An unrecorded carte-à-figures map of Asia

TODESCHI, Pietro.

Asia recens summa cura delineata Auctore Jud. Hondio. Pietro Todeschi Fecit 1670.
Bologna: Francesco Sabatini, 1670. 455 x 555mm.

Bottom right corner rebuilt with manuscript fill.

A very rare and attractive carte-à-figures map of Asia, engraved by Pietro Todeschi. The side panels contain native costume figures and miniature vignette views of major towns and cities: Calicut (Kozhikode), Rhodes, Damascus, Jerusalem, Aden, Hormuz, Goa, Famagusta, Macao, Mount Gamalama (a volcano on Ternate, a spice port in the Moluccas), Kandy & Banten. Of interest in the map is the North-Eastern truncation of China/Siberia, presumably due to a belief in a North-West passage through the Straits of Anian.

This map was published by Francesco Sabatini, one of the many fringe figures in Italian map-making and publishing in the late seventeenth century. Unfortunately even accurate dates for his life and death elude us, while his work life can be established only by the rough dating of his maps dependent on the dedications on those maps bearing them, but he was apparently active as a printer and publisher (and possibly engraver) in the 1670s, probably in Bologna.

This s a contemporary piracy of Dutch carte-à-figures maps, popularised in the first part of the seventeenth century, although it seems likely that the map was plagiarised from intermediate Italian copies, perhaps by Stefano Scolari.

STOPP: 'Drie Karten von Francesco Sabatini'; SCHILDER: 'Mappae Antiquae Liber Amicorum' p.281-285.
Stock ID : 24120