From the City Witnessed to the Community Dreamed: The “Civitates orbis terrarum” and the Circle of Abraham Ortelius and Joris Hoefnagel (2006)
Robey, Jessica Chiswick (Author)
University of California, Santa Barbara
Meadow, Mark A.
Edition Details: Advisor: Meadow, Mark A.
Physical Details: 461 pp.
Language: English
The Civitates orbis terrarum, a six-volume atlas of cities edited and published by Frans Hogenberg and Georg Braun between 1572 and 1618, stands as a rich portrait of not only the cities it describes, but also of the process by which a particular type of engagement with the world came into being. When we examine a project like the Civitates not as a modern work struggling to emerge from its Renaissance chrysalis, but as a site for the negotiation of the epistemological concerns and social identities of its producers, we see that the empirical engagement with the world in the late sixteenth century was in fact firmly embedded in the cultural values of its champions, and emotionally charged by the personal bonds between men like Joris Hoefnagel---the primary artist for the Civitates ---and Abraham Ortelius---the renowned geographer whose Theatrum orbis terrarum, published in 1572, provided the inspiration and model for the Civitates. In this dissertation, I seek to situate the production of the Civitates in its sociopolitical context to understand how it spoke to the concerns and ambitions of its makers and audience. In particular, I investigate the cultural function of Hoefnagel's hybrid fusions of elaborate ornament and extreme naturalism that framed the Civitates as a site of both poetic self-fashioning and empirical scrutiny of place. Against the backdrop of political violence and religious unrest, the Civitates emerges as an arena in which the urban professional classes struggled to define themselves in a time of exceptional opportunities and treacherous political circumstances. I examine the atlas through the lens of artistic self-fashioning, the development of empiricism, the culture of collecting and cosmopolitan humanism in order to understand how the Civitates functioned strategically for the international intellectual community given voice by the project.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/10 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3238799.
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