Giacomo Gastaldi and Girolamo Ruscelli

Giacomo Gastaldi (Villafranca Piemonte, about 1500 to Venice 1566), cosmographer to the Venetian Republic, was the foremost Italian mapmaker of his century. His pocket edition of Ptolemy (Venice 1548), with its maps engraved on copper, was the first atlas in small format and the first to give separate maps to the regions of the New World: Brazil, the coast of New Spain, Cuba and Hispaniola. Girolamo Ruscelli (Viterbo, about 1518 to Venice 1566), editor and polymath, reworked these maps on a larger scale for his own Italian Ptolemy, published by Valgrisi in 1561 and reissued in 1562, 1564, 1574 (Ziletti), 1598 and 1599.

The Ruscelli maps are the form in which Gastaldi's cartography reached most readers. Their states are well documented: the first states of 1561 differ from the later ones in details of the plates, and the edition is recognised from the text and page number on the verso.

Our collection holds Ruscelli's maps of Brazil, South America, Cuba and Hispaniola, and Germany, described with edition and state.