Scarce Late Edition of the First Italian Epitome.
Very good example of this scarce late-17th-century edition of Ortelius's famous Epitome, the immensely-popular pocket-sized reduction of his foundational atlas.
This Venetian edition of Ortelius's work miniaturized his full-sized atlas for an Italian audience. Ortelius's folio-sized Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, published starting in 1570 and as late as 1640, proved immensely popular throughout Europe and quickly spawned a reduced-size version. The first "Epitome" was published in 1588 by Philippe Galle and quickly spawned other editions, continuing into the 18th century, outliving the folio atlas. The Epitome proved most popular for those for whom a full-sized Ortelius atlas was too cumbersome or expensive, such as students or voyagers.
This 1667 Italian Epitome, published by Scipion Banca, uses copperplates first issued by Pietro Maria Marchetti for a Brescian Epitome in 1598 and likely was inspired by the 1593 Italian edition of Galle's Epitome. The plates were then re-used in the Relationi Universali di Giovanni Botero in 1599.
The atlas includes 108 engraved maps starting with a suite of the world and continents before proceeding with the regional maps. Each map faces its text description, although some of the more extensive descriptions cover a few pages.
Provenance
- Effaced signature and other possibly related markings, dated 1735.
- Illegible 20th-century annotation on verso of title.
- Querzola Libri Rari, Roma; their label on front pastedown.
- In ballpoint, on verso of title "Aqueonio 1960" (sp?)
Collation
[8]; 1-232; [14].
Abraham Ortelius is perhaps the best known and most frequently collected of all sixteenth-century mapmakers. Ortelius started his career as a map colorist. In 1547 he entered the Antwerp guild of St Luke as afsetter van Karten. His early career was as a business man, and most of his journeys before 1560, were for commercial purposes. In 1560, while traveling with Gerard Mercator to Trier, Lorraine, and Poitiers, he seems to have been attracted, largely by Mercator’s influence, towards a career as a scientific geographer. From that point forward, he devoted himself to the compilation of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), which would become the first modern atlas.
In 1564 he completed his “mappemonde", an eight-sheet map of the world. The only extant copy of this great map is in the library of the University of Basel. Ortelius also published a map of Egypt in 1565, a plan of Brittenburg Castle on the coast of the Netherlands, and a map of Asia, prior to 1570.
On May 20, 1570, Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum first appeared in an edition of 70 maps. By the time of his death in 1598, a total of 25 editions were published including editions in Latin, Italian, German, French, and Dutch. Later editions would also be issued in Spanish and English by Ortelius’ successors, Vrients and Plantin, the former adding a number of maps to the atlas, the final edition of which was issued in 1612. Most of the maps in Ortelius' Theatrum were drawn from the works of a number of other mapmakers from around the world; a list of 87 authors is given by Ortelius himself
In 1573, Ortelius published seventeen supplementary maps under the title of Additamentum Theatri Orbis Terrarum. In 1575 he was appointed geographer to the king of Spain, Philip II, on the recommendation of Arias Montanus, who vouched for his orthodoxy (his family, as early as 1535, had fallen under suspicion of Protestantism). In 1578 he laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography with his Synonymia geographica (issued by the Plantin press at Antwerp and republished as Thesaurus geographicus in 1596). In 1584 he issued his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus, a Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). Late in life, he also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table (1598).