1565 Giovanni Battista Ramusio Map of Western Africa

Ramusio Captures the French Coasting of Africa.

This is Giovanni Battista Ramusio's 1556 / 1565 map of Western Africa. It is the first specific map of the region to be based substantially on contemporaneous report (that of the diplomat and author Leo Africanus). Also, it reveals Ramusio's familiarity with African coastal charts of the Dieppe school of chartmakers, as evidenced not only in the map's distinctive coastal outline but also in its lively decorative elements.

A Closer Look

The map covers western Africa and the Guinea Coast, stretching from modern-day Mauritania to Cameroon. Part of the Island of St. Thomas appears in the lower right. The map's detail extends from just above the Tropic of Cancer to the Equator, which forms the bottom border. The coastal detail is distinctive and remarkably accurate. Cap Blanc and Arguin (Argin) are named, and the Bay of Arguin and its treacherous banks are recognizable. Cap Verde, the Senegal River, and the Gambra River are depicted and named. The Serra Leona (the mountain range that gives Sierra Leone its name) appears dramatically. Further along the coast, the landmarks of Cape Palmas and Cape Three Points (on the coasts of modern-day Liberia and Ghana, respectively) are clearly marked. Inland of the latter is depicted the infamous Castel de la Mina, which, since 1482, had been a principal Portuguese fortress and a key staging location for the slave trade. While La Mina had appeared on the 1554 Gastaldi/Ramusio Prima Tavola of Africa, this map was the first to represent the importance of the fort; this was emphasized especially by the note by the Portuguese ship sailing in the Gulf of Guinea, Vado al castel de la mina (Going to the Castle de la Mina). Further along, the other prominent river openings are marked and named.

In the interior, the clear detail of the coastline is replaced with a lucid visual description of Africa to a European audience. A barren, desert 'Libya Interior' in the north gives way to mountains and jungle below. Not only exotic animals like elephants and monkeys appear, but also herds of camels, and a shepherd with a flock. Africans are shown with houses and stockades. A king is shown with courtiers at Guinea, and while many Africans here are portrayed in a primitive light, the soldiers in the vicinity of Guinea are shown well-armed and orderly. While there are plentiful sea monsters visible amongst the European ships and native canoes, the land is devoid of such beasts as the cyclops, which dominates Munster's 1540 map of the continent. The Africa depicted here is an Africa peopled by men.

Ramusio's Sources

Ramusio cited Giacomo Gastaldi as providing some of the maps for inclusion in his atlas, and it is conventional to assign Ramusio's maps to that Venetian authority. However, scrutiny of several maps, including this one, invites skepticism. While most of the coastal placenames here can be found on Gastaldi's 1548 map of West Africa, this map's delineation of the coastline itself cannot be traced to that map, and the interior detail - particularly the placenames north of the Tropic of Cancer - differ sharply from it.

The present map compares much more closely to the relevant portion of the general map of Africa appearing in the 1554 volume 1 of Ramusio's Voyages than to the 1548 map. The common thread in both these new maps, which was not available for the weaving of the 1548 map, was the detailed account of Leo Africanus, Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica. Though completed in 1526, this foundational description of Africa would not be committed to print until Ramusio included it in his Voyages as 'Descrittione dell' Africa.' Its influence on the present map is easy to find. All the placenames appearing north of the Tropic of Cancer, absent from the 1548, appear together for the first time in Leo Africanus. The description of Sierra Leone stands as an example. In John Pory's 1600 translation of Leo Africanus, Sierra Leone is described:

This cape last mentioned hath an exceeding high mountaine thereupon, which causeth it to be seene a mightie distance off. It seemeth to be the same promontorie which Hanno and Ptolemey call The Chariot of the Gods. It is called by the name of a lyon in regard of the dreadfull thunders and lightnings which are continually heard from the top thereof: howbeit neere unto it are found apes, munkeies, and such other beasts as live in temperate places.

On Ramusio's map, the mountain resembles a volcano (inspired by the 'dreadfull thunders and lightnings') and a 'munkei' is pictured sitting at its feet.

The delineation of the coastline on the present work resembles that on the 1554 Africa, but it does not appear on any earlier printed map; it is quite different than that which appears on Gastaldi's 1548 map. It is worthy of note that it would be incorporated in Gastaldi's future works, and those derived from them.

This appears to be an area in which Ramusio's role as ambassador to France appears to have benefited him. Several of the maps appearing in his Voyages are very credibly based on the French manuscript charts of the Dieppe school of chartmaking. A comparison of the present work with the corresponding manuscript chart in the c. 1547 Vaillard atlas at the Huntington Library is instructive: the coastline is very similar in content and execution, particularly in the pronounced, angular presentation of Cap Verde and the Cap des Palmas. The Vaillard is a coastal chart, and, as such, does not present interior placenames or rivers; however, that interior space is filled with depictions of men, animals, and fortresses very comparable to the corresponding images on the present work. While we do not propose that the Vaillard atlas itself was the source for the coastal information in the Gastaldi/Ramusio work, there are enough similarities to suggest that Ramusio drew from a chart of the same school. This connection is not limited to this map: Ramusio's map of Brazil is very similar, in both its delineation and themes, to the chart appearing in the Vaillard atlas. The incorporation of French charts in these works, as well as the ubiquity of identifiably French ships in them, indicates Ramusio's appreciation of France's growing global reach in the 16th century.

Publication History and Census

This map was first cut by Matteo Pagano for inclusion in the 1556 third volume of Ramusio's Navigationi et Viaggi. The woodblocks for this, and indeed all the maps of the 1556 edition, burned in a 1557 warehouse fire. The blocks were all re-engraved, probably again by Pagano, for the 1565 edition of the Navigationi et Viaggi. The second block - the present example - is geographically identical to the first; the two blocks are most easily distinguishable by differences in the trees appearing behind the various buildings, and by the leonine sea monster appearing above the word 'Equinotial' in the lower left (the corresponding creature in the 1556 version is more fishlike.) This second block would be employed one more time in 1606, that edition easily identifiable by the small worm-shaped blank areas. (Woodworm appears to have similarly infested all blocks of the 1606 edition.) This work is rare. Seven examples of the 1565 Navigationi et Viaggi are listed in OCLC, while just twenty of the 1606 edition appear. Only four examples of this separate map are catalogued in OCLC in the 1565 edition.

Cartographers

Giovanni Battista Ramusio (July 20, 1485 - July 10, 1557) was an Italian civil servant, humanist, scholar, historian, and geographer active in the middle part of the 16th century. Ramusio spent most of his life in the service of the Republic of Venice, first as part of that state's embassy to France, and later as a reporter on voyages and discoveries. He was born to an illustrious family in Treviso and moved to Vencie as a young man, where his father was a magistrate. He studied at the University of Padua but may not have received a full degree. He entered the civil service shortly after leaving the university and was immediately assigned to diplomatic service for his facility with languages, particularly French. His most significant contribution to cartography is his publication of Navigationi et Viaggi a collection of travel narratives he collected in his service to the state. The narratives include those of Marco Polo, Niccolò Da Conti, Magellan, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Giosafat Barbaro, and Tomé Pires, among others. Some of the voyages appearing in the Navigationi et Viaggi are otherwise unknown, marking it as an exceptionally important volume. Ramusio died in Venice in 1557.   Further Details...

Giacomo Gastaldi (c. 1500 - October, 1566) was an Italian astronomer, cartographer, and engineer active in the second half of the 16th century. Gastaldi (sometimes referred to as Jacopo or Iacobo) began his career as an engineer, serving the Venetian Republic in that capacity until the fourth decade of the sixteenth century. During this time he traveled extensively, building a large library relating to voyages and exploration. From about 1544 he turned his attention to mapmaking, working extensively with Gextantiovanni Battista Ramusio, Nicolo Bascarini, and Giovanbattista Pedrezano, as well as taking private commissions for, among others, Venice's Council of Ten. He is credited with the fresco maps of Asia and Africa still extant in the map room of the Doge's Palace. Gastaldi was also one of the first cartographers to embrace copper plate over woodblock engraving, marking an important development in the history of cartography. His 1548 edition of Ptolemy's Geographia was the first to be printed in a vernacular; it was the first to be printed in copperplate. As with his Swiss/German contemporary Münster, Gastaldi's work contained many maps depicting newly discovered regions for the first time, including the first map to focus on the East Coast of North America, and the first modern map of the Indian Peninsula. His works provided the source for the vast majority of the Venetian and Roman map publishers of the 1560s and 70s, and would continue to provide an outsize influence on the early maps of Ortelius, De Jode, and Mercator.   Further Details...

Johannes Leo Africanus, born al-Hasan Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, الحسن محمد الوزان الفاسي)(c. 1494 – c. 1554) was a Berber Andalusi diplomat and author who is best known for his 1526 book Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa) in 1550, the 16th century's most authoritative text on the geography of the north parts of Africa. He was born al-Hasan Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasin in Granada around the year 1494; his family moved to Fez soon after. There studied at the University of al-Qarawiyyin; As a young man he accompanied an uncle on a diplomatic mission, reaching as far as the city of Timbuktu in the Songhai Empire. 1517 found him working as a diplomat in the service of the Sultan of Fez, on a mission to Constantinople. He was a witness to the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. His return to Tunis in 1518 would be interrupted by his capture by Spanish pirates, and his imprisonment on Rhodes. His erudition saved him from a lifetime as a galley slave: An example for the ages of the value of an education, he was instead sent to Rome and presented to Pope Leo X. He was not only freed, but also given a pension as an inducement to remain in Rome. There he converted to Catholicism, and was in 1520 baptized with the Latin name Johannes Leo de Medicis. Following the death of his patron Leo X in 1521 Leo Africanus traveled Italy four years, and wrote: his works included an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin medical vocabulary, and an Arabic grammar. He returned to Rome in 1526, where he would write his African geography: although it is unlikely that he had firsthand knowledge of every place he described, he certainly would have been in a position to share knowledge of other travelers, and his access to the great library of Timbuktu may have availed him of much knowledge otherwise beyond reach.

Africanus' African geography would remain in manuscript until it was committed to print in Giovanni Battista Ramusio's Voyages as Della descrittione dell’Africa et delle cose notabili che ivi sono, per Giovan Lioni Africano. It would be reprinted five times, and later be published in other languages.

Leo Africanus' life following the completion of his Geography is uncertain. He may have remained in Rome until his death; he may have eluded the 1527 Sack of Rome, returning to Tunis until his death there. Another theory sends him from Tunis back to Morocco, where he still had relatives. Despite his intentions to do so (expressed in the text of his Africa book) Leo Africanus produced no further books that have survived.   Further Details...

Source

Ramusio, G. B., Delle Navigationi et Viaggi Raccolte da M. Gio. Battista Ramusio, (Venice: Appresso i Giunti) 1565.    

Condition

Excellent with broad margins and a good strike.

References

cf Afriterra 227. OCLC 500336998. Norwich 314.