José María Cardano y Bauzá (1781 - 18??) was a Spanish draughtsman, cartographer, engraver and naval officer active in Madrid with the Spanish Dirección Hidrográfico / Depósito Hidrográfico. Cardano was the nephew of the important cartographer and head of the Direccion Hidrográfico, Felipe Bauzá y Cañas (1764 - 1834). He was born in Cartagena, Spain, and studied at the Cartagena School form 1796 - 1798. In 1799 he embarked as a cabin Boy on the Soledad, a Spanish frigate. He was promoted through the ranks until 1802, when he was assigned to the Dirección Hidrográfico, where he uncle Felipe Bauzá y Cañas, was increasingly influential. Under Bauzá's patronage, Cardano moved to Paris where he mastered engraving, returning to Spain 1806 as a salaried Direccion Hidrográfico engraver. From 1809, he was a professor of draughtsmanship at the military academy in Cádiz. Cardano briefly returned to sea from 1813 to 1817, when he received a scholarship, again under Bauzá's patronage, to study lithography - at the time a new economical and innovative printing technique that the Direccion Hidrográfico was keen to adopt. He was sent to Berlin, to study lithograph under its inventor Alois Senefelder (1771 - 1834). He assisted in the establishment of one of Spain's first lithographic presses, Establecimiento Litográfico de Madrid, in 1818, but efforts to use the new system were foiled by low quality paper. Cardano was thus sent to Amsterdam and Paris, this time to study the art of paper making. He was likely fortunate to be out of the country, as the Spanish government fell into disarray. When King Ferdinand VII reasserted monarchal authority following the Trienio Liberal ('Three Liberal Years', 1820 - 1823), he and Bauzá both fled to London to avoid potential death sentences. In London he established a lithographic press at 2 Leigh Street, Burton Crescent, London. There he tutored the great Spanish artist and fellow exile Francisco Goya in lithography. The date of his death us unknown. Despite some scholarship suggesting he died in 1834, we known he was active in London until at least 1835, the date of his last known correspondence. There is a trade card for his business definitively postdating 1835 in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, suggesting he was active much later. At least one rare map, a lithograph map of Colombia, was issued in 1841, possibly posthumously. Likely he was alive and publishing well into the 1840s. His older brother Felipe Cardano y Bauzá (1778 - 1824) was also a copper engraver and lithographer.