The thirty-fourth annual James Ford Bell Lecture was presented by Professor David Woodward on Thursday, April 25, 1996 at The Bakken: A Library and Museum of Electricity in Life. Professor Woodward is the Arthur H. Robinson Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He began, with J.B. Harley, the massive History of Cartography Project, and since 1991 has been the senior editor of it. The first volume Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1987. Volume 2, book 3, in the series, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies is in press. We are especially appreciative of the work that David has published in the history of mapmaking, e.g., “The Woodcut Technique,” in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). We are pleased to share his research on the “Camocio Atlas” through this James Ford Bell Lecture.

Carol Urness, CURATOR
JAMES FORD BELL LIBRARY

The atlas in the James Ford Bell Library known as the “Camocio atlas” eluded my search for almost twenty years. I was looking for an atlas that Henry Wagner had referred to as the “Harmsworth Atlas,”as during the 1920s it was bought by Sir R. Leicester Harmsworth, the prominent English collector, from the great Paris antiquarian Charles Chadenat (Wagner 1926, 1929). The atlas had been sold at Sotheby’s (lot 1191) on 28 June 1939 to Henry Stevens for £500, but I was not able to trace to whom it had been sold. Jack Parker’s booklet on the Strait of Anian finally confirmed that the atlas had been acquired by the James Ford Bell Library in 1956 (Parker 1956, 4).
      It was first described in print by Henri Vignaud in 1921 (Vignaud 1921). Vignaud focused on the map of the Americas which he regarded as the first map to show the Bering Strait. He consequently ignored the other four maps in the atlas.
      The atlas is bound in a characteristic limp-vellum sixteenth-century binding sewn on six cords, with its four ties broken. The paper size is about 41 x 57 cm, which roughly conforms to a trimmed down extra large or imperial size (often about 50 x 74 cm), which when folded once would approximate the royal size of 30 x 44 cm, about the size of the volume when closed. The front and rear endpapers reveal a pair of eagles in circle watermarks which are the same as in several of the maps (Woodward 1996a, no. 58). Another watermark is a lozenge in a circle of about 34 mm diameter (Woodward 1996a, similar to no. 193/294). There is a small watermark or countermark visible in some of the marginal strips which is made up of a “P”, an “M”, and a cross combined into a single symbol. The contemporary manuscript title is “Quatro parte del Mondo.”The atlas was printed shortly before the maps were cut and pasted together and it was bound immediately afterwards. In addition to the use of the same watermarks for the endpapers and some of the maps, one of the guards or strips for binding in the map of Africa bears a degree scale trimmed off to bind sheet 2 into the volume. Although the maps were all printed from copper plates originally engraved in Venice probably in the 1570s, the binding of the atlas took place around 1590 in Rome. It is clearly an integrated sixteenth-century artifact.
      Maps bound into books and atlases have the habit of becoming invisible, protected from the browser’s and cataloger’s gaze. In the case of the “Camocio atlas,”this problem is compounded since four of the five maps are multi-sheet maps intended to be glued together to form wall-maps for display. It is difficult indeed to visualize what these wall maps look like when pasted together, so they have been reconstructed here as figures 1-4. They are of the four continents (the quatro parte del mondo of the atlas’s manuscript title), a common motif as we shall see in late sixteenth-century Italian interior decorating.
      In addition to the wall maps of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, there is a small world map that acts as a kind of frontispiece to the atlas. It is a curious map to have been included in an atlas put together around 1590, because it is not in the most recent state available at that date. The map is in a 1562 state of a plate originally engraved in 1560, but many later states of the plate, with dates changed on the copper plate, have survived, even up to 1751 (Woodward 1990, 01.02)! It was obviously printed before 1570, when the next state of the copper plate is dated. A watermark would help in its dating, but one cannot be found. When the atlas was assembled around 1590, an old impression of this 1562 must have been salvaged from stock and pressed into service some twenty-five years later.
      It is the four wall maps that attract most of our attention, because they are so rare and in such fine condition that it is puzzling that they have never been described in print. They are masterpieces of the copper engraver’s art, at its height in Venice of the 1560s and 1570s, where more maps were printed than anywhere else in Europe. In the intaglio technique, lines and letters were engraved into thin metal plates with a sharp engraving tool or burin, and then printed in a rolling press under considerable pressure. It produced maps of extraordinary delicacy and decorative appeal (Woodward 1996b).
      The wall maps were all designed to have nine large sheets and three half sheets attached to the right-hand side (Figs. 1-4). The first is a map of Europe by the Venetian map engraver and publisher Giovanni Francesco Camocio. Camocio published books as well as some thirty-six large maps between 1560 and 1575 (Gallo 1950, 93). He is also well-known for a small isolario: Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre maritime sottoposte alla ser.ma Sig.ria di Venetia, ad altri Principi Christiani, et al Sig.or Turco, nouame[n]te poste in luce (Venice, 1571). We know of him through the archives because he had the misfortune to attract the attention of the Inquisition. In September 1566, Camocio, like other hardpressed booksellers in Venice in the period of the Counter Reformation, sold prohibited books under the table and was fined five ducats (Woodward 1996b, 67).
      The map of Europe is one of only two known complete copies, of which one other survives in the Prins Henrik Maritiem Museum, Rotterdam [K263]. The two complete impressions were unknown to van der Heijden in his bibliography of maps of Europe (Heijden 1992). The James Ford Bell Library map seems to be originally dated 26 July 1572 (MDLXXII)? but is altered in ink to 1579 (MDLXXIX). However, the Rotterdam impression is clearly dated 26 July 1573 and has not been changed. The map is proudly dedicated to Count Antonio Valmarano of Vicenza by Camocio:

Having in the last months brought to light the description of Asia in beautiful and useful form, which pleased scholars such that I was stimulated to accompany it with a similar Europe.

Camocio acknowledges Valmarano’s association with the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza (he was its chairman until 1575) and expresses the hope that Valmarano will accept this map and that it will be worthy of his “Museo.”Maps and topographical views were sought after in collections intended to provide a microcosm of universal knowledge, the Wunderkammer or Kunstkammer. In Italy they were known as studioli or musei.
      In the bottom margin of the top right-hand sheet, near Lake Ladoga, in a space that would otherwise be covered when the wall map was pasted together, the engraver has dreamily engraved in tiny letters the words “mio caro,”perhaps just a doodle to ease the boredom of his ten-hour engraving day (Fig. 5). Such intriguing glimpses into the everyday life of what must have been a fairly mundane occupation make looking for details worthwhile.
      Next comes the twelve-sheet wall map of Africa, a direct copy of Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1564 eight-sheet map of Africa (Biasutti 1920). Gastaldi about whom very little is known styled himself “Piemontese” an allusion to his birth in Villafranca in Piemonte, but despite several attempts by archivists of that area to find documents in both Villafrancas relating to his birthdate and early life, none have been found. He lived and worked in Venice from 1539 to his death in October 1566 and became the most influential cartographer on the Italian peninsula, culminating in his nomination as Cosmographer to the Republic of Venice. His activities stretched far beyond his cartographic work disseminated in the Italian map trade, for he also worked for the Magistratura delle Acque in the Veneto, the agency responsible for controlling the water in the region’s rivers, canals, and lagoons (though being turned down for such a sensitive post as its head probably because of his non-Venetian origin). His official position afforded him the opportunity to be well connected with the academic and political elite of Venice. By 1548, he had provided the maps for the first compact edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, drawn the maps to appear in the Voyages of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, and designed the mural maps in the Shield Room in the Ducal Palace in Venice. In that period, he also compiled several important and influential maps, including a large woodcut world map of ca. 1561, the Cosmographia universalis, to which we shortly have occasion to refer (Karrow 1993).
      There is clear evidence of etching as well as engraving on the map of Africa. Etching lacked the crispness and effect of precision given by the burin, and could not easily achieve the elegance of calligraphic lettering that required stresses and movement to produce subtle changes in the thickness of lines. An etched plate, in which the lines were shallower, wore out more quickly and yielded only about half the number of impressions from an engraved plate. The process was messy, and great care had to be taken to avoid scarring the plate with acid. If not carefully cleaned, this scarring and pitting would attract dirt and ink. The etching process was also extremely dangerous: great care had to be taken to avoid scarring the throat and lungs from the nitric acid fumes. The cheapness and autography of etching made up for its shortcomings. Its stylistic versatility could cater to the increasing demand for a wider range of tonal effects and artistic expression. Thus etching is used for the decorative details of many maps, reserving the burin for the more exacting cartographic information (Woodward 1996b, 29-32).
      The map of Africa is clearly an early version as it does not bear a formal title, but only a blank cartouche advertising itself as a space in which a dedication or title could be placed: “Qui dentro va posta la epistola dedicatoria et espositoria della presente carta” (Fig. 6). “Here you can put the dedicatory and explanatory note for the map.”
      Similar in format is the map of Asia in twelve sheets. It is dedicated to Gottardo Murari, a Venetian noble born in Verona who held a succession of prestigious offices. In 1567, Murari was Governatore del S. Monte di Pietà, in 1568 Console dell’Arte della Seta (the silk guild), and in 1580 Preside della Carità. Paolo Forlani dedicated to him his world map (1565), his view of Venice (1566), and his map of Europe and the Mediterranean (1569). Camocio in the dedication says that of the four parts of the world, he already has published two of these, namely Africa and Europe, and to accompany them he is making Asia in similar fashion with the hope of a fourth so that the whole world can be enjoyed.… It is dated MDLXXV4 (1579) but the V and 4 seem to have been added, perhaps but not necessarily over previously engraved Roman numerals. If Asia first came out in 1570, however, the maps of Africa and Europe to which he refers must have been versions that are no longer extant, for the existing impressions are dated later.
      The last map in the atlas is a nine-sheet map of the Americas, of which only one other complete example exists, in the Museo Correr, Venice (Burden 1996). Unlike the other three continental maps, this is not in twelve sheets, but nine. It was clearly intended originally to be the same size as the others, but suffered one of those production glitches that frequently plagues the printing industry. After carefully engraving the sheets covering the Atlantic and most of South America, and carefully drawing the boundary of the map to the west, the engraver must have realized that the map was supposed to consist of three, not two, sheets across. Now, with the new narrower version, the width of North America could not be properly accommodated.
      Hoping to make the best of a very bad situation (the fourth part of the world was clearly not going to end up the same size as the other three), the engraver decided, throwing geographical exactitude to the four winds, as many before him (and since), to engage in a little edge-matching. Lest we think that this cosmetic activity is limited only to modern practitioners of geographic information systems, we should take solace in the fact that here is someone in the sixteenth century who was doing exactly the same thing.
      Figure 8 shows what the map was supposed to look like, with Alaska and Northern California in the top left hand sheet. This however would have required faking not only an entire sheet in North America, but two blank sheets in the Pacific Ocean with some imperfectly known islands in the area of New Guinea. The solution was to make it a nine-sheet map, and edge match the Northeast sheet to suddenly join up with Florida, diverting the east coast dangerously near the island of Bermuda. In the west, the island of Japan could be cunningly joined up with Mexico, refitting the tip of Baja California to Southern Florida. The whole map suddenly seems to represent a giant east-west fault zone that has shifted Mexico through 50 of longitude. The scattered sheets of this map that grace various collections Alaska and Peru are in the British Library, the sheet devoted to Brazil is in the University Library, Leiden bear witness to the stunted unsaleable disaster that resulted.
      What was the interior decorator’s loss, however, was the map historian’s gain, for the map has fascinating links. Its source is clearly the ten-sheet “wall map” of the world by Gastaldi engraved on wood in 1561 now in the British Library (Fig. 7). This pivotal map was referred to in a booklet published in 1561. Here again, however, the map compiler displayed a singular lack of knowledge about plotting information from one map projection to another, for while the Gastaldi world map is on an elegant oval projection, the Camocio wall map is on a rectangular one. Nevertheless, the coastline was blindly copied from one projection to the other.
      Another clue as to what was intended in Camocio’s multi-sheet map of America lies in the reduced engraving by Paolo Forlani of North and South America, dated 1574. This rare map of the Pacific Ocean and the Americas may have been another attempt to salvage the larger map (Caraci 1962, 57-59). This map poses a real puzzle. The six impressions known to me all have the date 14 December 1574, and thus the map takes its place with two other maps that have a similar date, both of which have the imprint of Simone Pinargenti and both of which have the exact day (Territory of Bresciano: 1 December 1574) and Territory of Verona: 25 October 1574). This is unusual for Forlani, but not unknown (his 1562 map of Africa was engraved on the 9th of May) (Woodward 1990, 10.01). His only other association with Pinargenti was apparently with a map of the Eastern Mediterranean dated 1571 (again engraved with the day: 22 December) (Woodward 1990, 95). The extra four “iiii” to the MDLX also appear to have been added later. As I have proposed elsewhere, since Forlani left nothing dated 1572 or 1573 and since maps later than 1571 bear imprints of publishers with whom he was not normally associated, we may suggest that he did not engrave anything after 1571, making it likely that some state exists dated 1570 (Woodward 1992). Or perhaps he became indisposed during this period and left the plates unfinished, which came into the hands of Pinargenti two or three years later. Forlani says in the title cartouche that the map is based on a drawing supposedly shown to him some months before by one Don Diego Hermano di Toledo. Giuseppe Caraci claimed that Forlani made up this Spanish gentleman in order to convince his readers that the map was based on new information, adding that Forlani was anything but scrupulous in such matters (Caraci 1926-32, 188). It is now obvious, not only from the similarity of the outlines, but also the place-names, that it came from the Gastaldi world map of 1561, which Caraci had not seen.
      A further clue to what might have been intended for the map of America is afforded by another version of the wall map, already mounted, with three additional sheets to correct the discontinuity and some text pasted over the bottom left corner of the map. This map was offered as part of a set of four continental maps in H. P. Kraus’s catalogue 124, and the maps are now in the possession of the University of Texas at Austin, and another set was in the stock of George Ritzlin and is now in a private collection in the United States. A detailed comparison of these maps with the Camocio atlas in the James Ford Bell Library still remains to be done.
      Philip Burden dates the nine-sheet map of America as ca.1569, assuming that it formed the basis of Forlani’s map of North and South America which, although dated 1574, may have appeared in a 1570 version (Burden 1996, 45-49; Woodward 1992). If this is true, the wall map of America would have been the first of the four to have been made by Camocio, but abandoned because it was too difficult to amend the mistake in fitting together the sheets. Its abandonment might account for the fact that, although Camocio specifies in his securely dated map of Europe (July 1573) that he has just made the map of Asia “in the last months” he does not mention the map of America. Furthermore, in the map of Asia, he says he had already published Africa and Europe, and to accompany them he is making Asia in similar fashion with the hope of a fourth (presumably America). The sequence of these four maps is clearly not simple to unravel.
      The dating problem can thus be summarized as follows:
      1. On the map of Asia, which could be originally dated 1570 but both copies are dated 1579, the text indicates that it was done after Africa and Europe and that America is yet to come.
      2. On the map of Europe, of which the earliest dated impression is 1573, the text indicates it was done after Asia.
      3. The map of America seems to have been made before Forlani’s map of North and South America, which may date from 1570 but all impressions bear the date 1574.
      Unless these contradictory statements are simply due to textual or engraving mistakes, Camocio may be referring to other versions of Europe, Africa, and Asia that he made before 1570. In view of the well-known vulnerability of wall maps as artifacts, it is not unlikely that other versions have long been lost.
      What do the three watermarks tell us about the date of printing and binding this atlas? Of the three watermarks in the atlas, two are strongly associated with Claudio Duchetti (Claude Duchet) and the Roman publishers during the 1570s, 80s, and 90s. In particular, both the eagle watermark: ([Woodward 1996a, 58], Eagle displayed in circle under crown) and the lozenge in a circle (Woodward 1996a, 293) are present in the composite atlas of provenance Henry Stevens-George H. Beans-Roy V. Boswell-Kenneth Nebenzahl with the Pietro de’ Nobili state of Lafréry’s title page, usually dated in the late 1580s or early 1590s. The other watermark, similar to (Woodward 1996a, 146), occurs in a map published by Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalleri, one of the group of Roman publishers in the 1590s.
      The plates for the four wall maps in the Camocio atlas were most likely engraved between 1570 and 1575. In August 1576, the plague erupted in Venice. It killed more than 46,000 people, a third of the population which in 1555 had risen to almost 160,000. It is very possible that Camocio died during this outbreak for we have no evidence of his work after it. As with many Venetian copper plates, the plates for the wall maps probably found their way to Rome and Duchetti’s shop after Camocio’s death. Duchetti was Lafréry’s closest relative, and hence received the inheritance of plates by court order upon Lafréry’s death in 1577. In order to enlarge his business, Duchetti had already bought other Venetian plates, and it would have made sense for him to acquire more after the Venetian plague. The plates stayed in the Duchet family until 1593 and continued to be printed by his heirs. Some of the stock went to Petri de Nobilibus, and I believe, on the evidence of the watermarks, that it was in his shop that the Bell Camocio atlas was put together in the early 1590s.
      By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and throughout the seventeenth, sets of the four continent maps were becoming so popular as wall maps in private houses that they appear repeatedly in household inventories. For Venice, these have been documented most fully by Federica Ambrosini (Ambrosini 1981). The frequency of these references to these “description of the world in four parts” might suggest that they were a symbolic furnishing accessory projecting the owner’s interest in cosmography reflecting social and scholarly status. And although large paintings were usually the privilege of the well-to-do, the working classes were occasionally able to afford their cheaper equivalent: prints and maps. Andrea Bareta, a wool worker who died in 1587, owned a small collection of pictures including the four continents: “Asia, Africa, et Europa, et Peru” among the more expected sacred themes.
      Geographical prints in the inventories occur mostly in the houses of the gentry, not only in Venetian townhouses, but also in the country houses of the Terraferma. Lorenzo Tarabotto kept a set of four continental maps in black frames in one room and a large map of the world in a black pearwood frame. The Tasca family exhibited a particular passion for maps in its villa at Gardigiano:

in the portico del sopra: four maps showing the four parts of the world
in the primo mezado: two maps of the four parts of the world
in the mezado near the steward’s kitchen: four large maps of the four parts of the world on paper glued to linen
in another location: four small globes and a large one on its pedestal (Ambrosini 1981, 83).

      The clergy were often indifferent to displaying maps and pictures of exotic places, with some rare exceptions. The bishop Leonardo Mocenigo (died 1623) had “un quadro de mapamondo” among the paintings and statues in his Ceneda palace. Another vicar of San Bartollomeo, Giovan Francesco Montanari, counted among his goods (1697) “tre parti del mondo in carta” in a room of his house in Fiesso, a fourth part of the world in another room, while the four parts of the world in paper were the motif in another “saletta” (Ambrosini 1981, 82).
      Even in the last decade of the century, Gastaldi’s name was still associated with this newly popular trend in consumption, twenty-five years after his death. Printed maps had by then been regarded as geographical prints. They were engraved by the same engravers, made in the same printshops, sold by the same street sellers, appeared on both sides of the same sheet of paper, and were gathered within the same bound volumes. Maps were subject to the same technical and marketing constraints as other figurative prints and were designed to be sold to an expanding market of people eager for news or wanting to collect and display maps to enhance their reputation as cosmopolitan citizens.
      Printed maps were regarded as geographical prints in the Italian Renaissance. They were engraved by the same engravers, made in the same printshops, sold by the same street sellers, appeared on both sides of the same sheet of paper, and were gathered within the same bound volumes. Maps were subject to the same technical and marketing constraints as other figurative prints and were designed to be sold to an expanding market of people eager for news or wanting to collect and display maps to enhance their reputation as cosmopolitan citizens.
      The wares of the printshops of Venice and Rome might not have been avant-garde in disseminating new information about geographical discoveries, since most of this was in the form of closely controlled official manuscripts. But that there was a radical change in the patterns of ownership of maps and works of art between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is not in doubt. Clearly, by the mid-1560s, the printed map trade had matured and was being driven by a market substantial enough to demand bound sets of maps and prints.
      As maps became more and more a part of everyday life, they played a subtle but important role in the shaping of ideas about the world. Beyond conveying knowledge factual or otherwise about strange places and events, they symbolized through a complex iconography some overarching themes: the magic of capturing the world as a single universal, ordered image, the replacement of the content of classical geography with a “modern” geography that incorporated “the new discoveries,”and the secularization of the world image from the representation of spiritual to geometric space. In this arena, the ideology of individual makers and agencies in molding the information content of maps may be less relevant than our understanding of the cultural practices that constituted the production, distribution, and consumption of symbolic goods.
      Although we know from house inventories that maps of the continents, “the four parts of the world,”were regular subjects for interior decoration, there are almost no Italian sixteenth-century wall-maps preserved in the form that they were originally displayed. Maps mounted on linen and attached to rollers have a notoriously short life; even those from the nineteenth and twentieth century are rarely found in good condition. It is remarkable that a set of these incredibly rare continental maps has been preserved, almost by accident, in the Camocio Atlas in the James Ford Bell Library, where they can provide a fascinating window on the map culture of the Italian Renaissance.

Notes

The Camocio atlas can be found in the James Ford Bell Library under the call number of 1560 fCa. I am indebted to Jack Parker for his unpublished notes on the atlas, to Carol Urness for her kind help in the library, to Brad Oftelie for help with the illustrations, and to Brian Hanson for design and typesetting. Douglas Sims kindly read through the manuscript and offered helpful suggestions.