When I have my own house, this is the first thing I will buy!
Louis Bretez and Michel-Etienne Turgot's monumental 1739 map of Paris during the reign of Louis XV. Michel-Etienne Turgot, Louis XV's Prévot des Marchands, commissioned this plan in 1734 from Loius Bretez, a sculptor, painter and perspective specialist, who used the conventional bird's-eye representation. This was the last major example of this type of plan and is an important record of the architecture and gardens of Paris at that time. Turgot's plan of Paris is possibly the most ambitious urban mapping ever undertaken. Shows the whole of 18th century Paris and offers a wonderful perspective on the city prior to Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann’s 19th-century redesign.
Turgot, who held the mayor-like office of Prévôt des Marchands de Paris, commissioned Louis Bretez and Claude Lucas to produce this map in 1734. Oriented to the east on an axonometrical projection, this map is best understood as an aerial view where in every building, window, tree, shadow and park is shown. It took the team nearly five years of exhaustive sketching and surveying to assemble this masterpiece. In order to produce the thousands of sketches and surveys required to complete this map, Bretez was issued a permit to enter every building in Paris. The completed plan which consists of twenty individual sheets, can be assembled into a massive and striking display roughly 8 feet by 10 feet.
(via map-fair.com)
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| The map at Antony Todd's Store in NYC |
