1571 Camocio map of Zakynthos, Greece

This is a scarce, separately-issued Lafreri-type map of the Greek island of Zakynthos, produced in 1571 by the Venetian Giovanni Francesco Camocio.

A Closer Look

The map is oriented to the north and shows several towns and churches, including the main port and fortress. In the cartouche, the island is said to produce very good wine and pitch and to possess veins of metal; it is also described as being subject to earthquakes. The map also indicates the location of a salt pan on its northern shore. Camocio likely did not have the benefit of a survey, and the map was almost certainly based on a verbal or written description. Nonetheless, the bay dominating the eastern end of the island is accurate.

The 'Lafreri' School

Between 1544 and the 1580s, Rome and Venice saw the production of a number of elegant, rare, and consequently now highly sought-after maps. These are frequently classified collectively as belonging to the 'Lafreri-School,' a term used due to the survival of a 1572 catalog of maps from the stock of publisher Antonio Lafreri. The close resemblance of this list to the contents of various bound collections of Roman and Venetian maps of the period led to these proto-atlases to be attributed to Lafreri, despite the maps having been produced by over a dozen different mapmakers, including Lafreri himself, his heir Duchetti, the Bertellis, Gastaldi, Camochio, Zenoni, Salamanca, Forlani, Ligorio, Tramezini, Zaltieri and others. These cartographers, mapmakers, engravers, and publishers, some of whom shared formalized partnerships, left a legacy of some six or seven hundred maps, all of which are scarce due to their not having been included in a standard atlas. Although generally sold in assembled-to-order, composite 'atlases,' the contents of these works varied wildly, and those that survive are poorly cataloged. Since the maps in these composite works were not intended to be compatible, bookbinders had to go to lengths to combine them: pasting smaller maps down to larger sheets, which were then stitched into the books, or larger maps trimmed close and then folded to fit smaller bindings. We have also encountered some maps, usually found separately, yet printed to the same sheets to be included together in bound works.

The popularity of these works, and their utility, appear to have influenced Ortelius in his project of creating the first true, uniform atlas in 1570. Despite the proliferation of Italian mapmakers in the 1560s and 70s, only a few appear to have lived beyond the Italian plagues of 1575-77, and these survivors seem to have prospered mainly by their acquisition of plates engraved prior to those plagues. The absence of any Italian response to Ortelius' work is more likely to have been a product of the devastation wrought by the pestilence than any overwhelming superiority of the Flemish work.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved in 1571 by Camocio for separate issue. A second state of this map exists with an engraved plate number '41' in the lower right, absent here; this would have been added in about 1575 by Bertelli when the plate was included in Isole Famose, Porti, Fortezze e Terre Maritime, the mapmaker's posthumous isolario. We see only three examples of this separate map listed in institutional collections: the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Sachsische Landesbibliothek, and the Newberry.