Printed in Genoa in 1950, this tri-fold brochure is one of the finest examples of postwar Italian tourist cartography. The central panel is entirely occupied by a large panoramic view of Lake Garda rendered using the “bird’s-eye view” technique, the unmistakable stylistic hallmark of Heinrich C. Berann. The viewer is ideally positioned to the southwest, with Mantua behind them, and the gaze sweeps northward, taking in the entire expanse of the lake: from the morainic amphitheater of Desenzano and Sirmione in the foreground, through the central narrows between Salò and Gardone to the west and Bardolino to the east, all the way to the Alpine gorge that constricts the basin near Riva del Garda and Torbole. The lake’s axis is slightly rotated relative to true north—a technique typical of Beranni—to maximize the clarity of the water’s surface and lend the composition a sense of monumental vastness. The intense, iridescent blue of Lake Garda, dotted with golden reflections, immediately captures the viewer’s attention, while the side valleys open up with an almost didactic clarity, without ever sacrificing pictorial beauty for topographical precision.
The composition is framed by two vertical side panels, arranged at the edges of the triptych like the wings of a Renaissance polyptych, each adorned with Baroque-style cartouches, perfectly in keeping with the style of Central European tourist illustrations from the 1940s and 1950s. These panels list, in the style of a concise guide, the main towns on both shores: on the left, the Brescia shore with Gardone Riviera, Salò, Gargnano, Toscolano-Maderno, Limone, Desenzano, Sirmione, Peschiera, and Lazise; on the right, the Veronese and Trentino shores with Riva, Torbole, Malcesine, Brenzone, Torri del Benaco, and Bardolino.
In the corners of the side panels—four vignettes with an almost painterly quality—Berann includes perspective views of the most famous destinations.
At the top of the central sheet, a gilded cartouche supported by cornucopias overflowing with citrus fruits—lemons and oranges, symbols of the Garda Riviera—bears the title of the work: LAKE GARDA / IN THE GARLAND OF CITIES / TRENTO · BRESCIA · MANTOVA · VERONA.
Heinrich Caesar Berann (1915–1999) was an Austrian painter and cartographer, renowned for achieving worldwide fame with his panoramic maps that combined modern cartography with classical European painting. He is unanimously considered the father of the modern panoramic map.
His technique was based on a tried-and-true system of creative and carefully calibrated distortions: Berann exaggerated the vertical relief of the terrain, visually opened up compressed valleys, emphasized lakes and bodies of water with light reflections to draw the viewer’s eye, and made extensive use of clouds on the horizon to create vanishing-point effects or balance the composition. In this view of Lake Garda, all these elements are present with rare coherence: the northern Alpine range is strikingly heightened in elevation to accentuate the contrast between the Po Valley and the Alpine world; the skies fade from a clear sky blue to the greenish-blue of the misty horizon; and the colors, though seemingly very vivid, blend at a normal viewing distance into natural tones of great harmony.
His career began in 1934 with his victory in a competition to create a panoramic map of the Großglockner Hochalpenstraße, a newly opened Alpine road in Austria. Drawing on his artistic heritage and techniques he developed on his own, he invented a new way of depicting landscapes for tourism purposes.
Over the course of his career, he created over one hundred maps, including those for the Summer and Winter Olympic Games—Cortina 1956, Rome 1960, Innsbruck 1964 and 1976, Sarajevo 1984, Nagano 1998—maps of the major European ski resorts, and a long-standing collaboration with National Geographic, for which he produced masterpieces such as the view of Mount Everest (1962), the Pacific Ocean floor (1969), and a map of the Alps (1985). Among his later works are four panoramic views for the U.S. National Park Service, dedicated to Yosemite, Yellowstone, the North Cascades, and Denali.
His body of work in Italy is extensive and well-documented: in addition to Lake Garda, Berann created maps for the Province of Mantua, for Cortina and the Belluno Dolomites, for Sestriere, for the Adriatic Riviera of Romagna, for the L’Aquila area, and for numerous other destinations. From 1952 onward, he lived in his home in the mountain village of Lans, near Innsbruck, where he remained until his death.
In this 1950 brochure, his style is already fully mature: the warm, luminous color palette, his mastery in rendering the textures of the vineyards and olive groves on the morainic hills, the imperceptible transition between the topographic precision of the landscape and the painterly freedom of the sky and the Alpine peaks—all contribute to making this document not merely a tool for promoting tourism, but a true work of graphic art, worthy of standing alongside the finest examples of illustrated cartography from 20th-century Europe.
