Frankreich (France) — Sebastian Münster, 1588

About this piece

Frankreich is an original hand-coloured woodcut map of France from the 1588 German edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, published in Basel by Sebastian Petri. The country is presented as a sixteenth-century reader might have encountered it in a geographical book, through the relationships between towns, rivers, coastlines and neighbouring lands.

The line of the coast gives the sheet its broad shape, from the Channel and the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Inland, the winding courses of rivers and the close-set place names offer a more intimate way to read the country. It is particularly appealing beside Münster’s views of Bordeaux and Lyon. The map gives those cities a place within France, while the city woodcuts bring the reader down to the scale of streets and buildings.

The sheet retains its original hand colouring and the paper is in very good condition. The woodcut measures 31 × 36 cm on a sheet of 35.5 × 43 cm.