Kagan, Richard. Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493-1793. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 240p., 18 b&w + 136 color illus. ISBN 0-300-08314-9, $50.

ichard Kagan will be known to many readers of Mapline for his lecture in the 1991 series of Nebenzahl Lectures on city images. He was then developing the idea of the distinction in portraying cities between the urbs and the civitas, the first concerned almost exclusively with the topographical appearance, and the latter more concerned to describe and express the aspirations of the community. In this book he develops the idea further, focussing on a variety of Hispanic cities on both sides of the Atlantic. In seven chapters he dwells on the particularly subjective nature of many city images, showing on the way that many European cartographers were just as concerned as their Indian counterparts to show the “communicentric” (community-centered) as-pect of the places that they portrayed.

This way of looking at city images is very fruitful, and could be applied with profit, for instance, to a scrutiny of the images in Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum. Here, some “urbs-type” views appear almost planimetric, with little in the way of human intervention, while other “communitas-type” images dwell much more fully on the real or imagined nature of the community. Former observers have made this point, rather in passing, but Kagan works the idea out thoroughly and well.

His argument is helped by the excellent production of the images in the book, which shows us material from some very obscure but highly relevant places: the plan of Cuzco (1643), for example, from the Archivo Arzobispal in Lima, or the view of Potosí from the Museo de Las Charcas, Sucre, in Bolivia. Most of these well-produced images are highly communicentric in nature. This book is largely the product of a three-year fellowship from the Getty Foundation, which gave the author the time and resources to work his ideas out in an elegant and convincing form.

David Buisseret
University of Texas at Arlington