BOUTTATS, Gaspar (c. 1640–1695) — *Polonia Regnum*. Vienna: G. B. Hacque, 1670.

BOUTTATS, Gaspar (c. 1640–1695) — *Polonia Regnum*. Vienna: G. B. Hacque, 1670.

Hand-colored copperplate engraving, paper, 338 × 435 mm, on a sheet measuring 370 × 465 mm. Verso blank. Minor creases in the paper; a small insect bite mark on the left margin.

A detailed map of the Kingdom of Poland, engraved by Gaspar Bouttats, who produced maps and illustrations for several important historical and geographical publications from the second half of the 17th century, primarily for the works of the Italian military historian Galeazzo Gualdo Priorata (1606–1678).

"Historia di Leopoldo Cesare Priorata," dedicated to the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I and the military campaigns of his reign, was illustrated with maps by Bouttats depicting the disputed borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe — areas of particular strategic importance during the protracted conflicts between the Habsburg Monarchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and Muscovy in the second half of the 17th century. The map of Poland was intended to help readers orient themselves geographically within this turbulent theater of war.

The map covers a vast area of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and its neighboring lands. It stretches from Silesia and Bohemia in the west to Moscow in the east, encompassing the territories of present-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine. It employs landscape representation techniques characteristic of mid-17th-century cartography: mountain ranges are shown in profile, forests are marked with stylized tree symbols, and numerous settlements are depicted as vignettes. Rivers, including the Vistula, Oder, Warta, Bug, and Neman, are clearly marked. The simple, rectangular title cartouche, devoid of figurative and allegorical decoration, reflects Bouttats’s characteristic functional illustrative style, in which geographical content took precedence over ornamentation.

Imago Poloniae, K75/7.