This copy is copyright protected.
Copyright © 2024 Geographicus Rare Antique Maps
This item has been sold, but you can get on the Waitlist to be notified if another example becomes available, or purchase a digital scan.
1496 Schönsperger Map of the World after Schedel
World-schonsperger-1496$3,750.00
Title
Der welt das xiii blat.
1496 (undated) 4 x 5.75 in (10.16 x 14.605 cm)
1496 (undated) 4 x 5.75 in (10.16 x 14.605 cm)
Description
This is the rare 1496 first edition of the rare Hans Schönsperger world map, a reduced version of the map appearing in Hartmann Schedel's 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle. Rarer than its 1493 model, Schönsperger's map is one of the earliest acquirable printed maps of the world, one of only a handful of world maps printed in the fifteenth century.
While the size of the map necessarily reduces their legibility, this reduced edition nevertheless retains most of the placenames appearing on the 1493 Schedel, and these reflect modern European toponymy: - Anglia, Francia, Hispania, Russia and so on. Thus, despite the ancient origins of its topography, the map's toponymy reveals it to be an attempt at the depiction of the modern world, not that of antiquity.
Schönsperger's map also preserved the decorative elements of its source. Its border includes a dozen wind-heads. Outside the border, the sons of Noah preside over the three parts of the world representing their patrimony. While they are presented separately from the map itself, the facing page and the verso of Schönsperger's work includes depictions of grotesque, semi-human monsters derived from Herodotus and Ctesias, and a discussion of the marvels of Asia.
As is often the case with printed works of this period, this one has been unobtrusively annotated in the margins. This includes the neat, but erroneous labeling of the three parts of the world: the annotator has labeled Japhet's domain 'Affrica' and Ham's 'Europa', but these should be the other way around. Shem's 'Asia,' he got right.
A Closer Look
While Schönsperger's miniature edition necessarily displays less detail than its 1493 model, it shares the primary qualities of the earlier work. The topography featured on the map was modeled on that of the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy: it thus displays the Oikoumene, the habitable part of the world as known to ancient Rome (Asia, Africa, and Europe). The Indian Ocean is presented as an inland sea, with land extending from Africa towards the east, bending north to connect with China. Overall, this geography is reflective of a view of the world prior to the 1488 Portuguese rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. However, both the eastward curve of the African Atlantic coast and the inclusion of an Atlantic island south of the Ptolemaic 'Fortunate Islands' indicate an awareness of the fifteenth-century Portuguese efforts to explore the African coast that would eventually contradict the map's Ptolemaic depiction of the Indian Ocean.While the size of the map necessarily reduces their legibility, this reduced edition nevertheless retains most of the placenames appearing on the 1493 Schedel, and these reflect modern European toponymy: - Anglia, Francia, Hispania, Russia and so on. Thus, despite the ancient origins of its topography, the map's toponymy reveals it to be an attempt at the depiction of the modern world, not that of antiquity.
Schönsperger's map also preserved the decorative elements of its source. Its border includes a dozen wind-heads. Outside the border, the sons of Noah preside over the three parts of the world representing their patrimony. While they are presented separately from the map itself, the facing page and the verso of Schönsperger's work includes depictions of grotesque, semi-human monsters derived from Herodotus and Ctesias, and a discussion of the marvels of Asia.
As is often the case with printed works of this period, this one has been unobtrusively annotated in the margins. This includes the neat, but erroneous labeling of the three parts of the world: the annotator has labeled Japhet's domain 'Affrica' and Ham's 'Europa', but these should be the other way around. Shem's 'Asia,' he got right.
Publication History and Census
This woodcut was prepared for inclusion in the 1496 German edition of the Liber Cronicarum printed by Schönsperger in Augsburg. A Latin edition followed in 1497; a further German edition was printed in 1500. This did not reproduce the typesetting of this 1496 printing, so the two are easily distinguished. Although Shirley discusses editions of the map appearing throughout the 16th century, these appeared in different publications altogether with different text. Schönsperger's Liber Cronicarum is well represented in institutional collections both in Latin and in German, but the separate map is not cataloged in OCLC. We are aware of the map having come on the market separately seven times going back to 2005.CartographerS
Johann (Hans) Schönsperger (c. 1455 - February 25, 1521) was a German printer and publisher living and working in Augsburg. Little is known of his youth or education. He set up a printing shop in 1481 in partnership with goldsmith Thomas Rüger and with his stepfather Johann Bämler. He would be the dominant publisher in Augsburg for the end of the fifteenth century, but would go bankrupt in 1507. He would be kept afloat by his appointment as court printer to Emperor Maxmilian I, publishing for him a highly regarded prayer book in 1513. Schönsperger is now remembered primarily for his Bibles, and for his abridged (and pirated) edition of Schedel's world chronicle. More by this mapmaker...
Hartmann Schedel (February 13, 1440 - November 28, 1514) was a German historian, physician, book collector, and humanist. He was among the first to reproduce a map using the printing press. He was born and died in Nuremberg. Little is known of his youth or education, although it is understood that the professor of philosophy and medicine, Matheolus Perusinus, was his tutor; he is thought to have studied in the university at Florence. Schedel is remembered for having written the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle (Schedelsche Weltchronik in German, Liber Cronicarum in Latin.) As per its title, the book is a chronicle: it begins with a restatement of Biblical history reaching back to Creation before addressing the ancient world following the Biblical era, and recording more contemporary history - followed by a handful of pages left blank, in order that the reader should record the few years left of this sixth age of the world prior to the book's description of the seventh age of the world, that is to say the end of the world as presented in the Bible. Despite its adherence to this medieval form, the work would be the most lavishly illustrated work at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, and was an important conduit for the spread of humanistic learning north of the Alps. It included one of the first printed world maps, an excellent map of central Europe, and 29 full page city views representing the earliest realistic printed images of the cities they represented. Schedel was also a noted book and art collector: his private library is preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, Germany. Learn More...
Claudius Ptolemy (83 - 161 AD) is considered to be the father of cartography. A native of Alexandria living at the height of the Roman Empire, Ptolemy was renowned as a student of Astronomy and Geography. His work as an astronomer, as published in his Almagest, held considerable influence over western thought until Isaac Newton. His cartographic influence remains to this day. Ptolemy was the first to introduce projection techniques and to publish an atlas, the Geographiae. Ptolemy based his geographical and historical information on the "Geographiae" of Strabo, the cartographic materials assembled by Marinus of Tyre, and contemporary accounts provided by the many traders and navigators passing through Alexandria. Ptolemy's Geographiae was a groundbreaking achievement far in advance of any known pre-existent cartography, not for any accuracy in its data, but in his method. His projection of a conic portion of the globe on a grid, and his meticulous tabulation of the known cities and geographical features of his world, allowed scholars for the first time to produce a mathematical model of the world's surface. In this, Ptolemy's work provided the foundation for all mapmaking to follow. His errors in the estimation of the size of the globe (more than twenty percent too small) resulted in Columbus's fateful expedition to India in 1492.
Ptolemy's text was lost to Western Europe in the middle ages, but survived in the Arab world and was passed along to the Greek world. Although the original text almost certainly did not include maps, the instructions contained in the text of Ptolemy's Geographiae allowed the execution of such maps. When vellum and paper books became available, manuscript examples of Ptolemy began to include maps. The earliest known manuscript Geographias survive from the fourteenth century; of Ptolemies that have come down to us today are based upon the manuscript editions produced in the mid 15th century by Donnus Nicolaus Germanus, who provided the basis for all but one of the printed fifteenth century editions of the work. Learn More...
Source
Schedel, H., Das Buch der Croniken...,(Augsburg: Schönsperger) 1496.
Condition
Good. Wear at centerfold thread holes mended; mended tear to left page well away from map with virtually no loss to text. Manuscript notation in margins; marginal soiling and spotting. Size given for map only: printed area for sheet is 9.25 x 13.25 inches.
References
cf. OCLC 865113302. Shirley, Rodney W., The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps 1472-1700, 20. Campbell, T. The Earliest Printed Maps, 221 ii.