Villa Castello is the kind of place tour guides tout as an exquisite example of medieval Florence. Those expecting grandeur in the property will probably find themselves disappointed. A large, severe, pinkish-tan structure with a Tuscan roof and square-eyed windows, Castello does not so much resemble a castle as a vaguely distinguished historic warehouse.
The gardens on the villa’s grounds are more impressive than the building, although they are also modest. Their most striking feature is a grotto of stone animals adorned not only with sculpted fish, dogs and deer, but a bear, a giraffe and a rhinoceros, the latter certainly the product of myth rather than any close observation. The medicinal herbs, varietal jasmine and espaliered citrus plantings all around give off a sensuous suggestion of the way life was lived five centuries ago.
Villa Castello stood as one of twenty-seven bastions owned by the Medici family, scattered across the Florentine republic as demonstrations of power, reach and wealth. These were essentially fortified country resorts, each with its attendant farms and hunting lodges, inhabited by Italy’s wealthiest and most influential political dynasty. All twenty-seven were built before the end of the seventeenth century, ranging from Villa del Trebbio in the mid-fourteenth to Villa di Artimino, begun in 1596.
Castello, its name deriving not from “castle” but from the more prosaic castellum, or cistern, was one of the earliest. The Medicis gutted an old farm and erected in its place a thick-walled fortress. Being the Medicis, they installed in it Botticelli’s masterpiece painting, The Birth of Venus, which would grace the villa from 1550 to 1761. At the end of the seventeenth century, the place turned into a pet project of Cosimo III de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, who took over the efforts of his ancestors to renovate a rural water tower.
The villa compound became known as “Cosimo’s playground,” where the curious and erudite ruler indulged his passion for art. When he was not squabbling with his French wife, who eventually abandoned him to become a nun, Cosimo found time to travel to the Netherlands and meet, among other people, Rembrandt van Rijn. No known portrait resulted. The idiosyncratic Cosimo was more likely to fill Villa Castello with commissioned paintings of the monstrous flowers, fruits and vegetables he favored, so the copious two-dimensional flora inside complemented the outdoor garden’s profusion of blooms.
By 1912, Villa Castello had long since relinquished its status as a seat of governance and flickered on as a rather faint light in the Italian cultural firmament. That year, Professor F. C. Wieder stepped within its sun-baked portals, traveling at the behest of Newton Stokes. A European adjunct to the Iconography team, Wieder had come on board that August, having worked as assistant librarian at the University of Amsterdam. The new man also served as an associate of the firm of Frederik Muller & Company, a venerable Dutch auction house through which Newton had snared some of his most impressive finds.
Wieder would prefer, he informed his employer, the title “adjunct-bibliothecaris.” He could devote vacation time to helping locate what Stokes termed the “items of the highest importance,” focusing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cartography of the northeast coast of America, and “especially bearing on the insularity of Manhattan.” Meaning Newton’s preference for maps that rendered Manhattan as an island.
Any number of maps, charts and globes were known to exist from this crucial time. Newton had examined many of them. A number had entered the growing collection in Newton’s library and been put into the Iconography. But Stokes felt the Book must be comprehensive. Wieder, one of the top experts in the field, was in a position intellectually and geographically to uncover prime specimens in a methodical way. The professor’s task was to locate maps in the files of circumspect private collectors, or perhaps lost in the dusty attics of old Europe. Newton imagined the Continent as studded with secret caches of the prints and maps for which he pined.
Such rarities did indeed exist, Wieder agreed. It was a question of being in the proper place when they materialized. Wieder’s fishing expedition would be of limited duration, finishing at year’s end. Newton compensated the professor generously, paying him 1,000 guilders for the two or three months it would entail to do the work (about $38,000 today). That was, Newton explained to the professor, “about as much as I should feel able to expend.”
Wieder began by delving into the records of Holland, the nation whose expansionist voyaging in the golden age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had led to the settlement of New Netherland in 1624. As the likeliest repository for navigational maps, the state archives at The Hague were perhaps a good starting point. Two years before, spelunking in the archives, Wieder happened upon a set of more than one hundred maps. Contained in a cracked calf binding from the seventeenth century, the jumbled collection had gone unnoticed by government experts.
The maps in the binding were highly distinctive. Drawn on large folio sheets of heavy paper, they were inscribed with vivid, delicate colors and bore in most cases a watermark of a crowned shield with a fleur-de-lis. Alternately, some had the Jesuit monogram “IHS.” All appeared to have been penned in the same hand, or at least in the same workshop.
As massive as the collection was, further research suggested to Wieder that the portfolio belonged to an even larger trove of maps, plans and views of Dutch settlements in various parts of the globe, an original grouping that had since been dispersed. Two folios had gone to auction in 1885 and ended up scattered among several buyers, while another sheaf was sold off in 1894. Wieder once discovered a few sheets from this same group in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But it was unclear what had become of the rest of the collection, which he termed “the atlas.”
In August 1912, Wieder brought in his colleague J. W. Yzerman, president of the Royal Dutch Geographical Society, to view the material at The Hague. Slowly, Yzerman turned a few leaves. Then, with a start, he said, “I have seen the same thing elsewhere.” The year before, Yzerman visited Florence’s Villa Castello on official business with the Geographical Society. There he had seen drawings that very much resembled the ones at The Hague.
But the fact that the villa’s maps must have come from the same atelier as the drawings in The Hague struck Wieder less forcibly than what Yzerman told him next. Among the manuscript items at Villa Castello, Yzerman reported, he had seen something quite unusual: a large, colored street plan of Manhattan, which from its context seemed also to date from the Dutch period.
An excited Wieder communicated the news to his patron in New York. Another grail, materializing right before Sir Gawain’s gaze. So far as Newton knew, no street plan of Manhattan in the Dutch period existed.
EARLY MAPS OF the New Netherland vicinity were extremely valuable and thus extremely well documented among Americana collectors, who paid fastidious attention to dates, editions, watermarks and other details of execution.
“The Figurative Map of Adriaen Block,” a Dutch map from 1614, illustrated for the first time Newton’s cherished “insularity of Manhattan,” making the cartographical leap forward that the island was in fact an island. Block, a trader and navigator, had personal knowledge of Manhattan’s insular status. After he reached New York harbor in late summer 1613, his ship caught fire and burned down to its hull, requiring him and his men to winter over in huts built with the help of local Algonquins. He and his company could thus be said to be the first Europeans to take up lodgings on Manhattan, and Block was one of the first to circumnavigate the island.
Another early map represented the first survey of Manhattan Island proper and the surrounding land areas. Originally inked in Holland in 1639, the Manatus map rendered the infant colony of New Netherland, with highlighted red-roofed farmhouses (labeled “plantages”) flagged with the names of all their owners, along with emblematic windmills and sundry hayricks. The structures dot a green-tinted island within a coastline of soft blue, the whole comprising a somewhat idyllic outline of Manhattan at the beginning of the European incursion.
The pièce de résistance was a chart that surfaced in 1909 and was known as the Paskaart of 1617.
The product of Willem Jansz Blaeu, a brilliant cartographer—son of a herring salesman and father of two more mapmakers—the Paskaart delineated the coasts of North and South America, from Newfoundland to Río de la Plata, and the western coasts of Europe and Africa between the same parameters of latitude. It was only the second map, after Block’s, that designated Manhattan as an island.
A sea chart, the Paskaart was engraved on paper and hand colored. That it was a first edition could be seen from the condition of the print. Experts deemed it one of the earliest impressions made from a pristine copper plate, before the copper was cleaned. So it was not only the single specimen known, it had the cachet of being the first. Before Stokes snapped up Blaeu’s first Paskaart, at a Muller auction in 1910, no one in the collecting world had heard of it. If the Paskaart came out of nowhere, perhaps the rumored Manhattan street plan could also emerge from thin air. The document was, according to Yzerman, rendered in color, in the same delicate blues and reds as the other maps in the portfolio.
Yzerman warned Wieder that if he wanted to visit Cosimo’s former playground, he must be circumspect. The documents at Villa Castello belonged to the private collection of the king of Italy. The question of viewing them could “only be approached in a diplomatic way.”
While awaiting permission to view Castello’s holdings, Wieder sent Yzerman’s sketch of the map to Newton. From the other side of the Atlantic there came a sharp intake of breath. If true, this first New Amsterdam street plan represented an inestimable rarity, a one-of-a-kind discovery. If it was genuine, nothing remotely like it existed.
Villa Castello finally opened itself to Newton’s emissary, although not without a certain reticent formality. The Italian government was not comfortable with unofficial, unaffiliated guests. Uniformed guards stood watch throughout the villa’s gloomy corridors. They represented only a slight distraction from the marvelous watercolors hung against the damp stone walls, shadings splashed across vellum and framed in sturdy wood. Photography, the guards instructed Wieder, could not be permitted.
Finally he penetrated the inner sanctum and beheld the grail. Yzerman’s memory proved true. When the guard briefly left the room, Wieder had just enough time to click off two surreptitious exposures with his “pocket-codac.”
Dark, grainy and each no larger than a thumb, the photographs have remained folded in a sheet of plain yellowed paper for a hundred years. They still evoke the mystery that tantalized Newton when he received them in New York, a week after Wieder’s Castello pilgrimage. Viewing them was like looking at treasure at the bottom of the sea through the glass bubble of a bathyscaphe. Newton noted the slight hump and curl that unmistakably represented the foot of Manhattan Island, its distinctive outline in the mid-seventeenth century.
A handful of streets crisscrossed the landmass from east to west and north to south. Perhaps most impressive on the tiny snapshots was a foursquare, guard-tower-garnished fort, hugely out of proportion to streets, clearings and other buildings, throbbing like the martial heart of the little Dutch outpost. Newton detected no street names on the dim photographs, although he could read the legend across the top of the image: “Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt.” Picture of the City of Amsterdam in New Netherland.
Newton knew, before ever seeing the Castello map in person, that this was the genuine article, and that he would do whatever was necessary to bring it to the attention of the world.
With the help of Yzerman, and a boost from letters Newton begged from the U.S. ambassador to Italy and from George Herbert Putnam, the U.S. librarian of Congress, Cavaliere D. E. Modigliani, an Italian culture minister, had been persuaded to grant Wieder permission to study the Manhattan map at Villa Castello, as well as other charts in the collection. Modigliani would also, he told Wieder, procure the services of Fratelli Alinari, the premier photography firm in Florence, to render an image for use for the Iconography’s photogravures.
Out of his genuine interest in the project, Modigliani himself would convey the photographer to the villa for the photographs. Il cavaliere would very politely expect a copy of the Iconography in return, of course. Unfortunately, however, there could be only a single opportunity to photograph the maps. He hoped the American eminence would understand.
The result of that solitary foray was, fortunately, magnificent. Alinari’s photograph in hand, Newton immediately assigned his American crew, in conjunction with Wieder in Amsterdam, to research the topographical features of the map now christened the Castello Plan. Since it had the watermarks to prove it, Newton and Wieder concluded that the map originated in the same period as the other pieces in the portfolio at The Hague. But the map was unsigned. Who had drawn it, who had commissioned it, and for what purpose? Answers to these questions were difficult to locate, and required a thorough sifting of other documents of the time.
It turned out that in 1660, on the orders of his employer, the West India Company, the New Netherland surveyor-general Jacques Cortelyou completed the map. As immigrants began to pour into Manhattan, the company’s directors had a keen awareness of changes under way in the makeup of New Amsterdam. This influx, they knew, was a good thing. But to monitor the use of their New World property, they demanded from Director-General Peter Stuyvesant a sense of what exactly was going on in the fledgling community, specifically in terms of its real estate.
Stuyvesant gave Cortelyou four months to execute a map that would provide some answers, then sent the Castello Plan back across the ocean to Holland in October 1660. Cortelyou’s creation, one of the cartographic triumphs of his or any era, provoked more questions than answers in the minds of the directors. They reviewed his bird’s-eye rendering of Broadway, Pearl Street, the Fort, the Wall, and saw in the spacing of the houses, yards and gardens a significant problem for people eager to reap economic gains from a New World colony. The directors’ response to Stuyvesant was stern: too much land had been given over to green space, gardens and orchards. Not enough to residential properties. If the directors had seen the town built to their own liking, it would already be an orderly streetscape of regular townhouses and straight-edge canals, just like the mother ship of Old Amsterdam.
But a map that so irritated the West India Company’s directors offered an unimaginable wealth of detail two hundred fifty years later. Cortelyou rendered the city in elegant microcosm. His attempt to capture the reality of Manhattan was not only factually clear, it was a beautiful work of art, as great maps can sometimes be.
Only the deteriorated condition of the Castello Plan inspired less than positive feelings. The centuries-old rendering had become, well, a bit muddy. Still, Newton desperately wanted to print the Castello Plan in color, staying true to its present faded autumnal hues of ocher, olive and brick.
Wieder advised against that course, stressing that the Italian authorities would never allow the customary restorative work to be done on the map. It would be necessary, however, to correct several problems on a black-and-white photogravure, especially to clean “the deposits left by flies on the original.” Such cleaning was vital, Wieder wrote, because “on a reproduction these occasional spots could be taken for cartographical indications.”
DETERIORATION, FLYSPECKS AND faded hues aside, Stokes had already put out feelers regarding making some sort of trade for the Castello Plan. It might seem unlikely, he observed to Wieder, that the Italian government would let it go, but he had had “some little success” with various institutions. If “the negotiation is intelligently and tactfully introduced and made, it is often possible by offering something which an institution greatly desires, perhaps something intimately connected with the country or locality in which the institution is situated, in exchange for something in which it has no particular interest.
“Were I to purchase the Castello documents,” he confided to Wieder, “I should have to dispose of a considerable part of my collection of Americana, but I would gladly do this in order to acquire two items of such superlative importance.”
Newton estimated the Castello Plan’s worth at $10,000— about $230,000 today. At the same time, he noted glumly, with that offer on the table, “if the exchange were to be consummated in the near future,” he would have to pay in installments. Purchasing maps and views had become an expensive passion, and Newton felt the pinch.
Over the next three years, Wieder conducted protracted negotiations with the Italian government on behalf of Newton, whose hopes rose and fell from month to month. The Italian king, ultimately the owner of the map, waffled and temporized. The Italian government seemed almost to be taunting Newton, letting him know through Wieder and other European intermediaries that it had convened a professor of geography and a director of a museum to assess the benefits of a trade.
Newton remained so conscious of money woes that when Wieder announced Yzerman’s interest in purchasing one of Stokes’s prized items, a one-of-a-kind globe, for 5,000 florins, Newton agreed. But he told Wieder to use the money from Yzerman to pay his own expenses for the Iconography.
Finally, in January 1915, two and a half years after those dark, grainy thumbnail photos crossed the Atlantic, Wieder broke the news that the Italian government declined “definitively” the proposed exchange. Newton made his peace with the decision, noting that such trades between countries were “open to many dangers.”
He was prevented from owning the original. But he would go one better. The problem with the Castello Plan, he had always felt, was its lack of perfect crispness, a result of the pummeling it had taken from moisture and light exposure in the villa, not to mention insect damage from those ubiquitous Italian flies.
He also still wanted to print it in color, but duplication problems remained. The process would surely prove an expensive proposition, perhaps more than he wanted to take on at this stage of the Iconography project.
Wieder suggested printing a stand-alone version in color—“many New York people will be eager to have it framed and hanged at the wall.” But even if color were a possibility, Newton was not at all certain it would be a good idea to reproduce what Wieder had termed “the faded and soiled colours of the original.” Newton’s next idea was unorthodox, unprecedented, but strangely logical within the cartographic tradition, where maps were never static, but constantly evolved in new editions according to increased knowledge and improved technique.
Newton would redraft the Castello Plan. The new plan, as he conceived it, would be just like the original, only better. The Redraft would scrupulously adhere to the topographic measurements of the old map, with every hillock, slough and inlet duplicated exactly. But in the Redraft, Newton would highlight all the available data about the island of Manhattan as it appeared at the moment the map was drawn.
Newton knew just the person to get the Redraft effort off the ground: Rawson Haddon, a young architectural historian and preservationist with a specialty in early American town planning. Haddon would be the draftsman, assembling a working diagram of the new plan based on archival information he received from staff iconographers Jennie and Clinton Macarthy, and from his own knowledge of Old New York society and culture. From Haddon’s visual “outline,” for example, came the detail that New Amsterdammers customarily faced their property walls with stone.
As crucial as the accuracy that Haddon brought to the Redraft was the style of the drawing. The Redraft might be said to be draped like beautiful fabric on the bones of the original. Haddon offered expertise, but the job required artistic prowess and a real feeling for the spirit of the place. It had to have soul.
For the drawing, Newton recruited the artist and illustrator John Wolcott Adams. Quintessentially American—he was a descendant of both John and Quincy Adams—the artist’s captivating illustrations of historical themes were just then drawing notice in magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Scribner’s and the Saturday Evening Post.
Finally, the color edition of the new plan would get the star treatment of H. A. Hammond Smith, taking a break from the business of restoring Old Masters. Stokes had decided that, unlike the original, this improved Castello Plan deserved reproduction in color for an audience that might not be interested in purchasing a complete, doorstop-sized copy of the Iconography. He authorized the printing of the Redraft apart from the book, at a scale almost twice as large as the original, in either black and white or color (fizzy greens and blues predominated).
Newton’s Redraft became the spiritual center of the second volume of the Iconography, signaling its importance by its positioning as the book’s foldout frontispiece. With the Redraft of the Castello Plan, there was no need for conjecture about the concrete dimensions of New Amsterdam, the man-made landmarks that embodied its colonial past or its vanished natural charms. They were there for fact. Winding streets and house lots were drawn to scale, along with the bulky step-roofed warehouses and the classic Dutch-colonial triptych of fort, flag and windmill.
The Castello Plan appeared again inside the Iconography, this time in its original, flyspecked version, given its own dedicated section of the book, accompanied by a 139-page textual trove of information about the year 1660 in Manhattan.
If loving is in essence the act of paying attention, then the text that accompanied the map surely comprised one of the greatest, most excessive love letters ever written to a city. The copy’s starting point came from a document preserved at the New York Public Library called the De Sille List. At the same time that Jacques Cortelyou had drafted his survey of the town of New Amsterdam, the city’s schout, or administrator, Nicasius De Sille, conducted a census. Naming the occupants of every single house in July 1660 (there were 342 residences), the De Sille List formed the basic text for the Iconography’s Castello Plan chapter. It would be supplemented by official records of every sort, including any relevant sundry fact that Newton’s people were able to unearth.
With the correlation of West India Company census data from the same year, and with the folding in of every other conceivable archival reference, Newton managed to create a stroke-of-genius portrait of 1660 New Amsterdam. The Iconography’s house-by-house, block-by-block narrative rose above the nuanced proportions of the Castello Plan to uncover the days and ways of the original European inhabitants of Manhattan.
In a typical entry, for example, we learn that Augustyn Heermans lived on the northeast corner of Broadway and Heere Dwars Street, in a house he bought from Evert Pels; that Heermans, a native of Prague, served in the Thirty Years’ War; that he dealt in furs, tobacco, wines, dry goods and slaves; that he was also a land surveyor; that together with his wife, Judith Verleth of Utrecht, he bore two sons and three daughters; that he was the artist of the sketch of New Amsterdam known as the Visscher View; and that he died on an estate in Maryland in 1686.
Lesser lights received nearly comparable attention. At 29 Beaver Street lived a French Huguenot named Toussaint Briel, a gentle warehouse porter, who died on the job in the summer of 1671. Anthony Jansen van Salee, also known as “Anthony the Turk,” owned a property in Stone Street. He had come to New Amsterdam before 1638, married a foulmouthed woman and eventually left Manhattan to farm a piece of land at Gravesend, in far-off Brooklyn.
Meat markets, gibbets, a belfryless church, the dilapidated barracks of “the Company’s negroes,” all received their due. Newton coaxed his illustrator Adams to take liberties that enlivened the sense of place, including a depiction of galleons anchored in the East River Roadstead and wagons lumbering up the central street then called the Brede Wegh. But the rigor of the text counterbalanced the liberties taken in the drawing.
“The composition would be much less dry if we could imitate the James occasionally,” wrote Jennie Macarthy in a note to Newton. “But we use only facts.” Fact and imagination together supplied what Newton, in his introduction to the Redraft, explained was “as real and as true a picture as possible of New Amsterdam at the close of the Dutch period.”
Clinton Macarthy and his fellow iconographers were well aware of their work’s achievement. Macarthy wrote Stokes in April 1913: “The manner in which our data correspond with the physical details of the Castello Plan is not merely gratifying: it is something in the nature of the marvelous. To go back 250 years and ascertain exactly the names of the occupants of the houses as shown on the plan is something probably never before attempted for any other city: it will be a remarkable feature of your book, and a matter of the most intense interest.”
Clinton’s sister Jennie concurred. Still deep in her research, she wrote Newton, “I consider it a privilege to be able to help you to reproduce the City of 1660 for the Citizens of 1915.”
How remarkable is it that all this is known, this house-by-house, soul-by-soul breakdown, for the tiny colony that clung to the wintry flanks of Manhattan Island four hundred years ago? With Newton’s conflation of the Castello Plan and the De Sille List, New Amsterdam sprang to life as a fully chronicled settlement, complete, complex, microcosmic. Newton and his staff were fascinated, as if they had constructed a ship in a bottle, finely detailed down to the boatswain’s whistle, which they were free to examine, admire and marvel at each time they came to work. The no-expense-spared approach meant that the Redraft had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. But no matter. It served as an exquisite keyhole into the past.
As was correct, Newton received billing on the finished Redraft. Beneath the dolphin-flanked cartouche in the upper left-hand corner that framed the words “Redraft of the Castello Plan/New Amsterdam/in 1660,” in a small, elegant font, read the names John Wolcott Adams and I. N. Phelps Stokes. This marvel was his own. He couldn’t buy the Castello Plan, but he could remake it. He created his own wonder, eminently suitable for his own cabinet.