by Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht. His view of Venice is generally regarded as the first purely topographical vista of the city. It is significant that this image appeared in a medium that that was not weighed down by the standard traditions of narrative painting or the expectations of either patron or public. The image of ‘Duke Charles d’Orléans writing in the Tower’ (c. 1483) is considered the earliest-known topographically accurate depiction of London. It is found in a collection of the poems of Charles, Duke of Orléans (held in the British Library), and accompanies the verses of Des nouvelles d’Albyon. Charles had been captured at the Battle of Agincourt (1415), and spent the next twenty-five years in England, part of the time imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he composed these poems. The emergence of a generation of excellent cartographers was another vital factor in the development of the cityscape genre. The first volume of the Civitates orbis terrarum was published in Cologne in 1572. This city atlas, edited by Georg Braun, eventually contained 546 prospects and views of cities from all over the world. It provided a comprehensive image of city life at the turn of the sixteenth century. The Grand Tour gave a new impetus to the development of the genre. As the itinerary of the journey became standardized, vedute (vistas) of familiar scenes like the Roman Forum or the Grand Canal recalled aristocratic travellers of their youthful Italian ventures. The first vedute were created by Flemish and Dutch artists who worked in Italy. Paul Brill, for example, was a landscape painter who produced a number of Roman views and scenes in the shape of painted picture postcards that were bought by wealthy visitors to the city. The market dictated the style. Art historians tend to look at the 1660s as the decade in which the veduta came of age. It was a period in which the representation of city views became a more common theme, foremost in etching and engraving, but also in painting. Always keen to identify a ‘starting point’, some critics have placed Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Gezicht op Delft’ (Marcel Proust considered this view of the city the most beautiful picture in the world) at the beginning of what turned out to be a rich tradition of urban images. The Dutch ‘Golden Age’ expressed pride in its flourishing city