1567 / 1569 Paulo Forlani City View of Geneva, Switzerland

This is a rare 1567 prospect of Geneva, Switzerland, engraved by Paolo Forlani. It presents the city as 'Protestant Rome,' the seat of the Reformation in Europe. The Italian Catholic engraver of the map addresses his audience: Behold how curious the world is today to see the site and form of Geneva! The city's distinctive profile, remoteness, and unfamiliarity to the Catholic reader doubtless inspired wonder.

A Closer Look

This prospect faces south: Lake Geneva (Lago de Losana) is in the foreground, with the city on its southernmost shore at the mouth of the Rhone River. The Rhone can be seen at the right; its tributary, the Arve, forms the southern limit of the view. The arms of the City of Geneva appear on the left. Features on the view - rivers and important structures, including a plague hospital - are named using an alphabetical key.

The Sources

Novel as this view may have been to Forlani and his Italian contemporaries, it was not strictly speaking new. Forlani describes his source - a very faithful one, with the names of the most notable places, all represented here below by alphabet - which corresponds to a 1552 view of Geneva produced in Lyon by Guillaume Guérault (1507 - 1569). Guérault's view was based on yet another, first appearing in the 1550 edition of Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia. Since Münster does not include the letter key evident (and identical) in the Guérault and the Forlani, it is clear that the Guérault was Forlani's source and not the earlier work.

The ultimate source for the view is not entirely clear. Münster's view accompanied a text by the Genevan noble, ecclesiastic, historian, and libertine Francois Bonivard (1493 - 1570), and it may be that he provided the view. While most of Guérault's city views were based on Münster's work, this may be a unique work, as Guérault was living and working in Geneva between 1545 and 1550. He, like Bonivard, was a Libertine, an opponent of John Calvin's efforts to enforce church discipline on Genevan society. Münster does not specifically name the source for the view, however, so this possible connection is lost to us.

The 'Lafreri' School

Between 1544 and the 1580s, Rome and Venice saw the production of a corpus of elegant, rare, and now sought-after maps and views. These are frequently classified collectively as belonging to the 'Lafreri-School,' a term often used due to the survival of a 1572 catalog of maps from the stock of publisher Antonio Lafreri. The close resemblance of this list to the contents of various bound collections of Roman and Venetian maps of the period led to these proto-atlases to be attributed to Lafreri, despite the maps having been actually produced by over a dozen different mapmakers, including Gastaldi, Lafreri himself, his heir Duchetti, the Bertellis, Camochio, Zenoni, Salamanca, Forlani, Ligorio, Tramezini, Zaltieri and others. These cartographers, mapmakers, engravers, and publishers, some of whom shared formalized partnerships, left behind a legacy of some six or seven hundred maps, all of which are marked by scarcity due to their not having been included in a standard atlas. Though these were generally sold in assembled-to-order, composite 'atlases,' the contents of these works varied wildly, and those that survive are often poorly cataloged. Since the maps in these composite works were not intended to be compatible with one another, bookbinders had to go to sometimes extreme lengths to combine them: pasting smaller maps down onto larger sheets, which were then stitched into the books, and larger maps trimmed close and then folded to fit smaller bindings. We have also encountered some maps, usually found separately, yet printed to the same sheets to be included together in bound works.

The popularity of these works and their utility appear to have influenced Ortelius in his project of creating the first true, uniform atlas in 1570. Despite the proliferation of Italian mapmakers in the 1560s and 70s, only a few appear to have lived beyond the Italian plagues of 1575-77, and these survivors seem to have prospered mainly by their acquisition of plates engraved before those plagues. The absence of any Italian response to Ortelius is more likely to have been a product of the devastation wrought by the pestilence than any overwhelming superiority of the Flemish work.

Publication History and Census

This view is attributed to Paolo Forlani and appeared initially in Il primo libro delle citta et fortezze del mondo, published by Forlani and Zenoi in 1567. The present example was printed without change in Giulio Ballino's 1569 De' Disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo. Ballino's edition is distinguishable by its verso text. It is rare; we see one separate example in OCLC.