Tertiae Partis Asiae quae modernis India orientalis dicitur acurata delineatio Autore Iacobo Castaldo Pedemontano.

Description

Based directly on Gastaldi’s rare 1561 wall map.

A stunning example of one of the most consequential maps of Asia published in the sixteenth century. Engraved by the celebrated van Deutecum brothers and struck from the plates of Gerard de Jode’s Speculum Orbis Terrae, this map was a first-hand distillation of Giacomo Gastaldi’s monumental wall map of Asia, Il Disegno Della Terza Parte Dell’ Asia (c. 1561), which at the time was considered the cartographic authority on this continent.

Offered here in fine original color, the map belongs to the scarce 1593 second and final edition of the Speculum Orbis Terrae, published two years after Gerard de Jode’s death and issued in numbers so small that the atlas is now counted among the great rarities of Renaissance mapmaking.

The map covers what its title terms the “third part of Asia”, which essentially implies everything that lies beyond India. It provides a sweeping view of Asia from the Lop Desert of Central Asia, across Tartary, Cathay, and the coast of China to the Mare de Mangi, and southward through Indochina, the Malay Peninsula, and the East Indies down to the Equator. Japan is notably omitted. This was seemingly a deliberate choice by de Jode and a means of distinguishing his map from Gastaldi’s original, as this included a sliver of Japan at the eastern edge.

India is rendered with a high degree of accuracy for the period, its peninsular form recognizable, while the coast of China is compressed into a long diagonal running up to the northeast. This schematic simplification would not be substantially corrected until the Jesuit surveys of the following century. The Malay Peninsula appears with Cingatola (Singapore) marked near its tip, and the Philippines and the Spice Islands (Moluccas) are shown in the lower right, flanked by a note identifying the kingdoms of Ternate, Tidore, Bacan, Cebu, and Sulu as sources of spices and medicinal drugs. A small volcano, labeled Vlcan, erupts in the northern part of the archipelago, a detail likely drawn from Ruy López de Villalobos’s mid-century Pacific voyages.

The interior is densely inscribed with captions adapted directly from Gastaldi and left untranslated by de Jode. Among them we find descriptions of a salt lake yielding fine pearls in China; oxen as large as elephants, whose wool surpasses that of sheep; and in the Lop Desert, a warning of evil spirits that lead travelers astray to perish in the sands. Mountain ranges, river systems, and hundreds of place names in Latinised and vernacular forms crowd the interior, reflecting the composite mix of missionary reports, mariners’ accounts, and classical geography that Gastaldi had collated a generation earlier.

Decoratively, the map is understated but extremely handsome in its detail. An 8-point compass rose anchors the Bay of Bengal, and mountain chains are rendered in a distinctive caterpillar-hachure typical of mid-16th-century Italian engraving. Along the right edge, a crested strapwork cartouche identifies the map’s author (Autore Iacobo Castaldo Pedemontano) and publisher (Gerardus de Iode excudebat), and the engravers’ signature in a lower box (Ioannes à Deutecum, Lucas à Deutecum fecerunt).

The sheet retains Latin text on the verso, with a title reading Asiae Tertia Pars Sive India. As the 1593 edition of the Asia map was reprinted without changes to the plate, it is only from the verso that the edition can be distinguished. While the 1578 edition used Latin numerals, the 1593 edition updated them to Arabic numerals, confirming our attribution of this sheet.

Cartographic significance

This map’s importance rests on its lineage. Its primary source is Giacomo Gastaldi’s monumental multi-sheet wall map of Southeast Asia, China, and India, compiled in stages between 1559 and 1565, and universally regarded by historians of cartography as the most influential mapping of the region produced in the sixteenth century. Gastaldi’s coastal outlines for the region were considered superior to every previously known map of Asia, whether manuscript or printed. De Jode draws directly from the northern sheets of Gastaldi’s iconic map. Along with Ortelius’s competing map from 1567, this sheet was one of only a handful of maps to carry Gastaldi’s geography into broader atlas circulation.

De Jode’s Asia map was first issued in the original 1578 edition of the Speculum Orbis Terrae and then re-struck without changes for the 1593 edition published by his son. The map’s significance reflects the fate of the Speculum itself. Conceived to rival Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the Speculum was overtaken commercially by its rival’s eight-year head start and never achieved comparable success. When Cornelis de Jode died in 1600, the plates passed to Jan Baptist Vrients, who at that time also owned the Ortelius plates. His motivation for acquiring the de Jode plates was thus to prevent any further printing of this atlas, thereby ending the publication of the Speculum with the 1593 edition. Of the first (1578) edition, only around a dozen examples are thought to survive. Examples from the 1593 edition are more numerous but remain very scarce on the market.

Modern specialists have judged many of de Jode’s plates, this one among them, to be equal to or superior to Ortelius’s in both engraving quality and geographic detail, even though the Speculum’s commercial eclipse means far fewer examples have survived to the present day.

The map captures a moment in the history of European engagement with Asia when our understanding of its geography was still shaped by Marco Polo’s medieval account and the earliest Portuguese and Spanish missionary and mercantile reports. This tentative geography would not be meaningfully surpassed until Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario (1596) reshaped European knowledge of the Indian Ocean. And for the Chinese coast, De Jode’s configuration would only really be updated with the Jesuit surveys of the early seventeenth century.