Aerial map of Venice from the south east looking back towards mainland Italy. Numbered key labelling significant buildings, canals and bridges within marked and lettered districts.

This map, like many of the Italian cities in the "Atlas Curieux", is based on Blaeu's Italian city town book first issued in 1663. However, due to its size, de Fer eschews showing the dense urban districts and rather focuses on the main monuments and public buildings. These are keyed to a list on the lower margin.

Nicolas de Fer was an extremely ambitious and highly successful map maker and publisher in the late 17th and early 18th century. He was born in Paris in 1646 and in 1687, he inherited his father’s publishing firm. By 1690, he was named Cartographer to the Dauphin of France and would go on to became Cartographer to Louis XIV and Philip V of Spain. These appointments gave him extraordinary access source maps not normally available to his contemporaries. Despite this access, his maps were not always the most accurate although he also suffered by comparison to his contemporary Guillaume de L’Isle, who was named the “ the first scientific cartographer”. Confusingly, de L’Isle was named “Premier Geographe du Roy” a different yet complementary position to the “Geographe du Roy” given to de Fer.

Despite these criticisms, de Fer was extremely successful with his output being prodigious and enormously varied: he published wall maps, miniatures, geographies as well as atlases. One of his more esoteric publications is a volume of European city plans based on the fortification designs of the important military engineer Sebastian Vauban, who revolutionised city fortifications in the late 17th and early 18th century.

One of his flagship products was the “Atlas Curieux” issued between 1700 and 1705. This was a general atlas of a more accessible nature and smaller size than usual folio maps. It covered the whole world and also included many city plans as well as several panoramic views and even garden plans, particularly Versailles. [IT3560]