Framed City Maps Artwork
City maps can be fascinating in their own right as pieces of artwork. They are intricate, showing hours of work by the mapmaker, detailing every street on a city, as well as the landforms, and famous buildings. Cities have been around for centuries, and so have their maps. We will take a look at framed city maps.
The framed city map sketch of “Plan of the City of New York City” by Bernard Ratzer is an historical view of New York before it became the Big Apple. The plans show a very small part of New York, which appears to be more farmland than city. In fact all around is nature and untamed areas, before urban sprawl set in and covered all the forestry in steel and concrete. At the bottom is a view of the harbour, which has boats of the time on the surface. It is very quaint.
Paris didn't used to have so many buildings, either. Nor the Eiffel Tower. In the framed old city map “1652 Gomboust 9 Panel Map of Paris, France”, by Unknown, there is a birds-eye view of an area of land that is much smaller than the Paris we know today. There appears to be a lot of countryside around it. It signals a very different time.
Vision Studio brings us yet another historical map with “Map of Rome”. The city, whenever it was rendered, was very small. The roads were narrow, and traffic would have been foot or horse traffic.