France Map 1720 Ancient Gaul Caesar Print - Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Strasbourg

Christoph Weigel of Nuremberg published this Gallia Vetus ex Iulii Caesaris Comentaris around 1720, a hand-colored engraved map of ancient Gaul drawn from classical sources, above all Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Weigel, who lived from 1654 to 1725 and worked in Nuremberg, was an engraver, art dealer and publisher whose maps combined practical use with decoration, and he was involved in the Atlas scholasticus et itinerarius, a world atlas widely used in schools. The sheet is notable for its classical title cartouche with trophies and a medallion portrait, and the Roman groupings are each washed in color. It was issued in the early eighteenth century, when German scholars and schools were deeply interested in classical geography.

Weigel divides the country into the Roman groupings: Gallia Belgica lies in the northeast, Gallia Lugdunensis across the center and west, Aquitania toward the southwest and Gallia Narbonensis, the Provincia, along the Mediterranean. The map extends beyond Gaul to Britannia and Hibernia at the top left, the Rhenus or Rhine as the frontier against Germania on the right, the Alpes to the southeast and part of Hispania at the lower left. This wider view helps a reader follow Caesar's campaigns and the Roman system of provinces. Today's Provence grew from the Provincia, Lyon began as Lugdunum, and the Rhine still divides France from Germany at Strasbourg.

A teacher of Latin, a reader of Caesar, or a family with roots in Provence, Aquitaine or the Rhineland will value this classical map, and a graduate in the classics would be glad to receive it. TheMapVault's 1815 Wilkinson, 1826 Tanner and 1863 Dufour sheets of ancient Gaul are nineteenth-century maps made for schools, and its 1892 Roman Gaul comes from a French atlas, whereas this Weigel is the earliest of them, a German baroque map of about 1720 with a trophy cartouche. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.