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1561 Ruscelli / Gastaldi Mariner's Map of the World
CartaMarina-ruscelli-1561-3$1,250.00
Title
Carta Marina Nuova Tavola.
1561 (undated) 7.5 x 9.5 in (19.05 x 24.13 cm) 1 : 108770000
1561 (undated) 7.5 x 9.5 in (19.05 x 24.13 cm) 1 : 108770000
Description
This is a superb example of Girolamo Ruscelli's 1561 map of the world,Carta Marina Nuova Tavola. It was one of three maps in Ruscelli's edition of Ptolemy: one depicted the ancient world, while two - this, and a double-hemisphere map - were modern works. This striking work, with its array of rhumb lines, was an enlarged and improved version of Giacomo Gastaldi's 1548 Carta Marina Nova Tabula and shared with that earlier map an abundance of unusual features.
Gastaldi's conviction on the connection of Asia and America ran counter to that of his contemporary Münster, and to many of the mapmakers to follow in the 16th century. (It must be said that European geographers had no concrete evidence of the separation of Asia and America by the Bering Strait until Cook's voyage there in the 18th century.)
The geography here, preserved from the 1548 map, is distinct from any of Gastaldi's other maps thanks to the presence of two great bays appearing in North America: a bay intruding into the Pacific coast north of the unnamed California, and the appearance of the Sea of Verrazano in the northeast. Neither of these appear on any of Gastaldi's other maps. The appearance of the Sea of Verrazano - the wedge-shaped bay bisecting America from the north - may represent an effort by Gastaldi to reconcile his geography with that of his colleague, Sebastian Münster, on whose maps of America and the world that bay had appeared. Münster and Gastaldi were familiar enough with each other's work for the former to write the preface to Gastaldi's 1548 Ptolemy, so the idea likely was one they had discussed. However, Gastaldi's interpretation of the sea is very different from Münster's. The German-Swiss scholar's sea appeared to hold out hope for a convenient passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In contrast, Gastaldi's Verrazanean Sea connects not with the Pacific but with a great northern ocean with no connection to either the Atlantic or the Pacific.
Despite Ruscelli's version having been engraved thirteen years after the Gastaldi original, it remains among the earliest maps to show a peninsular California. (It first appeared on Cabot's 1544 map; Gastaldi had adopted the form as early as 1546.) It shows the Strait of Magellan and a massive insular Tierra del Fuego - although it does not command the size of the Terra Australis that would appear on Mercator's maps.
Asia and America
The most prominent element here drawn from Gastaldi's world maps (until 1561) is the emphatic connection of North America and the Asian mainland. This is unmistakable on the present work: the same continent sporting Florida, Mexico and a peninsular California continues to reveal the Ganges River at its westward limits; the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra tell the same tale. Japan does not appear at all. This delineation shrinks the Pacific Ocean drastically; it may depend on an underestimation of the size of the globe (perhaps following Ptolemy's erroneous measurement, as opposed to the closer estimation of Eratosthenes.)Gastaldi's conviction on the connection of Asia and America ran counter to that of his contemporary Münster, and to many of the mapmakers to follow in the 16th century. (It must be said that European geographers had no concrete evidence of the separation of Asia and America by the Bering Strait until Cook's voyage there in the 18th century.)
The geography here, preserved from the 1548 map, is distinct from any of Gastaldi's other maps thanks to the presence of two great bays appearing in North America: a bay intruding into the Pacific coast north of the unnamed California, and the appearance of the Sea of Verrazano in the northeast. Neither of these appear on any of Gastaldi's other maps. The appearance of the Sea of Verrazano - the wedge-shaped bay bisecting America from the north - may represent an effort by Gastaldi to reconcile his geography with that of his colleague, Sebastian Münster, on whose maps of America and the world that bay had appeared. Münster and Gastaldi were familiar enough with each other's work for the former to write the preface to Gastaldi's 1548 Ptolemy, so the idea likely was one they had discussed. However, Gastaldi's interpretation of the sea is very different from Münster's. The German-Swiss scholar's sea appeared to hold out hope for a convenient passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In contrast, Gastaldi's Verrazanean Sea connects not with the Pacific but with a great northern ocean with no connection to either the Atlantic or the Pacific.
Despite Ruscelli's version having been engraved thirteen years after the Gastaldi original, it remains among the earliest maps to show a peninsular California. (It first appeared on Cabot's 1544 map; Gastaldi had adopted the form as early as 1546.) It shows the Strait of Magellan and a massive insular Tierra del Fuego - although it does not command the size of the Terra Australis that would appear on Mercator's maps.
'Carta Marina?'
Despite the title of this little map and its elaborate latticework of navigator's rhumb lines, this work would be of very little use at sea. That said, it focuses on the seas: very few cities are named, and only the most dramatic land features appear. The map's purpose, then, may be to show Gastaldi's ideas about which of the world's seas were navigable and where one might be able to travel, so the map's 'chartiness' and its nautical title may have been intended to invoke the idea of the navigability of the post-Magellanic world. For even the most housebound armchair traveler, the idea that 'one might be able to get 'there from here' would have been a compelling message for such a map to deliver.Publication History and Census
This map was engraved for the 1561 edition of Ruscelli's La Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo. The maps of that edition were engraved two-to-a-plate, and consequently, the platemark runs off the edge of the sheet at top. Afterward, the plates were divided, and examples from 1574 onwards exhibit a platemark all around the map. This example is the first state of 1561 and conforms typographically to the 1562 edition of Ruscelli's work. We see eleven examples of this separate map cataloged in OCLC in various editions.CartographerS
Girolamo Ruscelli (1500 - 1566) was an Italian polymath, humanist, editor, and cartographer active in Venice during the early 16th century. Born in Viterbo, Ruscelli lived in Aquileia, Padua, Rome and Naples before relocating to Venice, where he spent much of his life. Cartographically, Ruscelli is best known for his important revision of Ptolemy's Geographia, which was published posthumously in 1574. Ruscelli, basing his work on Gastaldi's 1548 expansion of Ptolemy, added some 37 new "Ptolemaic" maps to his Italian translation of the Geographia. Ruscelli is also listed as the editor to such important works as Boccaccio's Decameron, Petrarch's verse, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and various other works. In addition to his well-known cartographic work many scholars associate Ruscelli with Alexius Pedemontanus, author of the popular De' Secreti del R. D. Alessio Piemontese. This well-known work, or "Book of Secrets" was a compilation of scientific and quasi-scientific medical recipes, household advice, and technical commentary on a range of topics that included metallurgy, alchemy, dyeing, perfume making. Ruscelli, as Alexius, founded a "Academy of Secrets," a group of noblemen and humanists dedicated to unearthing "forbidden" scientific knowledge. This was the first known experimental scientific society and was later imitated by a number of other groups throughout Europe, including the Accademia dei Secreti of Naples. More by this mapmaker...
Giocomo Gastaldi (c. 1500 - October, 1566) was an Italian astronomer, cartographer, and engineer active in the second half of the 16th century. Gastaldi (sometimes referred to as Jacopo or Iacobo) began his career as an engineer, serving the Venetian Republic in that capacity until the fourth decade of the sixteenth century. During this time he traveled extensively, building a large library relating to voyages and exploration. From about 1544 he turned his attention to mapmaking, working extensively with Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Nicolo Bascarini, and Giovanbattista Pedrezano, as well ask taking private commission for, among others, Venice's Council of Ten. He is credited with the fresco maps of Asia and Africa still extent in the map room of the Doge's Palace. Gastaldi was also one of the first cartographers to embrace copper plate over woodblock engraving, marking and important development in the history of cartography. His 1548 edition of Ptolemy's Geographia was the first to be printed in a vernacular; it was the first to be printed in copperplate. As with his Swiss/German contemporary Münster, Gastaldi;'s work contained many maps depicting newly discovered regions for the first time, including the first map to focus on the East Coast of North America, and the first modern map of the Indian Peninsula. His works provided the source for the vast majority of the Venetian and Roman map publishers of the 1560s and 70s, and would continue to provide an outsize influence on the early maps of Ortelius, De Jode, and Mercator. Giocomo Gastaldi's 1548 edition of Claudius Ptolemy's Geographia - that is, La Geografia - . This appeared in six Latin editions in 1540, 1541, 1542, 1545, 1551 and 1552. According to Karrow, Munster based the text on the Latin translation of Willibald Pirkheimer, but he carefully collated it with previous editions, adding notes of his own. The first three editions contained 48 maps, consisting of 27 based on Ptolemy's ancient geography, and 21 maps based on modern geographical knowledge. The latter three editions contained 54 maps, comprised of the same ancient works but with six of the modern maps discarded, and twelve new ones added. For the collector, the modern maps are of sharpest interest. Some were based on Waldseemuller's geography, but many were based on Munster's own surveys and those of other European geographers whose assistance Munster had been able to enlist. Most of these would be reprised in Munster's magnum opus, Cosmographia Universalis. A disproportionate number of Munster's modern maps show contemporary geographical knowledge of the their respective areas for the very first time: The first map to show the continents of the Western Hemisphere; the first map to focus on the continent of Asia; the first modern map to name the Pacific Ocean. Even in cases where earlier maps exist, Munster's works very often remain the earliest such acquirable by the collector. Learn More...
Source
Ruscelli, G., La Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino…, (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi) 1562.
Beginning in 1561, Girolamo Ruscelli published this important, expanded edition of Giacomo Gastaldi's 1548 Ptolemy. Its maps, engraved in Venice by Giulio Sanuto, were in the main based directly upon those in Gastaldi's 1548 work. The maps were larger format than Gastaldi's, however, and Sanuto's engraving was far clearer and more legible than those appearing in the 1548 work. There are some important additions that distinguish Ruscell's Ptolemy from Gastaldi's. Ruscelli's work contained a map of the habitable world according to Ptolemy, which the Gastaldi lacked; also, the double-hemisphere map appearing in the Ruscelli was new and did not appear in the Gastaldi. Ruscelli's modern map of England was based on the work of George Lily, rather than the Waldseemüller-derived map appearing in the Gastaldi; the Ruscelli is the earliest generally acquirable map of England based on knowledge from someone who lived there. In a fateful innovation, Ruscelli's work included Septentrionalium partium nova tabula,the first copy of Nicolo Zeno's 1558 fraud Carta da Navegar, which introduced a novel mapping of the north parts of the world, including the phantom islands of Frisland, Icaria, Drogeo and Estotiland. Had Ruscelli not copied the Zeno - which had a narrow, brief publication - this preposterous geography would have probably not taken hold. Its inclusion in Ruscelli's beautiful, authoritative and popular work would lead to the adoption of the Zeno map by Mercator, Ortelius, Plancius and their successors, baffling scholars for centuries. Ruscelli's Ptolemy had a long publication history, cementing the influence of the work. It appeared both in Italian and Latin editions, all printed in Venice, throughout the latter 16th century:
- 1561 La Geographia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino, Italian. Venice, Vincenzo Valgrisi.
- 1562 Geographia Cl. Ptolemaei Alexandrini, Latin. Venice, Vincenzo Valgrisi.
- 1564 La Geographia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino, Italian. Venice, Giordano Ziletti.
- 1564 Geographia Cl. Ptolemaei Alexandrini, Latin. Venice, Giordano Ziletti.
- 1574 La Geographia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino, Italian. Venice, Giordano Ziletti.
- 1598 Geographia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino, Italian. Venice, heirs of Melchoir Sessa.
- 1599 Geographia di Claudio Tolomeo Alessandrino, Italian. Venice, heirs of Melchoir Sessa.
Condition
Excellent. Faint marginal soiling, else fine with a bold, even strike.
References
Rumsey 11311.13. OCLC 431575011. Shirley, Rodney W., The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps 1472-1700, #111.