Antonio Lafreri Art Prints - Maps and Views of Rome

Antonio Lafreri

1512–1577

Born	1512 (Orgelet)
Died	1577 (Rom)
Nationality	France
Epochs	Renaissance
Profession	painter, cartographer, engraver, publisher, graphic artist, copper engraver
Notable works	Ancient Temples and Rotundas (Five Designs) (1568), Amphitheatri Veronen Diligens et Accurata Delineatio (1560), Circi Maximi Accuratissima Descriptio (1568), Circi Maximi Accuratissima Descriptio (1568), Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae (1568)
Museums	Yale Center for British Art, Nationalmuseum Schweden

57 works at Meisterdrucke
Wikipedia: Antonio Lafreri

Antonio Lafreri

1512 - 1577

A volume in the University of Chicago Library brings together almost a thousand engraved views of Rome and its antiquities. No two copies are alike, as such volumes were never sold as finished books. Each one was produced in a shop in Rome, where customers chose from hundreds of sheets and had their selection bound. The shop belonged to Antonio Lafreri, a copperplate engraver, map dealer and publisher - the man who turned the image of Rome into a bespoke business.

In French, his name was Antoine Lafrery. Born in 1512 in Franche-Comté - sources disagree on the exact location, though the region is certain - he moved to Rome around 1540 and changed the French ‘Lafrery’ to the Italian ‘Lafreri’. He signed his early plates as ‘Sequaner’, after the ancient people of his homeland - a Frenchman who traced his origins back to antiquity. In 1544, he opened his shop on the Via del Parione, right in the heart of the printers’ quarter between Piazza Navona and Campo de’ Fiori. For the first few years, he made his living largely by producing copies of engravings by his rival Antonio Salamanca; in 1553 the two joined forces, and following Salamanca’s death, Lafreri ran the business alone from 1563 onwards - soon becoming Rome’s leading engraving dealer.

What he sold was a system. His *Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae*, the Mirror of Roman Splendour, was not a fixed volume, but rather an open catalogue: views of Rome and engravings of antiquities, numbering a good hundred plates by 1567, executed by the city’s finest engravers. The buyer would compile their own version of Rome from these and have it bound; in the mid-1570s, Lafreri printed a title page of his own for the collection. He took the same approach with maps. He was the first to trade in modern geographical maps on a large scale in Rome; around 1570, he compiled volumes of maps under an engraved title page and, in 1572, published a printed stock catalogue containing around five hundred titles - the first publishing catalogue of its kind. Researchers now refer to such custom-compiled volumes as ‘Lafreri atlases’.

A commercial success came, of all places, from the far north. Olaus Magnus’s *Carta Marina*, a map of Scandinavia on nine large sheets dating from 1539, had turned out to be too large and too expensive to attract buyers. It was only Lafreri’s 1572 version, about a quarter of that size, that sold: ‘Scandinavia, detail from the Carta Marina by Olaus Magnus, 1572’. The sheet is teeming with northern life. Sea monsters seize galleons, polar bears fish off Iceland, and on the Faroe Islands, islanders are butchering a sea creature to the sound of bagpipes; wherever iron, copper or silver lie in the ground, the map marks them with small symbols.

He sold Rome itself in every conceivable form. At night, the Romans would pin satirical notes criticising those in power onto two ancient statues, Marforio and Pasquino - which is why they were known as the ‘talking’ statues; Marforio was regarded as the one who prompted the questions, whilst Pasquino delivered the scathing replies. In 1550, Lafreri published ‘The “Talking” Statue of Marforio in Rome, engraved by the artist, 1550’, bearing his publisher’s mark ‘Ant. Lafreri Formis Romae’. The print depicts the colossal, bearded river god, who at that time stood by the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Forum; in the engraving, he rests against crumbling brickwork beneath an engraved poem. To mark the Holy Year of 1575, a fitting print was displayed in the shop window: ‘The Seven Churches of Rome, 1575’ depicts pilgrim processions between the city’s seven main churches; the engraving enabled visitors to plan their tour. Two years earlier, his large perspective map of Milan had been published: ‘Map of Milan, published by Antonio Lafreri (1512-1577) in 1573. This is the oldest map of Milan’. The map still shows the Castrum, the layout of the ancient Roman camp.

In July 1577, Antonio Lafreri died in the house on Via del Parione where he had lived and worked for more than three decades - without a will and without any direct heirs. The real value lay in the copper plates; the engraver Mario Cartaro was appointed as treasurer to oversee the division of the estate amongst relatives from Franche-Comté. Claudio Duchetti, one of these relatives, continued to run the shop and the ‘Speculum’ business; he had plates that had gone to others in the division re-engraved and added a note to the plates he had taken over stating that he was the nephew of the late Antonio Lafreri. Around 1602, Giovanni Orlandi was still printing from many of these plates.

When we produce such sheets as art prints at Meisterdrucke, the work begins with the question of paper. For historical maps, we use an extremely lightweight Japanese paper, Murakumo, 42 grams per square metre, with a warm ecru tone and a parchment-like appearance - it possesses that old character of its own; nothing is artificially made to look old. There is one exception: the bold areas of colour in the hand-coloured *Carta Marina* are better suited to a different type of paper. The monochrome engravings and plans, however - such as the Map of Milan or the Seven Churches - find in this wafer-thin, warm paper precisely the background that a sheet from the sixteenth century demands.