Agnese
liked to show new discoveries and explorations of his maps,
and this one includes the route that Magellan took around the
world, inscribed in pure silver that later tarnished. He also
traced, in pure gold, the route from Cadiz, Spain, to Peru,
with overland portage across the Isthmus of Panama. This was
the route of the treasure ships -- heavily armed galleons that
carried vast amounts of silver from Peru to Spain.
On
the Agnese map continents are in yellow and green watercolors,
mountains in brown, white, and silver, rivers (including the
legendary sources on the Nile) in blue, and the Red Sea and
Gulf of California in red. (In 1539 the explorer Francisco de
Ulloa, noting that the water in the Gulf of California had a
reddish tint, named it the Vermilion Sea to distinguish it form
the Red Sea.)
In
the blue-and-gold clouds surrounding the oval world are cherubs,
or wind heads, representing the classical twelve-point winds
from which modern compass directions evolved. The symbolic treatment
of winds first occurred in world maps of the tenth century on
which the windblowers are portrayed as human figures seated
on Aeolus bags. With one hand they hold trumpets or horns, and
with the other they squeeze the wind out of the bags. This symbolism
was at least as old as Homer, who wrote of Aeolus, the son of
Hippotes, god and father of the winds and ruler of the island
of Aeolia. Figures of old men, cherubs, or angels as windblowers,
with or without Aeolus bags, were popular illustrations on maps
up to the eighteenth century. In some cases the facial expression
and size of the blast emerging from the mouth told a great deal
about the wind, without further explanation.
The
portolan atlas containing this world map was drawn in Venice in
1543-44. It was originally prepared for and dedicated to Hieronimus
Ruffault, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of St. Vaast and
St. Adrian in Arras, a French city of Gallo-Roman origin. The
map is also known to have been in the library of the old Hanseatic
League town of Wernigerode, Germany, in 1916, to have subsequently
been offered for sale by Otto Lange in Florence, and to have been
in the possession of Lathrop Harper in New York. It was acquired
by the Library of Congress in 1943.
This
is a must have collection for any map history buff!
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