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Item Number:  22718 Authenticity Guarantee

Category:  Antique maps > World and Polar

Woodcut
Size: 28.5 x 42cm (11.1 x 16.3 inches)
Verso: Blank
Condition: Trimmed at bottom affecting a little bit the word "MERIDIES" (outside the neatline), small lower centrefold split, slightly browned along centrefold. Nice copy.
Condition Rating: A
References: Shirley (World), 45; Baynton-Williams, p.17; Wagner, IV.

"Waldseemüller's large 1507 world map is the unacknowledged source of Apian's map of 1520. Much detail has inevitably been left out but there is a close geographic correspondence, a similarity of woodcutting style, and the same truncated cordiform projection. There is no evidence that the much more up-to-date Carta Marina of 1516 has been used at all, and the marking of Calicut is the only hint of the great Portugese discoveries in the East.
Laurent Fries, whose initials appear in the lower right-hand corner, was probably the co-daughtsman or woodcutter: the twelve windheads and the decorative surround to the map are robust examples of woodcut work. The other initials are those of Johann Kamers (Camertius) in whose book the map apppeared and (in monogram form) L A or Luca Alatses who paid for the production of the map. Peter Apian, a professor of Mathematics in Vienna and Ingolstadt was also a geographic writer and publisher as well as cartographer. His text book Cosmographicus Liber first came out in 1524 and was re-issued for over eighty years. From 1544 onwards it often contains the world map of his pupil Gemma Frisius. Two years earlier, in 1522, Apian published a small treatise Isagore in typum Cosmographicum describing his new map of the world, inferred by Harisse to be an ellipsoidal world map (now lost) rather than the truncated cordiform one of 1520. In 1530 he produced another world map on a cordiform projection." (Shirley)

For many years, this map was thought to be the first map to use the name America.

References: Shirley (World) - 45; Wagner - IV