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A nice example of Ruscelli's map of the ancient world from his La Geografia.
The map shows the a Ptolemaic World projection, very similar to the ones that appeared in the 1477 and 1478 editions, the first ever printed editions of Ptolemy's work, which in turn were based on medieval manuscripts which had first come Western Europe at the beginning of the 15th Century and were translated from Greek to Latin.
One of three maps of the world maps in Ruscelli's Atlas.
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.
