NICHOLAS ANGELO
FINE ART

Vignettes of Lice-Eaters, Alexander's Columns, Altars Sarmatiam Asiaticam

We are pleased to offer this exceptional original Ptolemaic map of the region from Crimea and the Sea of Azov east to the mouth of the Volga and Caspian Sea and north well into Russia.

By Gerard Mercator (1512-1594).

Mercator's eponymous projection, which in the felicitous phrase of his recent biographer Nicholas Crane "reconciled the sphere and the plane", combined with his unsurpassed dedication and skill as a cartographer and engraver make him without question the most famous mapmaker of all time. At a time when the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius was conquering the European market, Mercator postponed for years the publication of his own atlas of modern maps until he finished the production of an atlas of precisely drawn maps based on the coordinates of the famous Geographia of the second century astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy. As Andrew Taylor observed in another recent biography of Mercator, "the creator of a new, objective, and mathematical system of geography was demonstrating his skill as a medieval cartographer...at a time when explorers from Portugal, Spain, Italy and England were frantically extending the known limits of geography, Europe's leading cartographer concentrated on the best way of presenting knowledge that dated from fifteen hundred years earlier." Mercator felt that it was culturally and historically important to first present the way the ancient world was geographically understood in order to properly contextualize his modern cartography, and the result was a selection of maps that is universally considered the finest edition of Ptolemaic maps ever created.

This example of the map is from a 1695 reissue of the Mercator Ptolemy atlas by the Dutch publisher François Halma (1653-1722), who purchased the Mercator plates at auction in 1694.

46 x 33.5 cm diameter copperplate engraving, 55 x 43.5 cm sheet size, modern hand colour, engraved in Duisberg 1578, printed in Utrecht 1695

Framed