Abstract
The book introduces 1, 500 technically described, made available and digitised vedute from graphic sheets, city albums, atlases and old prints from the unique Map Collection of the Faculty of Science, Charles University. Veduta is characterized as topographically accurate view of a city or landscape.
City vedute were created more easily than urban plans and they are one of the major sources of historic geography and cartography. The book contains introductory texts of the editor and the director of the Map Collection.
Data are numerically sorted and structured by a description of presented image and location on veduta, by legend, country, quotes, authorized names of primary and secondary authors of the work, date, processing techniques and precise dimensions of the work and the frame. Primarily the unique vedute from the 16th to 18th century, which are not mostly contained in the database of the Czech vedute (http://veduty.bach.cz/veduty), were processed.
The main focus was on the authors grouped around the court of Emperor Rudolf II, such as G. Braun, E.
Sadeler, J. Hoefnagel or M.
Merian. It also describes for the first time separately vedute of Münster Cosmography.
Other important authors whose works are presented in the book are J. Zinzerling, A.
Ortelius or A.W. Ertl.
Some of the larger comprehensive albums of vedute are works of J. Peeters and G.
Bouttates capturing mainly fortifications in the times of Great Turkish War (1683-1699). The unique set of Carniolan (today Slovenian) vedute was created by Baron J.
W. Valvasore.
Vedute were also completely digitised and made available with metadata in veduty.cz database. The conversion of data between the librarian and archive programme took nearly 2 years.
The book contains 150 illustrations that are accompanied by descriptions on 915 pages. In addition to the descriptions, there is also a rich apparatus of registers (countries, localities, authors, publishers) in the book.
The work was created by cooperation of the staff of the Map Collection of the Faculty of Science, Charles University and the section of Archiving Administration and Filling Service Department of the Ministry of Interior of the Czech Republic.