Hereditas Antikvárium

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16. Könyvárverés

Amsterdam, 1596.
Rare, unusually – with north to the right – oriented map of South America made by Jan Huygen van Linschoten, based on Portuguese portolan charts. The depiction includes Florida, the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean, and the whole continent until the Strait of Magellan with Terra del Fuego shown as a strip of the Southern landmass. The coastlines very accurately indicate all the known harbours, cliffs, and sands as well as the deep and shallow waters. The two ornate cartouches contain the titles: in the upper left corner in Latin – followed by the engraver’s name (Arnold Florent van Langren) – and in the lower right corner in Dutch. The third cartouche at the bottom of the page shows the bar scales. The inner parts of the continent are not so detailed (even filled with some fictional rivers and mountains), but the coastline had been drawn with extraordinary precision, though the shape of the continent evidently does not reflect reality. This aberration may be explained by the difficulty of determining longitude, and the featuring of the mostly unknown southwestern coastline. The richly decorated page is filled with vignettes of sea and land creatures (including a sphinx-like beast with a striped tail), galleons, indigenous life scenes – like a cannibal feast – and a beautiful compass rose.
Dimensions: 395 x 565 (530 x 605) mm. Clear, strong print. Our copy was probably previously bound in a composite atlas since it was mounted on a larger blank sheet and numbered by hand (119).
Poss.: With the mounted embossed stamp of László Gróf L., the well-known map collector from Oxford, on the verso.
Schilder, Gunter: Monumenta Cartographica Neerlandica (Alphen aan den Rijn, 2003.) VII.: 10.3.7