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Peru.
[London, 1671]. Copper-plate engraving, 11.375” x 13.875” plus margins. CONDITION: Good, light foxing, toning from old mat window. A wonderfully decorative map of Peru from noted cartographer John Ogilby’s atlas of the Americas, featuring exotic depictions of native peoples and animals. This ornate map, oriented with east at the top, shows Peru from roughly the equator to the Tropic of Capricorn, including parts of modern-day Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile. It depicts the mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, provinces, towns, and cities of the region, which was then the richest province in the Spanish Empire, known especially for its silver production. The map originally appeared in Ogilby’s renowned atlas America: Being the Latest and Most Accurate Description of the New World. The work, including its maps, is an English translation of Arnoldus Montanus’s 1671 Dutch original titled De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld [The New and Unknown World]. These maps, including the one of Peru, were in turn derived from earlier maps depicting the region by Willem Blaeu, Jan Jannson, and others. Ogilby’s map includes an elaborate cartouche in the upper left featuring Peruvians in native attire, appearing alongside a cornucopia and several native species—a llama, an armadillo, (possibly) an iguana, and a snake eating fruit. In the lower right of the map are two scale bars within a handsome cartouche featuring spears and cannons, with mermaid-like figures emerging from the sea to approach it. It shows scale in “Milliaria Germanica communia” and “Milliaria Gallica communia,” or German and French miles. Three ships in full sail and a sea monster appear in the “Mar Del Zur” (South Sea). A compass rose with emanating rhumb lines and a fleur-de-lis directional pointing upwards (to the east) appears in the sea to the left of the scale cartouche. John Ogilby (1600–1676) arrived at cartography late in life, following a colorful career as a dancing master, theater owner, classics translator, and publisher. He twice experienced the loss of his entire publishing inventory—first in a shipwreck, and again in the Great Fire of 1666. After the fire, Ogilby was appointed to the Commission of Survey, which produced a large map of London in the wake of the destruction, thus beginning his career in cartography. Over the course of a decade, Ogilby produced several important maps of Britain and the world. He is best known for his atlas Britannia (London: 1675), which features strip maps of British roads and is considered the first road atlas. REFERENCES: Moreland, Carl and David Bannister. Christie’s Collector’s Guide: Antique Maps (Oxford: Phaidon / Christie’s Limited, 1986), pp. 157–58.
Item #9645
Price: $450.00
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