Europam et Asiæ partem Sic describere Conabar Ioannes Baptista Nocolosius S.T.D.

Description

This pair of sheets comprises the two lower sections of Giovanni Battista Nicolosi’s landmark map of Europe, which was published in Nicolosi’s Dell’ Ercole e Studio Geografico (Rome, 1660) on commission from the Vatican. Together they present Europe and the western reaches of Asia on a single coherent projection, extending from the Atlantic coast of Ireland and Portugal in the west to the Caspian Sea and the borders of Persia in the east, and from the North African coast and Arabia in the south to the latitude of northern Germany and Poland in the north.

This is the first map of Europe to employ the Nicolosi Globular Projection, the cartographic innovation that would become standard across the following two centuries.

The Map in Detail

The left sheet covers Western Europe in the characteristic curved format of the globular projection, the meridians arching gently to suggest the curvature of the earth. The British Isles appear in the upper left, rendered with considerable detail in the coastal outlines of England, Scotland, and Ireland. France, the Iberian Peninsula, the Low Countries, and the Italian peninsula are all present, with the Mediterranean spreading across the lower portion of the sheet — Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and the North African coast visible below. The Bay of Biscay is labeled Mare Aquitanico / Cantabrico; the Atlantic, Oceano Occidentale. The cartouche occupies the lower center of the left sheet where the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa leave open space.

The right sheet extends the composition eastward from the Black Sea (Mare Negro) at the center, to the Caspian Sea (Mare Caspio), which anchors the far right of the composition. Greece, the Aegean islands, Crete (Candia), and Cyprus appear in the south; the Ottoman provinces of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia are mapped with surprisingly rich toponymy. The Caucasus region is labeled (Colchida); Arabia Deserta and Persia appear at the lower right, marking the eastern limit of this sheet’s coverage.

A notable disparity in detail rewards close reading. The Iberian Peninsula is rendered with conspicuously sparse toponymy compared to regions of lesser cartographic tradition, such as the Ottoman Empire and the Levant. This was not an oversight. By 1660, Spain’s political influence had declined sharply: the Peace of Westphalia had ended the Thirty Years’ War on terms unfavorable to Spanish interests, the Low Countries had effectively seceded, and the Anglo-Spanish War had further eroded Spanish maritime dominance. For a Vatican cartographer, Catholic Spain’s diminished standing was both a political reality and a delicate subject; the relative blankness of the peninsula on this map registers a considered judgment. The Ottoman Empire, by contrast, appears in dense and careful detail — a reflection of both its political significance and the Vatican’s extensive intelligence on the region.

Historical Context

Nicolosi published the Ercole at a moment when Italian cartography was under competitive pressure from the French school, particularly from Nicolas Sanson, whose systematic approach to geographical sources had made Paris the new center of European mapmaking. The Propaganda Fide in Rome commissioned Nicolosi explicitly to produce a rival work, and the Ercole — its title invoking the labors of Hercules as a metaphor for Nicolosi’s own effort — was the result: twenty-two large maps covering the known world, produced over seven years of intensive scholarly work. The atlas first appeared in Italian in 1660 and in a posthumous Latin edition in 1671, the latter being the version that most effectively carried Nicolosi’s innovations into the European cartographic mainstream.

The projection Nicolosi developed for the Ercole — in which the established meridians are combined with circular parallels to suggest the curvature of the globe — was an entirely novel solution to the longstanding problem of representing large landmasses on a flat surface. In the decades following publication, the Nicolosi Globular Projection was adopted by Guillaume de l’Isle, Aaron Arrowsmith, and others, eventually supplanting the stereographic projection popularized by Mercator and becoming the standard cartographic technique for continental maps through much of the nineteenth century. It remains in use today.

Publication History and Census

Giovanni Battista Nicolosi (1610–1670), cartographer; Vitale Mascardi, printer; Rome, 1660. Published in Dell’ Ercole e Studio Geografico, dedicated to Giovanni Battista Borghese. Reissued in a posthumous Latin edition, Rome, 1671. The present example comprises the two lower sheets of the four-sheet Europa map; the two upper sheets, which in the complete map carry inset maps of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and Italy, are not present. The four-sheet continental maps of the Ercole are among the most sought-after items in the atlas by collectors and institutions. Rare.