This etching, made anonymously based on the print shown below by the Antwerp cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), displays the coast and the beach not far from Katwijck op Zee, a Dutch town along the Oude Rijn, a lower arm of the Rhine.
The square foundations of a Roman fortification are visible, including tower foundations, a warehouse (horreum) and a well, which are shown from a bird’s eye view. The so-called Brittenburg – a fortified Roman castle (Arx Britannica) – was washed away by several storm floods in the 16th and 17th centuries and became an object of great fascination in humanist circles north of the Alps. Ortelius himself was there in 1562 and made drawings of the floor plan as well as the preserved inscriptions and other small findings.
The etching first appeared in 1581 in the updated and expanded new edition of the Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (“Description of the whole of the Netherlands”), which was translated into several languages. This reissue was by the Florentine Lodovico Guiccardini (1521-1589), who lived in Antwerp. The frequently reproduced print was long considered to be a cartographically correct indication of the location of the Brittenburg and still serves as the starting point for research into locating the fortress, the exact positioning of which remains unknown.
Further Reading
- Buijtendorp, Tom: Brittenburg. Verdronken hoeksteen van het Romeinse Rijk, Leiden 2018.
- Kaszab-Olschwesky, Tünde / Grimm, Gerald Volker: Brittenburg Reloaded. in: Laura Di Carlo / Johannes Lipps / Anna Pawlak / Daniel R. F. Richter (Ed.): Andere Ästhetik meets Andere Ästhetik. Visualisierungen von Antiken nördlich der Alpen in der frühneuzeitlichen Druckgraphik, Tübingen 2023.
- Kaszab-Olschwesky, Tünde / Grimm, Gerald Volker: Überlegungen zur Brittenburg, in: Bonner Jahrbücher, Vol. 214(2014) pp. 43–68.
- Ottenheym, Konrad: On Romans, Batavians and Giants. The Quest for the True Origin of Architecture in the Dutch Republic, in: Bianca De Divitiis / Kathleen Wren Christian (Ed.): Local Antiquities, Local Identities. Art, Literature and Antiquarianism in Europe, c. 1400–1700, Manchester 2019, pp. 261–285.
