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Published in Augsburg by Matthäus Seutter in the 1720s, this lavishly coloured plan of Rome offers a bird’s-eye synthesis of the Eternal City just before Nolli transformed its urban cartography. Every street, piazza and cloistered garden is rendered in crisp footprint form, with the sheet framed by allegories that proclaims Rome’s double identity as seat of antiquity and living capital of the papacy.
At upper left, a cameo portrait of Benedict XIII (Pope from 1724-30) is set within a glory of attendant virtues, one resting her arm on the platonia of St Peter to link Petrine foundation with present rule. Opposite, putti bear the papal tiara and crossed keys aloft on clouds, also displaying the arms of Benedict, their billowing drapery dissolving into the Campagna. Down the left margin runs a trompe l'oeil scroll listing the XIV rioni: beside each name Seutter presents the district’s ancient emblem (column for Colonna, crescent for Campo Marzo) so that civic identity becomes a heraldic procession along the Tiber. The south-west corner is reserved for the Castel Sant’Angelo and the Vatican precinct, drawn in almost miniature depth to anchor the map in living topography.
Seutter encloses his descriptive text in a crumbling brick aedicule at lower right, a conscious evocation of the antique walls now shoring up Baroque façades; below reclines a bearded Tiber, companioned by the Capitoline she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus, while reeds and rubble merge past and present in a single emblematic strip. The engraving’s close, even hatch gives the city fabric a mosaic density, and the fresh hand color (ochre for masonry, turquoise for the river, pale green for the gardens beyond the walls) helps the viewer read both the archaeological palimpsest and the Baroque street plan at a glance.
Rarity
A scarce map, this being one of only a handful of times we have offered it for sale.
Matthäus Seutter (1678-1757) was a prominent German mapmaker in the mid-eighteenth century. Initially apprenticed to a brewer, he trained as an engraver under Johann Baptist Homann in Nuremburg before setting up shop in his native Augsburg. In 1727 he was granted the title Imperial Geographer. His most famous work is Atlas Novus Sive Tabulae Geographicae, published in two volumes ca. 1730, although the majority of his maps are based on earlier work by other cartographers like the Homanns, Delisles, and de Fer.
Alternative spellings: Matthias Seutter, Mathaus Seutter, Matthaeus Seutter, Mattheus Seutter
