📍 Title: "Tabula Asiae II"
📌 Striking and highly detailed very interesting 1574 Girolamo Ruscelli’s copper engraved map in trapezoidal form of the southern Russia covering the northern portions of the Caucauses, the Sea of Azov, and nearby southern Georgia. Ruscelli based much of his work on that of Claudius Ptolemy, and on the atlas maps of Giacomo Gastaldi. This Ptolemaic map focuses on a historical region steeped in legend, one of great importance in the early development of trade between Asia and Europe, the Silk Road region, between the Hyperborei and Caucus Mountains. It includes a portion of the Caspian Sea.
Those regions of eastern Europe which border the Black Sea are depicted, and named according to ancient kingdoms and peoples. The Black Sea has an interesting shape. Constantinople is not named, but the Bosphorus is. A number of references to the Scythians are noted, including the term ‘Hippophagi’, meaning eaters of horseflesh. While the Scythians were nomadic and depended entirely on the horse for transportation, they also used them as a source of food.
A number of other ancient civilizations are also referred to including the Sarmatians, the kingdom of Mithridatis, and the Amazons are named, but in the wrong region or Anatolia. Colchis is shown to the south of a very misshapen Anatolia. Numerous mountain ranges and river systems are shown in detail. Ruscelli was obviously familiar with reports of early explorers in the region, for he depicts and names many intriguing ancient monuments, including the famed ‘Columns of Alexander’. Most of these monuments are no longer extant, but their existence was vouchsafed by ancient historians. Descriptive Italian text on the verso describes the territory and provides some historical information.
✨ Source: La Geografia di Claudio Tolomeo alessandrino già tradotta di greco in italiano da M. Giero. Ruscelli & hora in questa nuova editione da m. Gio. Malombra ricorretta & purgata d'infiniti errori con un discorso di m. Gioseppo Moleto, in Venetia, appresso Giordano Ziletti, 1574.
🕑 Date: 1574 ( undated )
🖼 Paper size: cm 29,1 x 21,8
📍 Very strong and dark impression on good paper. Paper with chains and wiremarks. Sheet uncolored. Wide margins. Small foxing and browning. Small waterstain. Map folded. Conditions are as you can see in the images.
🧔 Girolamo Ruscelli (1500-1566) was a cartographer, humanist, and scholar from Tuscany. Ruscelli was a prominent writer and editor in his time, writing about a wide variety of topics including the works of Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarch, Italian language, Italian poetry, medicine, alchemy, and militia. One of his most notable works was a translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia which was published posthumously.
There is limited information available about Ruscelli’s life. He was born in the Tuscan city of Viterbo to a family of modest means. He was educated at the University of Padua and moved between Rome and Naples until 1548, when he moved to Naples to work in a publishing house as a writer and proofreader. He remained in the city until his death in 1566.
👴 Claudius Ptolemy (90 A.D.-168 A.D.) was a celebrated astronomer, mathematician, and geographer who lived in Alexandria in the 2nd century AD. Although his thinking influenced contemporary Arab geographers, little was known of his work in the West until manuscripts from Constantinople reached Italy in about 1400. These manuscripts were written in Greek and contained the names of every city, island, mountain and river known to the many travellers interviewed by Ptolemy. In addition, the latitude and longitude of each of the resulting eight thousand locations were also recorded. They were translated into Latin by 1401 and appeared in print by 1475. The earliest Byzantine manuscript maps, drawn by analysing the Ptolemy figures, date from the twelfth century. A number of hand-drawn copies were made in Italy throughout the early fifteenth century to accompany Ptolemys text.
Ptolemy stressed the importance of accurate observations in order to calculate latitude and longitude, and laid down the principals of systematic cartography that remain to this day. Obviously there are many errors in Ptolemys maps, due to the limited extent of basic geographic information at that time and the lack of a method of determining accurate longitudes. Judged by modern standards, the basic shortcoming of the Ptolemy world map is the small area it portrays. The Mediterranean is fairly well depicted, but is greatly exaggerated in length (Longitudinally). The effect of this, combined with Ptolemys disregard for Eratosthenes extremely accurate estimate of the earths circumference (c. 200 B.C.) and the use of a Posidonius much smaller flawed estimate (c.50 B.C.) implied a much shorter distance across that part of the unknown earths surface not drawn on the map. Columbus and his contemporaries based their exploratory ventures on Ptolemys calculations and, like him, had no idea of the vast New World to the west, interposed between Europe and Asia.
Work on the first printed atlas from the text of Ptolemy was started in 1473 and finally published in 1478. A crude copy of this atlas was produced and published by some dissident workers in 1477 in order to be first. However, the plates for the 1478 were done prior to the pirated issue and thus the 1478 atlas holds the title of the first Atlas of the world. There are very few surviving examples of this atlas and individual maps.
👨🦳 Giovanni Malombra (circa 1520 – circa 1580), floruit 1574, also known as Zuan Malombra and Zuanne Malombra, Italian geographer and translator.
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♥ Great antique print for framing!
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