Planisphere with oval projection

Charming miniature wood block map of the World by the Italian 15th and 16th century umanist and cartographer Giuseppe Rosaccio.

Taken from the 1688 Bologna Teatro del mondo e sue parti cioe Europa, Africa, Asia, et America. For this edition new larger wood blocks were cut by Giuseppe Moretti.

The maps are now printed from one wood block and not two as for the previous editions. This is therefore the rarest and most desirable editions. The interior is filled with mountains, trees and with a few places represented by large castles.

The book was very popular and many edition were printed in Treviso, Bologna, Florence, Verona, Venice, Viterbo.

Giuseppe Rosaccio (Pordenone, 1530-Venice, c. 1621) was an esteemed cartographer, active in Venice and the author of several atlases, maps and planispheres, as well as of astronomical, astrological and geographical works that were very popular in the second half of the 16th century: Il Microcosmo, Mondo elementare e celeste, Discorso sulla nobiltà ed eccellenza delle Terra. He is also credited with editing an edition of Ptolemy's Geography.

In 1580 he first published Teatro del cielo e della terra, set according to the Aristotelian-Tolemaic conception, in which the spherical structure of the cosmos is illustrated through this hierarchy: Empyrean Heaven, Prime movable, Crystalline Heaven, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Abram's Sine, Limbo, Purgatory, Hell.

Woodcut with fine later hand colour, very good condition.

Bibiografia

King, Miniature Antique Maps, pp. 72,73. R. W. Shirley, "The Mapping of the world", 178; cfr. Liruti, Letterati del Friuli, IV, pp. 166-169.