Woodcut, 236x356 mm on sheet with good margins, hand-painted, perfect example in fine condition. Beautiful view highlighting the city walls and many famous monuments, portraying the capital by reproducing the classic late 15th century iconography dictated by Francesco Rosselli's prototype around 1485. The Colosseum is curiously absent, for lack of space, as stated in point G of the legend below the print itself. Taken from the rare Italian edition, published in 1558, of the Geographia Universalis, the most important german geographic work after the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, published in 1544 and then continuously enlarged and updated by the publisher Petri until 1628 with about a thousand woodcuts by engravers such as Holbein the Younger, Graf, Kandel, to whom we partly owe the success of the work. Münster (1488-1552) was a brilliant polymath and one of the most important intellectuals of the Renaissance era, among the first Europeans to understand Middle Eastern languages and cultures, he published several works on this subject as well as on theology, geography and chronology. Educated in Tübingen, his surviving university notebooks, the Kollegienbuch, reveal a mind of insatiable curiosity, especially about cosmography. Later, Münster became professor of Hebrew in Heidelberg and then, from 1529, at the University of Basel. In the 1530s, he devoted himself to the translation of Ptolemy's Geography, adding new material concerning the new lands discovered in Africa, the Americas and Asia. The result was the publication of his highly regarded Geographia Universalis, first printed in 1540. He was also an innovator in the design and layout of maps, and was one of the first to create a space on his wooden blocks for the insertion of place names in metal characters. Marigliani, Le Piante di Roma delle collezioni private, 14; Frutaz, Le piante di Roma, 170.