Imagini istorice ale oraşelor actualei Românii în tipografii europene (secolele XVI-XVIII)
Historical images of nowadays romanian towns in european printing houses (16th – 18th centuries)
Urban views provide evidence about events that took place in cities: battles, sieges, revolutions, peace treaties, coronations, executions, weddings or funerals, and so on. One of the most important consequences of the invention of printing was that it made possible the multiplication of representations of such events, to be sold to contemporaries, and thus the event became widely known; can be said that those images were the equivalent of today’s newspapers.
The popularity of the city views led to the production of both cheap or sophisticated and elaborate publications, illustrated with high-quality prints.
Printed images of towns occur in the last decades of the 15th century with the first illustrated books. During the centuries, major towns were subject of a larger number of representations drawn, painted, engraved, but mostly printed.
Representations of the current Romania towns have been made on a large variety of supports, but most of them were printed images, published originally but which circulated as well as prints. They are to be found as illustrations inside books printed in several European printing houses.
This paper brings together the titles of books printed in western Europe containing historical images of nowadays Romanian Towns.
Keywords: printing house, urban views, old books, historical images, prints
David Bland, A history of book illustration. The illuminated manuscript and the printed book, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969.
Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing. The Use of Images as Historical Evidence, Reaktion Books, London, 2001.
James Elliot, The City in Maps: Urban Mapping to 1900, The British Library, London, 1987, Lucien Febvre, Henri-Jean Martin, L’apparition du livre, Paris, 1958.
PDA Harvey, Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe în History of Cartography, vol. I, Cartography in Preistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean (editat de J.B. Harley şi David Woodward), University of Chicago Press, 1987 Kristina Hartzer Nguyen, The Made Landscape: City and Country in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Prints, Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin, tom 1, nr. 1, 1992.
Johannes Keuning, The „Civitates“ of Braun and Hogenberg, în Imago Mundi, 17, 1963.
Alberto Manguel, Istoria lecturii, Editura Nemira, Bucureşti, 2011.
Timothy F. Mitchell, From Vedute to Vision: The Importance of Popular Imagery in Friedrich’s Development of Romantic Landscape Painting, The Art Bulletin, tom 64, nr. 3, 1982.
Lucia Nuti, The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a Representational Language, The Art Bulletin, tom 76, nr. 1, 1994.
Anda-Lucia Spânu, Despre surse iconografice utilizate eronat. Cazul „Liber Chronicarum”, în Historia Urbana, XII, 1-2, 2004.
Anda-Lucia Spânu, Vechi reprezentări grafice ale oraşelor din România, Contribuţii privind istoria oraşelor XII, Editura „ASTRA Museum”, Sibiu, 2012.
