1 - The City and the Parish

Summary

… The images by which cities were represented … while these images were by no means fully accurate reflections of how urban life was carried on … played crucial roles in establishing urban identity.

Seventeenth-century people were familiar with the convention of communicating ideas through visual symbolism. Images were regularly used in place of words in a society where many people were illiterate or poorly educated: in shop signs in the streets, in woodcuts illustrating pamphlets or ballads, in pictures painted across the walls of alehouses. Even for the reading public, a symbol or a picture could convey far more than a few words. Monarchs had long capitalised on the premise that promoting the correct image in art was a form of self-propaganda.Take Van Dyke’s series of portraits of Charles I during the 1630s for example. Picturing Charles on horseback in Charles I with M. de S. Antoine or the Equestrian Painting of Charles I, for instance, the artist expressed with classical styling the centuries of socio-political thought that fed into the ideal of divine right kingship. Such paintings communicated messages to both the educated and uneducated eye, from recognised classical artistic conventions and allusions, to a simple message of power and authority. In just the same way, maps could be appropriated as a propaganda device.

Early maps were commonly presented in the form of a prospect or profile. Elaborately decorated, urban prospects had become fashionable in Europe, especially Italy, during the 1470s.They were created using a combination of surveying techniques, artistic skill and observation; then engraved and reproduced in the ever-increasing diversity of printed materials that included geographies, travel writing, didactic texts, local histories, emblemata and cosmographia. Print expanded the possibilities for budding cartographers to explore the science and many urban maps were replicated in this format.The armchair voyeur no longer had to rely on tales of far-flung cities but could indulge his passion as if he himself were arriving at the city gates.

During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, corporation governments increasingly recognised the value of maps as tools to be manipulated for the purposes of propaganda. An expensive luxury though they may have been, maps were nonetheless understood as a creative device that enabled mapmakers and commissioners to project an image, or a message of their own choosing.