Brightstowe

This is Jansson's 1657 edition of Georg Braun & Frans Hogenberg's map of Bristol, one of the earliest available printed views of the city, first published in 1581 in their seminal work, "Civitates Orbis Terrarum".

Civitates Orbis Terrarum was the first atlas dedicated to city plans and was conceived by the German publisher Georg Braun. The first volume was issued in 1572 and the whole publication proved so successful that it grew to six volumes published 1572-1614. Braun’s main artistic collaborator was the engraver Frans Hogenberg, who provided many of the engravings for the work as well as sourcing others.

The Bristol map first appeared in Volume III of Civitates in 1581. It is a near contemporary depiction of the city, attributed to a sketch drawn in 1568 by the Elizabethan antiquarian William Smith. Our example is from Jan Jansson's edition of Civitates, published in 1657. Jansson purchased the copperplates for the work after the deaths of Braun and Hogenberg, and continued to publish the individual maps and the atlas.

The major difference between the Jansson edition and the Braun & Hogenberg original is the removal of the costumed figures from below the index in the lower-left corner. Jansson's map was published almost 70 years after the first edition of this map, so the costumed figures would have been quite out of fashion to the eye of Jansson's customers. Removing these figures allowed Jansson to continue to publish a 70-year old map as if it were modern and up-to-date.

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