1748 Nolli Engraving of Bufalini’s 1551 Plan of Ancient Rome.
Urbis Ichnographiam A Leonardo Bufalino Ligneis formis Evulgatam Servata Proportione contractam Atq. Aeri incsam Jo. Bapta. Nolli.
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Description
This 1748 map of ancient Rome is one of the most historically layered objects in the cartography of the Eternal City. Its title declares its genealogy: a woodcut plan of the city published by Leonardo Bufalini in 1551, reduced in proportion and engraved in copper by Giambattista Nolli. It is, in other words, Nolli’s own engraved reduction of the map that had inspired his great work, a direct acknowledgment by the maker of the most important urban map of the eighteenth century of the predecessor on whose shoulders he stood.
The Map in Detail
The map presents a city plan of ancient Rome, showing the city’s hills, walls, streets, and monuments as they would appear from directly above, with buildings rendered as floor plans rather than in perspective. The seven hills are labeled, the Tiber curves through the composition, and the principal monuments of the ancient city, including the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Pantheon, and the great bath complexes, are plotted throughout. Extensive index panels on both the left and right margins identify the numbered and lettered locations on the plan for easy reference.
The dedicatory cartouche in the upper left addresses Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, Cardinal Camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church under Benedict XIV, situating the map within the same papal patronage network as the great 1748 Nolli plan. Two architectural vignette views anchor the lower corners: the Pantheon on the left and a dramatic view of ancient ruins on the right, providing the topographic survey with an evocative sense of the ancient city’s physical character. A compass rose occupies the upper right. The scale bar at the bottom is graduated in ancient Roman measurements.
Historical Context
Leonardo Bufalini’s plan of Rome, published from woodblocks in 1551, was the first map of Rome to employ the ichnographic method, representing the city’s buildings as ground plans rather than as pictorial elevations or perspective views. It was a radical departure from the tradition of urban representation and established the conceptual foundation for subsequent scientific mapping of cities. When Nolli came to survey Rome in the late 1730s and 1740s, he was explicit about his debt to Bufalini, actively inviting comparison between the two maps and positioning his own work as the fulfillment of Bufalini’s work two centuries earlier.
Nolli’s decision to engrave this copperplate reduction of the Bufalini plan was not merely a scholarly homage but a demonstration of how far the ichnographic method had advanced: Bufalini’s woodcut, with its relatively coarse lines and schematic rendering, set against Nolli’s copper engraving of the same plan, illustrated the technical and conceptual distance between 1551 and 1748 more eloquently than any text could. The map thus condenses the arc of Rome’s cartographic history from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment into a single sheet, in the hands of the two surveyors most responsible for defining what it meant to map the Eternal City.
Publication History and Census
This copperplate engraving of Bufalini’s 1551 woodcut plan was produced in connection with Nolli’s preparation of his great twelve-sheet map of 1748.
Cartographer(s):
Giambattista Nolli (1701 – 1756) was an Italian architect, surveyor, and mapmaker best known for his ichnographic plan of Rome, known as the Nolli Map. He was born in 1701 in Castiglione d’Intelvi near Como. As a young man, Nolli moved to Rome to train and work as an architect under the patronage of the Albani and Corsini families.
In addition to his hugely influential map from 1748, Nolli worked on the churches of Sant’Alessio on the Aventine Hill (1743) and Santa Dorotea in Trastevere (1751–1756).
Leonardo BufaliniLeonardo Bufalini (active mid-sixteenth century) is known primarily through a single work of landmark importance: his Pianta di Roma, published in 1551 as a set of twelve woodcut sheets. It was the first true ichnographic plan of Rome — that is, the first to show the city’s buildings as ground-level footprints seen from directly above, rather than in the bird’s-eye or perspective views that had dominated Roman cartography since the fifteenth century.
In adopting the orthographic convention, Bufalini established the method that would define urban cartography for the next three centuries, and that Nolli would bring to its highest expression in his great plan of 1748. The 1551 plan depicted both the ancient and modern fabric of the city, based on careful ground survey, and was dedicated to Pope Julius III. Bufalini appears to have been a surveyor or military engineer by training and came from Città di Castello in Umbria; beyond this, his biography is largely obscure, his reputation resting entirely on the Rome plan. It is enough.
Condition Description
Very good. Some along the centerfold and minor blemishes in the margins.
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