ARABIA FELICE NUOVA TAVOLA
£450
Pristine example of Ruscelli's modern map of Saudi Arabia, the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. One of the first separate maps dedicated to the region.
Ruscelli's famous map of Arabia Felice is an enlarged engraving of Giacomo Gastaldi's 1548 miniature map of the Arabian peninsula, the first "modern" map dedicated to the region, superseding the anomalous Ptolemy sixth map of Asia and entirely based on Portuguese and Italian sources and the latest discoveries. Latitude and longitude marks on all sides. MAR ROSSO (Red Sea) is also named GOLPHO ARABICHO (Gulf of Arabia).
his is from the first plate, which was engraved with two map on the same plate - as evidenced by the lack of a plate mark in the upper margin. Latin text on verso.
Excellent hand colour
Mint condition
Ref: Tibbetts #27
code : M5375
Cartographer : RUSCELLI Girolamo
Date : 1562 Venice
Size : 16*25 cms sheet 23*32 cms
availability : Available
Price : £450
Girolamo Ruscelli (1500s-1566) was an Italian polymath, humanist, editor, and cartographer active in Venice during the early 16th century. Ruscelli is best known for his important revision of Ptolemy's Geographia, which was published post humously in 1574. It is generally assumed that Alexius Pedemontanus was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli. In a later work, Ruscelli reported that the Secreti contained the experimental results of an ‘Academy of Secrets’ that he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli’s academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an ‘Accademia dei Secreti’ in Naples in the 1560s.
