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Striking, Early Western Spanish Regional Map -- Madrid Misspelled "Nadrid"
Fine, rare depiction of western Spain—one of the first printed maps of the area.
The map is oriented with west at the top, showing a wide swath of the Iberian Peninsula, from the Basque Coast in the north to the Strait of Gibraltar, encompassing today’s Andalusia, Extremadura, Castile, Asturias, Cantabria and parts of Galicia and the Basque Country. Many important cities are noted including Valladolid, Toledo, and Bilbao and a misspelled Madrid.
Some of the most important features are the maritime details. Rivers are quite prominent throughout the map, which is west-oriented. The Strait of Gibraltar is shown separating Tangier from Gibraltar and Cadiz, with a sailing vessel nearby. To the north is the Atlantic.
Cologne School
This work is from the so-called Cologne School of mapmaking, the members of which made a concerted, though largely unsuccessful, attempt to supplant Antwerp (and to a lesser extent Amsterdam) as a mapmaking hub in the 1590s and first decades of the seventeenth century. Cologne's role as a mapmaking center was boosted by Dutch and Flemish refugees fleeing persecution and war, just as that of Amsterdam was boosted by those leaving Spanish-controlled Antwerp after 1588.
Rarity
The map first appeared in 1596; this example was issued in 1598 as part of a geographic compendium of Europe’s Christian Kingdoms.
This is the first time we have ever handled this map. It is rare on the market.
Johannes Matalius Metellus, also known as Jean Matal or Johannes Metellus Sequanas, was born in Poligny, Burgundy, France in ca. 1517. A humanist scholar, he was a polymath devoted to cartography, geography, law, paleography, and antiquarianism. Late in life he published a series of atlases; all his maps and atlases are rare and highly sought-after.
Matal was educated at Dole, Freiburg, and several Italian institutions. At Bologna, he met Antonio Agustín, a Spanish legal scholar, who recruited Matal to be his secretary. Together, the men researched ecclesiastical law, with an especial emphasis on Roman legal manuscripts, with trips to Venice, Florence, and elsewhere in Italy to study codices. In 1555, the two traveled to England to meet with Queen Mary on a mission for the Church.
After leaving his employment with Agustín, Matal traveled in the Low Countries and eventually settled in Cologne. There, he mixed with other savants, including especially Georg Cassander and Pedro Ximénez. It was in Cologne that Matal began his serious interest in mapmaking. He contributed to Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitae Orbis Terrarum; Georg Braun described him in glowing terms, “vir omni scientiarum genere praestans"—"a man outstanding in every form of knowledge."
Late in life, Matal began preparing a set of maps of the entire world. In 1594, he published an atlas of France, Austria, and Switzerland (39 maps), in 1595 an atlas of Spain (10 maps), and, posthumously, an atlas of Italy (37 maps), and one of Germany and the Netherlands (55 maps). Many of these maps were combined and augmented into atlases of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the world’s islands. In 1602, a compendium work showcased all of these previous works called Speculum Orbis Terrae; this atlas was well received by contemporaries like Walter Raleigh and is very rare today. Many of these maps and atlases were released after his death in 1598, they were finished by his friend and fellow mapmaker Conrad Loew (Matthias Quad).
