Antique Print of Büdingen by Braun & Hogenberg (1617)

Description: Antique map titled 'Bingen'. Bird's eye-view of Büdingen, Germany. The view shows a city surrounded by vineyards and well fortified with walls and moats. On the right is the castle with its keep. Seen from a high viewpoint in the south, the houses in the city are shown crowded together, with the late Gothic church of St Mary standing out in the middle. The figures in the foreground are a reference to the status of the city: the burgher woman with a hood is shown in accordance with her standing with ruff and full-length skirt, but her apron indicates that she is hard working. The maids, with their skirts tucked up for work and carrying the harvest on their heads, symbolize the fertility of the soil, while the men carrying a prong-hoe and an axe represent the toil in the fields. This print originates from 'Theatri praecipuarum Totius Mundi Urbium'. 

Artists and Engravers: Georg Braun (1542-1622), a German publisher and Frans Hogenberg issued the famous six volume town book "Civitates Orbis Terrarum" between 1572 and 1618. The volumes originally published in Latin, follow by German and French translations. Franz Hogenberg (1533-1588) was the son of a Munich engraver who settled in Malines. He engraved most of the plates for Ortelius' Theatrum and the majority of those in the Civitates, and may have been responsible for originating the project. Worked and died in Cologne/Germany. He was a prolific copper engraver and etching artist of maps and town views. In cooperation with Georg Braun he created the first four volumes of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum in 1572.