1574 Edition of Ptolemy's Geography. With Modern Maps of New France, Mexico, and the World.
An excellent example of Ruscelli's Ptolemy, the most important Italian Ptolemy published in the second half of the 16th century.
Ruscelli first published his Geografia in 1561, basing his maps on Gastaldi's 1548 work. Ruscelli both enlarged Gastaldi's maps, which allowed for a significantly neater and more attractive style, and he also expanded the atlas, adding a number of maps. This brought the total number of maps in the atlas to 65, including an impressive six relating the the Americas, as well as three world maps. This includes the first double-hemisphere world map to appear in an atlas (Shirley 110).
A number of other maps are of particular interest. Septentrionalium Partium Nova Tabula, is the first reduction of the unobtainable 1558 Zeno map, which charted a 1380 Venetian voyage to the northern Atlantic. Tierra Nueva is the second printed map to focus on the eastern coastline of North America, stretching from Florida to Labrador. The map of the Southwest, Nueva Hispania Tabula Nova, includes a look at rivers in this region and the Seven Cities of Gold. Finally, the "mariner's map," Carta Marina Nuova Tavola, is an easily recognizable projection with strange features including an landbridge between North America and Asia.
The 1574 edition of Ruscelli's work is the third edition, the first to include the corrections by the editor Giovanni Malombra. Published in Italian, it is also the second issue to include Gioseppe Moleto's treaties on geographical terms and the process of mapmaking at the end of the book.
The work was written as the sun set on Ptolemy's millennia-long domination on the studies of geography. Recognizing this, the work compares Ptolemey's geography to "modern" geography in both its text and maps. With a similar number of both ancient and modern maps and text discussing both ways of mapmaking, this book acts as a bridge between classical and contemporary cartography.
Girolamo Ruscelli
Ruscelli was one of the great humanists of 16th century Italy, publishing a number of works on a variety of topics including Italian poetry, history, militaria, and, of course, his influential edition of Ptolemy's Geografia, expanded with modern maps. Ruscelli also founded what was supposedly the first-ever scientific society, the Accademia Segreta, in Naples, which existed between 1542 and 1547. Following this, he moved to Venice where he proofread for Valgrisi, with whom he would publish the Geografia.
Collation
*, **4, A - H4, A - Z4, Aa - Xx4, +2, A - Z2, Aa - Oo2, A - Z2, Aa - Dd2, α - η4, A - H4.
Provenance
Ignatius Zanardi, his bookplate, dated 1748.
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 (fl. AD 127-145) was an ancient geographer, astronomer, and mathematician. He is known today through translations and transcriptions of his work, but little is known about his life besides his residence in Alexandria.
Several of his works are still known today, although they have passed through several alterations and languages over the centuries. The Almagest, in thirteen books, discusses astronomy. It is in the Almagest that Ptolemy postulates his geocentric universe. His geometric ideas are contained in the Analemma, and his optical ideas were presented in five books known as the Optica.
His geographic and cartographic work was immensely influential. In the Planisphaerium, Ptolemy discusses the stereographic projection. Perhaps his best-known work is his Geographia, in eight books. However, Ptolemy’s ideas had been absent from western European intellectual history for roughly a thousand years, although Arab scholars interacted with his ideas from the ninth century onward.
In 1295, a Greek monk found a copy of Geographia in Constantinople; the emperor ordered a copy made and the Greek text began to circulate in eastern Europe. In 1393, a Byzantine diplomat brought a copy of the Geographia to Italy, where it was translated into Latin in 1406 and called the Cosmographia. The manuscript maps were first recorded in 1415. These manuscripts, of which there are over eighty extant today, are the descendants of Ptolemy’s work and a now-lost atlas consisting of a world map and 26 regional maps.
When Ptolemy’s work was re-introduced to Western scholarship, it proved radically influential for the understanding and appearance of maps. Ptolemy employs the concept of a graticule, uses latitude and longitude, and orients his maps to the north—concepts we take for granted today. The Geographia’s text is concerned with three main issues with regard to geography: the size and shape of the earth; map projection, i.e. how to represent the world’s curve proportionally on a plane surface; and the corruption of spatial data as it transfers from source to source. The text also contains instructions as to how to map the world on a globe or a plane surface, complete with the only set of geographic coordinates (8000 toponyms, 6400 with coordinates) to survive from the classical world.