: Bohemiae civitas Regnum a Moravia dividens

Title

Polna vulga Poln insign: Bohemiae civitas Regnum a Moravia dividens

Description

Map shows the city of Polna in Bohemia.

dated 1617

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

Bohemia is the westernmost and largest historical region of the Czech lands in the present-day Czech Republic. In a broader meaning, Bohemia sometimes refers to the entire Czech territory, including Moravia and Czech Silesia, especially in a historical context, such as the Lands of the Bohemian Crown ruled by Bohemian kings. Bohemia was a duchy of Great Moravia, later an independent principality, a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire, and subsequently a part of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian Empire. After World War I and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state, Bohemia became a part of Czechoslovakia. Between 1938 and 1945, border regions with sizeable German-speaking minorities of all three Czech lands were joined to Nazi Germany as the Sudetenland.