Image of the City of Constantinople, Which the Turks Call Istanbul, Portrayed as it is in Reality.

This panoramic view of Constantinople in 1616 is from the collection of cityscapes and broadsheets that once belonged to the Swedish statesman Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie (1622-86). Numerous mosques, monuments, and other landmarks are labeled in Latin. Below the engraving of the city, which is by Pieter van den Keere (also seen as Petrus Kaerius, 1571-circa 1646), is a portrait of Emperor Constantine and a separately printed description in 16 columns. The Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie Collection consists of 187 engravings from the late 1500s and early 1600s. The prints originally were bound, ordered, and assigned a number. The early provenance of the collection is uncertain. After perusing the correspondence of King Gustav II Adolf and the Dutch philologist and diplomat Johannes Rutgersius, the former national librarian of Sweden E.W. Dahlgren conjectured that the pictures were ordered by the king and purchased by Rutgersius. The collection later was incorporated into the library of Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie, then deposited in the Archive of Antiquities at the end of the 17th century, only to be transferred to the Royal Library in 1780. An exhaustive catalog of the collection was published by Isak Collijn in 1915, Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie's samling af a?ldre stadsvyer och historiska planscher i Kungl. Biblioteket. Dahlgren provides an account of the early provenance of the collection in his article, ""Miscellanea"" in Nordisk tidskrift fo?r bok- och biblioteksva?sen (1920)."