|
||
|
|
|
|
A vivid 20th-century Ottoman-style manuscript rendering of the New World, imitating the visual and calligraphic conventions of early Islamic cartography, particularly the tradition of Piri Reis and his successors. Executed in gouache and ink, the map presents a stylized hemispheric view of the Americas, with rich zoomorphic decoration across the continents—birds, deer, turtles, fish, bears, and marine mammals—interspersed with prominent place names rendered in Arabic script. A sailing ship traverses the Atlantic, and a radiant sun motif dominates the Pacific.
Though not a historical map per se, the composition draws heavily on the Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation) tradition and the iconographic language of 16th-century Ottoman portolan atlases. The faux-aging of the paper and pigments, combined with deliberately naïve drawing and an emphasis on visual ornamentation over geographic precision, strongly suggest this was produced as a historicizing tourist object, likely for sale in Istanbul during the mid- to late 20th century.
The map belongs to a genre of Ottoman revivalism that flourished in the early Republican and post-Ottoman period, when artisans and workshop painters turned to the imperial past to create decorative maps and manuscripts with exotic appeal for European and Middle Eastern collectors. These pieces often circulate alongside facsimiles of Piri Reis’ world map and stylized Persian or Mughal miniatures.
![Americae Aucta Delineatio [California as an Island]](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/106258.jpg)
