Abstract
This essay explores a possible pre-cinematic reading of Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum (1572–1617) by considering filmic notions such as the role of actors, the relationship between time and space, movement as well as aspects of screen language, in particular montage and continuity editing. Such general considerations of cinematic mechanisms applied to maps are then further considered in a case study, that of William Smith’s perspective map of Cambridge in 1575. A narrative layers methodology is applied to William Smith’s subjective rendering of Cambridge and reveals that it prefigures contemporary developments of the city in the twenty-first century.
The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance paintings represented the city seen in perspective by an eye that had not yet existed. At the same time they invented the aerial view and made possible the panorama. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods.
Michel de Certeau (1990, p. 140)
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Notes
- 1.
Laurent Mannoni reported that ‘it was in 1955 that Professor Francastel, during a film congress, advanced the principle of the existence of a “pre-cinema” (Mannoni 2003, p. 5). Note this is my translation.
- 2.
Similarly in films there can also be an implicit embodied human presence, for example in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins (2010), the people are barely represented on the screen but Keiller would argue that they are everywhere inscribed in the man-made landscape. This was Keiller’s response during the Q&A at the film premiere on 19 November 2010 at the National Film Theatre in London.
- 3.
Calvino was at the time referring to his visit to the exhibition ‘Cartes et Figures de la Terre’ (Macchi 1980) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
- 4.
Note that this is my translation as the book is only available in Italian and French.
- 5.
In cinematic terms this is the equivalent of knowing about a director’s early career, the film genre it subscribes to as well as to how the film was made in terms of funding and commissioning – together with the cultural and historical context, this constitutes the general background necessary to any preliminary film study.
- 6.
‘This plan of Cambridge, so far as I have been able to discover, is the earliest in existence’ (Clark and Gray 1921, p. 1).
- 7.
In his introduction to the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Skelton makes several references to William Smith: ‘Among other contributors of substantial groups of drawings were William Smith, for English towns […] William Smith (c. 1550–1618), herald and topographer, […] Chester – Smith’s native town’ (Braun 1965, p. XV).
- 8.
The issue of authorship is, however, not so straightforward as in 1991 D. Smith casts doubts on William Smith’s authorship of the Cambridge map ‘Cambridge was derived directly from Lyne (rather than from Smith’s 1588 re-drawing of Lyne’s bird’s eye view) […] of course it is possible that Smith supplied Braun with closer versions of Lyne and Cuningham than those of 1588, but the internal evidence available suggests that he sent printed originals rather than his manuscript version of them’ (Smith 1991, p. 163). D. Smith refers here to William Smith unpublished manuscript of 1588 ‘Particular Description of England’ which contained 10 panoramic/perspective plans of English towns. However, D. Smith does not elaborate further on the ‘internal evidence available’.
- 9.
Clark appears swayed by the presence of Parker’s coat of arms in Lyne’s map, in the top right corner, ‘Beneath are the arms of Archbishop Parker, separating the words Mat Cant. The presence of these arms upon the map gives colour to the view that Lyne was specially connected with the archbishop (Clark and Gray 1921, p. 3). According to Elizabeth S. Leedham-Green (Ancient Archivist, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge) ‘The map, probably drawn as well as engraved by Lyne, was sometimes bound with John Caius’, De antiquitate Cantabrigiensis academiae, but not necessarily produced solely for that book. Lyne was employed by Matthew Parker, M.CCCC 1544–1553, and Parker probably paid for Lyne to draw and engrave the map’ (Private Communication 2011). We can infer that Parker commissioned and most likely owned the Lyne map, although no reference to the ownership was found, including in Delano Smith’s study on ‘Map Ownership in Sixteenth-Century Cambridge: The Evidence of Probate Inventories’ (1995).
- 10.
On Lyne’s map Corpus Christi is referred to as Benett Coll. a name which is associated with the adjacent Benett Church.
- 11.
According to Gray ‘In 1587 the number of inhabitants “out of colleges” was stated to be 4990’ (Clark and Gray 1921, p. 137). Mullinger quotes a figure of 3050 for the number of University residents in 1622 (Mullinger 1888, p. 166). The numbers are not accurately reflecting the situation of 1574 but nevertheless the trend is an indication of a much larger town population
- 12.
I counted 34 dwellings on Lyne’s map versus 109 in the visible part of Hamond’s map, inferring an extra 20 houses, thus totalling 129 versus 34, roughly a one to four ratio.
- 13.
It has also to be noted that an interest in dwellings and housing – and the vernacular- only appears in the twentieth century. Even in the writings of Clark and Gray, there is a marked emphasis on buildings of architectural significance as for example in this paragraph ‘We will next consider the district, roughly triangular, of which the apex is at the junction of Heighe Warde and Bridge streate, and the base is formed by Sherers lane and Shoomaker lane. The greater part of this district is shown as sparsely populated, with large tracts of garden ground in the central portion. The buildings, with very few exceptions, are of little interest, and those few are all on the east side of High Street’ (Clark and Gray 1921, p. 3).
- 14.
This is in contrast to other ‘professional’ surveyors and topographers as noted by Lobel: ‘We know that both Smith and Speed worked with great rapidity, spending perhaps no more than a couple of days at each place’ (Lobel 1968, p. 54).
- 15.
The mapmakers of Cambridge appeared to have delighted in playing with cardinal orientation with almost every new incarnation of a Cambridge map: Lyne’s map points North, Smith’s map points East, Hamond’s map (1592) points West and so does Loggan’s in 1688. According to Edson, referring here to medieval maps, the north point at the top would have been established at the time ‘[…] the map is orientated with East at the top […] this is true of most European maps until the sixteenth century’ (Edson 1997, p. 16). Oddly in William Smith unpublished manuscript of 1588 ‘Particular Description of England’, the Cambridge map is pointing North.
- 16.
According to Gray ‘The building of Sidney Sussex College did not begin until 1595, and in 1592, when Hamond’s plan was made, the site was the property of Trinity, to which college the buildings and grounds of the Franciscans, or Gray Friars, were granted after the Dissolution. The accounts of the bursars of Trinity College show that enormous quantities of materials from “the Friars” were employed in the building of the Great Court during the years 1547–1557’ (Clark and Gray 1921, p. 126). This would explain why only one building is still standing at the time of Lyne’s map in 1574.
- 17.
Is diegetic all which pertains, within the ‘intelligibility’, to the story told, to the assumed or proposed world of the fiction within the film.
- 18.
This is particular true for me as I am very familiar with the city and I found it very poignant to be able to zoom onto my computer screen and explore a sixteenth-century map especially since the topography has not changed a great deal – it is this gap between the historical and the familiar which makes Lyne and Smith map so interesting and one suspects that some of it appeal would disappear if one was unfamiliar with Cambridge as it would not resonate in the same way.
- 19.
The translation of the quote is mine and the capital is as in the original text.
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Penz, F. (2017). The Cinema in the Map – The Case of Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum . In: Penz, F., Koeck, R. (eds) Cinematic Urban Geographies. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46084-4_2
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