Item #1423 L'isole piu famose del Mondo. Thomaso PORCACCHI.
L'isole piu famose del Mondo
L'isole piu famose del Mondo
L'isole piu famose del Mondo
L'isole piu famose del Mondo
With 17 New Maps
Venice, Heirs of Simon Galignani, 1590.

L'isole piu famose del Mondo.

Small folio [28.75 x 19 cm], (12) ff. including engraved title, 201, (1) pp., 1 integral blank, including 47 copper plate engraved maps in text. Bound in early 18th-century stiff vellum, raised bands on spine, with old, neat repair applying 5 strips of vellum to blanket spine and secure it to covers. Scored ownership inscription on verso of front endleaf. Old annotation on title correcting “Arretino” with “Fiorentino”. Some minor soiling and discoloration on title and in margin of scattered leaves, and some light waterstain in gutter of last few signatures; worming in lower gutter margin of a few signatures and a few leaves lightly browned; otherwise very good, with the maps in good impression.

Excellent enlarged edition of one of the most beautifully engraved Italian island books of the sixteenth century. L'isole piu famose was the first with maps engraved on copper; and with the Gastaldi edition of Ptolemy’s Geografia, 1548, it was among the few geographical works of any kind illustrated with engravings. This edition of Porcacchi contains much more than the first. According to Phillips Atlases it contains 17 maps not in the edition of 1572, including two relating to America: Jamaica and Puerto Rico, here called “Isola di S. Giovanni” for San Juan.

Altogether, pages 154 to 184 relate to America. The volume closes with ‘Descrizione del Mappamondo’ and ‘Discorso intorno alla carta da navigare,’ pages 193 to 201, illustrated with two splendid Lafrerian-style maps of the world engraved by the Paduan Girolamo Porro. Porro, well-known as a book illustrator, later engraved maps for the first small-format Mercator atlas and for a Ptolemy (both appearing in 1596). According to Shirley, the oval-shaped world map “is a finely-executed reduction of Camocio’s large world map of 1567, one of the last in the long line of derivatives from Gastaldi's prototype of 1546.”



* Adams P-1906; Sabin 64105; Shirley 127-28; see The World Encompassed 86.

Price: $9,500.00

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