Isola di Cipro

Map of Cyprus, printed in Venice as a single sheet, and signed by Natale Bonifacio whose monogram appears at the bottom left. This map must be compared with another largest map of the island, engraved in Venice in 1570 by Bonifacio. In both maps appears as the author the mysterious Venetian cartographer Felice Brunello, but we haven’t biographical notices of him. Meurer rightly points out that, the cartographic work of Bonifacio was the best-known series of maps depicting the Greek islands, Aegean and the Ionian Sea. They are not dated so it's difficult to assign a chronological order, dating from the period 1567/68. It is likely, therefore, that this map advances of just the output of the larger one.

All the maps were printed by the so-called Lafrery School, and then assembled in a composite atlases.

This example is taken from the work Universus terrarum orbis scriptorum calamo delineatus ... qui de Europae, Asiae, Africae, & Americae regnis, provinciis, populis, civitatibus.... published in Padua in 1713, at Matteo Cadorin, by Raffaello Savonarola, under the pseudonym of Lasor a Varea (or Varela).

The work was a kind of encyclopedia containing news about the various localities of the world arranged in alphabetical order, enriched with maps and views of the whole world belonging to famous cartographic collections of the past-Bertelli, Valegio, Camocio, Bonifacio, Nelli, Magini, and others-of which the publisher Cadorin probably possessed the original plates.

Copper engraving, in excellent condition.