1564 Camocio and Forlani Map of Crete, Greece

This is a 1564 first-state Lafreri School map of Crete, engraved by Paolo Forlani and published by Giovanni Camocio. This north-oriented map illustrates the island's topography based on the late model exhibited first in the 1513 Waldseemuller map and introduced to Venice via Matteo Pagano's 1538 map. Waldseemüller's model was sufficiently authoritative to make it the prototype for all maps of the island until the 1563 map of the Cretan Calapoda became available.

A Closer Look

The map's engraving is clear and neat, with pictorial mountains, hachured coastlines, painstaking lettering, and restrained decorative elements. As with the map's precursors, it includes the Labyrinth of Daedalus: the legendary maze built for King Minos to contain the bull-headed Minotaur. While often considered to have been constructed at Knossos, recent archaeology suggests a series of tunnels at Gortyn, which is tantalizingly close to the location of the labyrinth symbol on these maps. This corresponds with Gortyna, the Cretan capital in the 1st century AD. Among other notable and tantalizing features are colonies of cave-dwellings, yet another sign that the map was at least in part the result of actual visitation: such dwellings remain extant.

Maps of the 'Lafreri' School

Between 1544 and the 1580s, Rome and Venice saw the production of a number of elegant, rare, and consequently now sought-after maps. These are frequently classified collectively as belonging to the 'Lafreri-School,' a term often used due to the survival of a 1572 catalogue of maps from the stock of publisher Antonio Lafreri. The close resemblance of this list to the contents of various bound collections of Roman and Venetian maps of the period led to these proto-atlases to be attributed to Lafreri, despite the maps having been actually produced by over a dozen different mapmakers, including Gastaldi, Lafreri himself, his heir Duchetti, the Bertellis, Camochio, Zenoni, Salamanca, Forlani, Ligorio, Tramezini, Zaltieri and others. These cartographers, mapmakers, engravers, and publishers, some of whom shared formalized partnerships, left behind a legacy of some six or seven hundred maps, all of which are marked by scarcity due to their not having been included in a standard atlas. Though these were generally sold in assembled-to-order, composite 'atlases,' the contents of these works varied wildly and those that survive are often poorly catalogued. Since the maps in these composite works were not intended to be compatible with one another, bookbinders had to go to sometimes extreme lengths to combine them: pasting smaller maps down to larger sheets with were then stitched into the books, larger maps trimmed close and then folded to fit smaller bindings. We have also encountered some maps, usually found separately, yet printed to the same sheets to be included together in bound works.

The popularity of these works, and their utility, appear to have influenced Ortelius in his project of creating the first true, uniform atlas in 1570. Despite the proliferation of Italian mapmakers in the 1560s and 70s, only a few appear to have lived beyond the Italian plagues of 1575-77, and these survivors seem to have prospered mainly by their acquisition of plates engraved prior to those plagues. The absence of any Italian response to Ortelius' work is more likely to have been a product of the devastation wrought by the pestilence than any overwhelming superiority of the Flemish work.

Publication History and Census

According to Woodward, this map was engraved by Paolo Forlani in 1564 on behalf of Giovanni Camocio, who owned the plate. A second state of the map, bearing Bertelli's imprint, is unlikely to be earlier than 1573 (Bertelli inherited the plates after Camocio's death). At least one further state, with changes to the coastline, is recorded. Only five examples are cataloged in OCLC.