David Rotlin

David Rötlin (* 1st half of the 16th century; † after 1564) was a German painter and cartographer who worked in the imperial city of Rottweil . He emerged with a cartographic work: the so-called Pürschgerichtkarte from 1564, a circular sheet of two meters in diameter, on which he has drawn Rottweil and the surrounding area with pen and ink.

Nothing seems to have been handed down about his origin or his career. A close relative of his was probably the sculptor Conrad Rötlin , born around 1460 in Rottweil .

reception

Excerpt from the Pürschgericht map: A colored tracing from 1786

With his work, David Rötlin is one of the exponents in southern German country panel painting and stands in a row with cartographers such as Heinrich Schweickher , Philipp Renlin and others.

For the German cartographer and geographer Ruthardt Oehme (1901–1987), the Pürschgericht map is one of the most beautiful country tables that have survived from cities in southern Germany and their surroundings. He goes on to explain, among other things: Usually the land tables are drawn from some assumed point from a bird's eye view or from a gentleman's perspective. Rotlin deviates from this custom. He forces the image of the landscape around Rottweil into a circular panorama that can be imagined from an elevated point a little above the choir of the chapel church . Rötlin honestly struggled with solving the space problem. He found an artistic solution that kept the central part with the town of Rottweil very large in scale, and then tapered the scale sharply in the distance. The image of Rottweil looks as if the city lies on a strongly curved surface. In order to faithfully reproduce the most important street lines with their house fronts, Rötlin changed the viewing angle by 90 and 180 degrees for the cityscape. [...] The painter wandered through the city and the surrounding area with the sketchbook and constructed the map from his sketches. The situation is quite skewed. Rivers and streams are only given in rough outline and partly incomplete. Some of the paths end blind outside the city.

literature

• Bernhard Rüth (Ed.): Norbert Stockhus meets David Rötlin - Überdauert , Landratsamt Rottweil, Rottweil 2016, ISBN 978-3-928869-33-1 , ISBN 3-928869-33-7
• Georges Grosjean : History of Cartography , Geographical Institute of the University of Bern, Bern 1996, ISBN 3-906151-15-8
• Winfried Hecht : Rottweil 400 years ago: the Rottweiler Pürschgerichtkarte from David Rötlin from 1564 in individual views , 87th annual edition of the Rottweiler Geschichts- und Altertumsverein e. V., Rottweil 1987
• Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German southwest: With 16 color plates and 42 black and white maps , Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Konstanz and Stuttgart 1961

Remarks

1. ↑ Ruthardt Oehme: The history of the cartography of the German Southwest (1961), page 83