This Old Map: Da Vinci's City Plan, 1502

Perhaps the most common type of city map is the kind on Google Maps: a flattened out, “ichnographic” plan, where all buildings and features appear perfectly perpendicular to a single, aerial viewpoint. This unrealistic view allows newcomers to grasp a city’s entire layout, relative to its environs and the cardinal directions. In the era of GPS and aerial photography, creating an accurate ichnographic plan isn’t too difficult. But one such map, created by a famous Renaissance polymath, pre-dated airplanes and satellites by centuries.

The mapmaker in question is Leonardo da Vinci (as if we needed another reason to appreciate him). He made this map of the Italian town of Imola toward the end of his life—after creating The Vitruvian Man, but before his most famous masterpiece, The Mona Lisa.