Coppenhagen die Königl. Dänische Haupt und Residentz Stadt in Grund Riss.

Description

Plan and Prospect, Seutter’s Copenhagen in Superb Original Color.

This richly colored plan of Copenhagen is the work of Matthäus Seutter, the Augsburg cartographer and publisher whose atlas production in the first half of the eighteenth century made him one of the most prolific and decoratively accomplished map makers in Europe. Published simultaneously in German and French, it presents the Danish capital in ground plan above and panoramic prospect below, combining a precise survey of the city’s districts, fortifications, and harbor with a sweeping view of its famous skyline from the water. In fine original color, it is among the most visually striking city plans that Seutter produced.

The Map in Detail

The plan occupies the upper portion of the sheet, presenting Copenhagen in ichnographic form with its districts clearly delineated and labeled bilingually throughout. The Old Town, Die Alte Stadt, occupies the center, with the New Town, Die Neue Stadt, to its west. Christianshavn, labeled Christians Hafen and Christian Port, fills the upper portion of the plan, its characteristic grid of canals and its position as the city’s principal naval district clearly shown. The Eastern and Western suburbs, Oost and West Vorstadt, extend beyond the fortification lines, while Frederiksholm (Fridrichs Hafen) appears at the harbor entrance. The elaborate star-fort defensive works encircling the city are rendered in the Baroque cartographic tradition with careful attention to their geometric complexity, their bastions and ravelins colored in vivid green. The Royal Fleet, Königl. Flotte, rides at anchor in the harbor. Ships of war animate both the harbor and the open sea to the left, and a compass rose orients the sheet to the Øresund, here labeled Golfe Codan.

Below the plan, a detailed panoramic prospect of Copenhagen presents the city’s famous skyline of towers and spires as seen from the water, with the harbor, the Pebling Lake, and the St. Jorgen Basin labeled across the foreground.

The Danish royal arms and a second coat of arms occupy the upper corners. A lettered legend in the lower left identifies the city’s principal buildings and institutions.

Historical Context

Copenhagen in the first half of the eighteenth century was the capital of a significant European power. Denmark-Norway, united under a single crown, commanded the entrance to the Baltic through the Øresund, and the tolls levied on passing merchant shipping had made Copenhagen one of the wealthiest cities in northern Europe. The city’s appearance at this period was the product of successive waves of royal building and urban expansion, most notably the construction of Christianshavn under Christian IV in the early seventeenth century, which gave Copenhagen its distinctive island district of planned streets and canals modeled on Amsterdam.

The fortifications shown on Seutter’s plan were the product of the same period and the military pressures of the Great Northern War, in which Denmark had been deeply involved. Seutter, working in Augsburg, the center of Central European atlas publishing in the early eighteenth century, produced maps of major European cities for an educated German and French-reading public whose interest in the capitals of Protestant northern Europe was both commercial and political.

Publication History and Census

This map was published by Matthäus Seutter in Augsburg, where he operated one of the most productive cartographic publishing houses in early eighteenth-century Europe. Seutter (1678–1757) began his career as an engraver under Johann Baptist Homann and established his own firm around 1707, eventually producing hundreds of maps that circulated across Europe in his various atlases.