Circular View of Nuremberg's External Fortifications

Painter Paulus Reinhart was commissioned to produce a "mappa" of the city's Landwehr, a set of fortifications including palisades, moats and barriers that had begun construction outside the city in 1449 and was expanded later. The Nuremberg City Council had ordered an inspection of the fortifications' condition, and registered the owners of the adjacent land on both sides, who were assessed a levy for the fortifications' maintenance. Reinhart's work, more a landscape than a map, was archived in the War Room by a City Council resolution of August 17, 1577. Subsequently, in gratitude for being admitted to the Heilig-Geist-Spital home for the aged, the elderly woodblock cutter Stephan Gansöder offered to make a woodcut of the "mappa" and to donate the blocks to the City Council. Once Reinhart agreed to reproduce the drawing in reversed form on the blocks, Gansöder set to work, and completed the task in 1581.