A new town

[AntonioFrade]

MistyBeee, those illustrations are fantastic!! Do you know where I can find a copy of the Topographia Alstaiæ?

[randigpanzrall]

Damn, this is a very beautiful work. I love the details and the atmosphere, it´s worth spending the time to look at it intensively

[MistyBeee]

MistyBeee, those illustrations are fantastic!! Do you know where I can find a copy of the Topographia Alstaiæ?

Yes, they're amazing, isn't it ? Sadly, I don't think you can find this book easily. The original one is from 1663 (so really rare, and expensive...), but mine is a reprint from the 70's I found in a flea market last year. I had a quick look on the Internet and was unable to find the reprint for sale. But here you have the complete scan if you want

And @ThomasR : Thank you ! I just hope they can be an appropriate reference for Chlodowech

[Chlodowech]

Unfortunately i don't have any progress to show today, but still i wanted to join in for the Matthäus Merian discussion.

First of all, there were two Merian's, Mathäus Merian the older, and the younger, who was his son. Both made and published copper engravings as part of large publications, whose most important one for us here is the 'Topographia Germaniae', a geographical and historical compendium of all parts of the Holy Roman Empire by the middle of the 17th century. This truly gigantic œuvre, which includes maps as well as vedutas - and even some proper three-dimensional views of towns - is split up into the following parts, sorted by regions:

Topographia Helvetiae, Rhaetiae et Valesiae (Switzerland)
Topographia Sueviae (Swabia)
Topographia Alsatiae etc. (Alsace)
Topographia Bavariae (Bavaria)
Topographia Palatinatus Rheni et Vicinarum Regionum (The Palatinate by the Rhine and surrounding regions)
Topographia Archiepiscopatuum Moguntinensis, Trevirensis et Coloniensis (The archdioceses of Mainz/Mayence, Trier/Trèves and Köln/Cologne)
Topographia Hassiae et Regionum Vicinarum (Hesse)
Topographia Westphaliae (Westphalia)
Topographia Franconiae (Franconia)
Topographia Provinciarum Austriacarum (Austria)
Topographia Bohemiae, Moraviae et Silesiae (Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia)
Topographia Superioris Saxoniae, Thüringiae, Misniae et Lusatiae (Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Meißen and Lausitz)
Topographia Electoratus Brandenburgici et Ducatus Pomeraniae (Brandenburg and Pomerania)
Topographia Saxoniae Inferioris (Lower Saxony)
Topographia und Eigentliche Beschreibung Der Hertzogthumer Braunschweig und Lüneburg (Duchies of Brunswick and Luneburg)
Topographia Circuli Burgundici (The Netherlands, Belgium and Lotharingia)

As you can see by clicking the links, almost all of it is digitalized and to be found on wikipedia, only the 'Topographia Circuli Burgundici' seems to be missing.

Hope you have the time to work through this enormous source of inspiration.

PS: Thanks again for all the nice things you said about the map

[QED42]

That is a great list of free content, thank you very much for sharing!

[Chlodowech]

Mountains and the area inside the town wall - the two last things to be done with the pencil (apart from the border) - are done/in progress. I decided to fill that bit of empty space with a mix of houses and vineyards, as the original rayon of the old town - the area in front of the walls which had to be kept free of buildings and which lost its purpose after the construction of the new town wall and is now being filled with buildings.

[Pixie]

Hi there, very late to the party, but I just read that you were still struggling with that intra-walls land. Here's a thought and shared resource:

- a graveyard. An old town like that could have a large plot initially outside the walls perhaps a bit too rocky for agriculture, but just outside enough to house the dead and close enough to allow visits - it would make a lot of sense that such area was behind the church.

- here's something of a model - Enna, in Sicily, is a town built on a rocky outcrop, higher than the entire land around. People built the castle on one end of the hill and used the far end of the same hill as cemetery - as time passed the entire hill got occupied, and the cemetery grounds look like this: screen grab from google maps

[Chlodowech]

Hello Pixie,

thanks for the tip and especially the long explanation. In the end, i didn’t add a graveyard there, for the reason that graveyards were mostly around the parish church during the Middle Ages, and if not they had their own chapel - and if i have enough of something in this town, then it’s churches and chapels

In the meantime i continued, all the linework is done finally, and i‘ve started with the watercolouring today.

[Chlodowech]

Apart from a bit of work on the border it’s done. Next image will be on the finished map thread and in a better quality.

[Texas Jake]

Looks amazing.