1830 Anonymous Bird's Eye View of Vienna, Austria

This is a rare, anonymous c. 1830 bird's-eye view of Vienna, roughly oriented to the south.

A Closer Look

The city presented here is the flourishing capital of the Austrian Empire. We have seen it given a date of 1750, but its content suggests a date no earlier than 1827. Among other features, it includes the Lichtentaler Pfarrkirche, whose second tower was completed in 1827. It is certainly no later than 1850, as there is no indication of the city's Ringstrasse, which replaced the obsolete city defenses in the second part of the 19th century. It includes Vienna's famous Krankenhaus, or general hospital, including its separate insane asylum - which was constructed in 1784. The view includes a detailed key of locations both from the city center and its suburbs, including the city's nine Vorstädte.

An Anonymous Broadsheet Issue

The author of this view is not known, and it appears to have been printed as a separate issue. The view shows no artifact of having been included in a book and was almost certainly sold as a separate decorative piece. It is not without precedent, as a similar, but earlier view was produced in Vienna by Ignaz Eder, Die k. k. Haupt und Residenzstadt Wien. It shares the same orientation as the present but is slightly narrower in focus, largely because Vienna's suburbs had not yet developed to the degree they had when this later view was made. There are sufficient similarities between the two to make us suspect that Eder may have produced both works.

Publication History and Census

This copperplate map was engraved no earlier than 1827 and no later than 1850 by an unknown publisher, possibly Ignaz Eder. We see no examples cataloged in institutional collections. A facsimile included in the 1973 pamphlet Historic Urban Plans applied the impossible date of 1750 to this work, and this facsimile so appears in OCLC.