Ferraris map - Cabinet map of the Austrian Netherlands and the Principality of Liège, 1771 - 1778

In 1561, the Bruges Free, the largest and richest castle in the County of Flanders, asked Pieter Pourbus to paint a map of her entire territory, including roads, watercourses, villages and cities. Ten years later, the painter-cartographer delivered his magnum opus. ‘The painted map of the Bruges Free’ (1571) is at the crossroads between painting and cartography and presents the port landscape of Bruges in a unique way at the end of the sixteenth century. Pieter Pourbus painted the map at a switch point in history: Just before the Eighty Years' War and later industrialisation would change the coastal landscape forever. As a result, the map is a last, valuable witness to the late-medieval landscape around Bruges. But also because of her combination of scale, dimensions and details, the painting is a unique work of art. Of the original topographic map of the castle of the Bruges Free, which Pourbus finished in 1571, only a quarter of the total area was spared. The preserved fragment depicts the northeastern part of the Bruges Free, from Bruges to Zeeland. The identification was done on the basis of the faithful copy (0000.GRO0438.I) that Pieter Claeissens already made of the battered map in 1596-1597. The copy shows us the entire area of the Free, between Yser and Westerschelde. The entire cultural landscape, including individual houses, locks, dikes, castles, gatehouses or boundary posts, is both figuratively and topographically correct, as well as geodetically depicted in the right location Recent research into the cartographic accuracy of the map confirmed that both the topographical and geometrical precision of the map is exceptionally high. Pieter Pourbus is therefore the first mapmaker in Flanders of which it can be stated with certainty that he applied the triangulation, as published by Gemma Frisius in 1533, when measuring his maps and whose maps therefore undeniably have a scientific basis.