Gastaldi, Giacomo

Geographia particolare d'una gran parte dell' Europa. Rome:  for Antonio Lafreri, 1560



Engraved wall map, on six sheets joined (34 ¾ x 42 in.; 884 x 1068 mm). Title and dedication set in cartouches, four compass roses, seas decorated with ships, scale-bar, graticule border; upper left sheet shaved to plate mark along left and upper edge which are remargined, some discoloration along joints, vertical crease, small areas restored. Floated, glazed, and framed.

R.W. Karrow, Mapmakers 30/87; Tooley 28

Rare and important wall map detailing the theater of naval war between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League. Prepared at the height of Gastaldi's career as a Venetian engineer and cartographer, and engraved by Fabio Licini in Venice, it covers the entire region from Constantinople west through Greece and Dalmatia to Italy and north to Austria, detailing the whole area under threat and the countries that made up the Holy League [the Papal States, the Hapsburg states including Naples, Sicily, along with the Republics of Venice and Genoa]. The combination of its subject, scale, dedication (to Giovanni Giacopo Fuccari, councillor to the Holy Roman Emperor), and rarity (only three other assembled copies known) suggest an official production.

The two lower quadrants are each printed from two plates, while the upper quadrants are each printed from a single plate. The upper two sheets were published separately in Venice in 1559, when Lafreri acquired the rights and Gastaldi added the two lower sheets in 1560. The southeastern sheet of Greece was reissued in 1560 with separate title before being assembled into this wall map (Tooley 280). Gastaldi worked together with the Roman publisher Antonio Lafreri, who gathered maps from many sources for his composite atlases.