In this article on the history of "urban mapping" and the production of the 'image of the city,' Peter Whitfield traces the artistic depictions which strived to capture the city in its entirety, before political and military powers evolved and found greater needs for images that functioned with precise detail. Through advance in scale and perspective, early image-makers began to represent a "secular city" as a collection of fragmented limbs, ordering space with an intellectual precision over the symbolic religosity which dominated prior. Having come full circle today, Whitfield argues that this new generation of geographical images enabled by aerial photography actually represents "a return to the original aesthetic pre-technical impulse towards urban mapping; the desire to see the city itself, not an abstracted plan of it." FT
The names of the great cities of the ancient world echo in the mind like evocative fragments of poetry: Babylon, Nineveh, Persepolis, Thebes, Rome, Athens, Alexandria. Historians have told us repeatedly that the earliest cities were the fountainheads of civilisation, that their founding signalled the end of the pastoral and nomadic life and the beginning of law, government, architecture, art and the life of the mind.

But what did these great cities actually look like? Two centuries of archaeology have told us a great deal. But the people who lived in them have left us no surviving record - no maps, no views, no urban panoramas of their cities. All we have are a few sketches on stone or clay tablet showing city walls, usually under attack in battle or siege. The only real exception that we know of was the massive plan of Rome incised on stone around AD200 and laid out for public display; several small fragments have been discovered.

The lack of urban images continued into medieval art: there are no plans or views of Paris, London, Toledo, Milan, Cologne or any other of the great cultural centres. In medieval manuscripts we begin to see mere glimpses of cities - stylised walls, gates, towers, and perhaps a bridge. The Matthew Paris miniature of London dated 1252 is of this kind, the earliest image of London that we have. Two cities that do appear repeatedly in medieval art are Rome and Jerusalem, but once again in a purely stylised, symbolic form.

This lack of interest in portraying the real city is puzzling and intriguing. It must surely have had an intellectual rationale: the secular city was chaotic, sinful and impermanent, not a fit subject for artists whose motives and patrons were entirely religious. It can be no accident that a recurring motif in medieval art is the contrast between the earthly and heavenly cities, the one given over to the seven deadly sins, the other inhabited by saints and angels.

This strange reluctance to look at the city ends decisively in Italy in the early Renaissance. Between 1440 and 1500 we suddenly find manuscript artists painting fairly precise views, aerial snapshots, of Verona, Milan, Venice, Rome and foreign cities such as Constantinople and Jerusalem. These collections of city images were commissioned by both secular rulers and by princes of the church. They reflect the humanist’s growing curiosity about the world beyond their own immediate sphere. But they may have had a slightly more sinister motive too: in an Italy torn by armed conflict, a collection of city maps also had a political and military value. In order to satisfy either of these motives, the city views had to become more precise than they had been previously.

The urban image made the transition to print in 1485, with Rosselli’s beautifully conceived engraving of Florence, and reached a high-point in the breathtaking panorama of Venice executed by Jacopo de Barbari in 1500. Barbari must have made hundreds of sketches on the ground, then miraculously transformed all this material to create an imaginary viewpoint high in the air, giving us a god-like perspective on the city. Barbari’s approach exercised enormous influence, and was imitated by many artists, including Cornelis Anthoniszoon’s magnificent view of his native Amsterdam.

In this and in other Renaissance views, the secular city - and its representations - now became a realm of beauty in its own right, and an object of pride to its rulers and inhabitants. Just as Renaissance artists were looking at nature with fresh eyes, so too were they considering mankind itself and its creations, particularly architecture and the urban fabric with which people surrounded themselves. Artists and philosophers speculated on the ideal city, where order and beauty in the streets would engender social harmony and intellectual achievement. The transition to printing took the city view out of the hands of the ruler and the scholar, and placed it in the public domain. Barbari’s Venice was commissioned by a Venetian merchant, with no aim other than to display the splendour of his city, while Rosselli was a Florentine engraver and print-seller, whose maps were sold on the open market.

One of the most intriguing aspects of these superb urban panoramas is that they are not, in fact, naturalistic views. The artists realised that in order to display the entire city in a single image, a high degree of manipulation was essential: perspectives had to be falsified, and viewpoints had to be shifted or combined - in a word, extra space had to be created within the image. In this way the spectator could see into each part of the city with equal clarity. Without this reordering of space, only the immediate foreground of any view would be clear, while the rest of the image would recede into a jumble of roof-tops. Lying behind this artistic insight was the crucial but unspoken concept of scale, the understanding that each part of the view must stand in some constant relation to every other part.

The emergence of this new genre of urban images raises the question: did maps appear because people needed them, or because they became possible? The answer has to be the latter. It must always have been difficult for a stranger to thread his way through the streets of Florence or Paris or London. But it was only in the 15th century that the techniques of reordering space became familiar to artists and scientists alike, through the discovery of the laws of perspective, the use of co-ordinate systems and the concept of scale. These techniques enabled rudimentary pictures of the city to become far more precise and comprehensive. Only in this way could they satisfy the new aesthetic sense - and only in this way could they become, in time, more functional.

The new-found popularity of the image of the city culminated in the printing in Cologne between 1572 and 1617 of a massive atlas of views and plans by Braun and Hogenberg, entitled Civitates Orbis Terrarum. Its many hundreds of pictures are aerial views, with the buildings shown in elevation, in accordance with the publishers’ guiding principle that “the towns must be drawn in such a manner that the viewer can look into all the roads and streets, and see all the buildings and open spaces”. Although these views never include a scale-bar, an instinctive grasp of scale is again part of the artist’s vision. This can easily be seen in Braun and Hogenberg’s London, where it is evident that we are simultaneously above Westminster, St Paul’s, the Tower, Southwark and Bishopsgate; there is no perspective, no foreshortening, no vanishing point, as there would be with a single natural viewpoint. Yet the pictorial element remains strong: trees cast shadows, there is a visible current in the river, and the human figures in the foreground seemed placed there to draw the spectator into the living city.

These pictorial maps remained dominant for a further century or more, so that the 1676 map of Rome by Falda, or the 1739 Turgot map of Paris are sumptuous visual records of those cities. With the buildings vividly displayed in elevation, these maps are undeniably more vital, more personal and more evocative than the functional scaled plan.

So when and why then did the transition to the scaled plan occur? In the case of London we can date the change precisely to 1666, to the aftermath of the Great Fire. In order to rebuild the city, to recreate property and street lines, accurate large-scale plans were needed and of course none existed. By this date land surveying had become an established profession. Rather than the artists of previous eras, map-making became the province of surveyors, who were hurriedly commissioned to make accurate ground-plans of the devastated area. Two of them, John Ogilby and William Morgan, went on to publish the first comprehensive, large-scale plan of the entire city in 1676. In this new map there were no pictorial elements, no elevations, no human figures. Instead we have an austere plan of the streets and the larger properties, all drawn at a measured and consistent scale and clearly labelled. This is now a true map, an intellectually controlled diagram: what appears on paper corresponds in a precise and agreed way to the reality on the ground, although sacrificing the pictorial dimension.

This concept of the functional scaled plan appeared at precisely the right moment: it appealed to an age of science, and it was vindicated in the building or rebuilding of rationally planned cities such as St Petersburg, Karlsruhe, Berlin, Stockholm and Philadelphia. But the aesthetic aspect of the city map did not vanish overnight, for pictures of the principal buildings - those which gave each city its unique character - were now placed around the border of the map, as in Ughi’s 1729 plan of Venice, an austere diagram of canals and properties, with its borders encrusted with architectural images. But even these artistic borders soon vanished; the map became a technical diagram, its information encoded, its appeal cerebral rather than aesthetic.

We have now lived with the functional, scaled town-plan for more than two centuries, but the impulse to see the whole city as an entity, to get a sense of its colour, its buildings and its life, has never vanished. It reappeared in the ambitious urban panoramas of the 19th century, and more recently in the vogue for aerial photography and satellite imagery.

In a sense the wheel has come full circle, for online databanks of imagery such as Google Earth now promise the user the chance to see into any city or landscape in the world, offering a visual experience that the conventional map cannot equal. This new generation of geographical images offers exactly the same god-like perspective that Barbari or Rosselli devised in their views of Venice and Florence. They represent a return to the original aesthetic pre-technical impulse towards urban mapping; the desire to see the city itself, not an abstracted plan of it.