ARABIA FELICE NUOVA TAVOLA

£395

Superb rare and attractive map of the Arabian Peninsula based on the 1548 map of Giacomo Gastaldi.

Excellent strong impression.

It covers nearly all of the peninsula, but does not include the heads of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The coastlines are more accurate than earlier Ptolemaic maps although the southern part of the peninsula is still too wide. A large spurious lake (Stag lago) is shown in the southern region. Major towns are named, although not accurately located, and the rivers are entirely imaginary. This 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.

Mint condition

Ref: Tibbetts #27

code : M3507

Cartographer : RUSCELLI Girolamo

Date : 1564

Size : 16*25 cms

availability : Available

Price : £395

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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.