Universale descrittione del mondo
A RARE TWO-SHEET LAFRERI-SCHOOL WORLD MAP WITH ORIGINAL COLOR
Siena: Giovanni Florimi, 1634. Second issue.
Two sheets (32 ¼” x 20 3/8”, 816mm x 523mm sheet). Engraved, with original hand-coloring. Framed floating with glass recto and verso (39 ¾” x 28 ½”).
A stadium map of the world, with scrollwork in the corners. The whole is surrounded by a white-on-black heraldic meander. At the top, the title. At the bottom, a description in four columns. At the lower left of the map, a cartouche with the arms of Federico Borromeo (il Giovane).
Backed onto a sheet, evening out some irregular margins. Two vertical lines of soiling from earlier folds. Two areas restored in facsimile: ONDO in the title with its corresponding border, and a triangular section north of China centered on Tanguth. Some small patches of abrasion, but altogether in excellent shape, and with vivid original hand-color.
The Lafreri School takes its name from Antonio Lafreri (1512–1577), the Burgundian cartographer-engraver who settled in Rome and who embarked on the method of compiling atlases from loose sheets printed by various engravers and cartographers, based on the interest of a particular client. This practice would become popular throughout the continent in the XVIIc. Lafreri-School maps represent the high-water-mark of Italian cartography before the center of mapmaking moved north to the Netherlands.
Arnoldo di Arnoldi (d. 1602), a Belgian transplant to Italy, went to work for Matteo Florimi (1540–1615), whose son Giovanni continued the business after his death as Eredi Florimi (Florimi’s Heirs). Arnoldi brought influences from further afield to Italian mapmaking; in the case of our map, the 1592 eighteen-sheet cylindrical map of 1592 (which survives in a single copy at the Colegio del Corpus Christi in Valencia) made by Petrus Plancius. Arnoldi’s ten-sheet map (1600) was the first to draw on that map. In 1601, Arnoldi reduced the map to two sheets; our map is the second state of that 1601 two-sheet map (of which Bifolco-Ronca cites only five copies). The original state was dedicated to Cristoforo Chigi, the 1634 state to Federico Borromeo (1617–1673), who in that year (at the age of 17) received his doctorate in civil and canon law from the University of Siena.
The map is notable cartographically. It includes the Strait of Anián, the hypothesized precursor to the Bering Strait, as well as Lake Conibas, a clustered lake generalizing the Great Lakes, drawn from Mercator’s 1569 map. Indeed, Mercator’s influence is strongly felt throughout the map. The North Pole is in four islands, and there is a magnetic node near the Strait of Anián, which is perhaps an early explanation of magnetic variance.
Most striking of course is the terra australe incognita that fills nearly half of the southern hemisphere. It is connected to the southern tip of South America in the western hemisphere and joins to Giava Minore (i.e., Sumatra), which had been mentioned by Marco Polo and erroneously positioned on maps for centuries by scribal error; the connection of Sumatra to the terra australis was made by Jean Alfonse in 1544 and persisted into the XVIIc despite exploration by Janszoon and others.
Bifolco-Ronca, pp. 296–297; Shirley, Mapping of the World 228.
Item #6JLR0187
Price: $135,000