Jacopo Gastaldi
Jacopo Gastaldi , also called Giacomo (* around 1500 in Villafranca Piemonte ; † October 1566 in Venice ), was an engineer and important cartographer who worked primarily for private publishers, but also in the service of the Republic of Venice .
In 1539 Gastaldi went from Piedmont to Venice, where he could not find a job against competitors from the lagoon city. In the Magistrato all Acque citizens of the city like Cristoforo Sabbadino were preferred. So he turned to large-scale works that were more likely to be sold on the open book market than the maps of Venetian territory and the lagoon that the magistrates needed.
From around 1544, Gastaldi turned exclusively to cartography. On the one hand, he was one of the first to focus on the New World, which was particularly evident in his edition La universale descrittione del mondo in the context of Ptolemy's Geographia , which appeared in 1548, and for which he made 60 maps. Of these, 34 are “tabulae novae”, maps in a smaller format, making the atlas easier to handle for the user. In addition, he switched from printing with wooden blocks to copperplate engraving . This made it possible to enter considerably finer details on the map.
Gastaldi mainly worked for the editors Nicolo Bascarini and Gianbattista Pedrezano , but also took orders from the Council of Ten . For this he made fresco maps of Asia and Africa for the Doge's Palace , but also detailed maps of the Terraferma and the lagoon. For the Africa map he received the order for the Sala dello Scudo on May 6, 1549 . The previous card there was destroyed in a fire in 1483. Today the room is also called the Sale delle Mappe (Room of Maps). He served audiences and receptions. For this Gastaldi received a fee of 100 ducats , which was five times as much as a worker in the arsenal . For the completion of the Spanish countries in America for aesthetic reasons, he achieved a doubling of his fee. So he added the areas in the Indie occidentali , as he translated from Spanish sources into Italian. On August 9, 1553 he received the order for a corresponding map of Asia.
In 1561 Gastaldi took part in Girolamo Ruscelli's Ptolemy edition and contributed a nautical map and two representations of the hemispheres. From 1561 to 1563 he worked on his Cosmographia universalis et exactissima iuxta postremam neotericorum traditionem . It shows the world in an oval projection on an area of 90 by 182 cm. It has two celestial and two earth globes at each corner .
One of his most famous maps was that of Italy from 1561.
Works
- La universale descrittione del mondo , 1548, 1561 by Matteo Pagano, published again in 1565 by Francesco di Salò, Venice; then with Gavini, Venice 1927–28; Reproduction Miniati, Genoa 1991.
Remarks
- ↑ Davide Scruzzi: A city thinks the world. Perception of geographical spaces and globalization in Venice from 1490 to around 1600 , Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010, p. 143.
- ^ Carl Moreland, David Bannister: Antique Maps - A Collector's Guide , Oxford: Phaidon-Christie's, 1983, p. 66.
- ^ Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld : Facsimile-Atlas to the Early History of Cartography , Dover Publications, New York 1973, p. 40.
- ^ RV Tooley, Charles Bricker: Landmarks of Mapmaking , Elsevier-Sequoia, Amsterdam, 1968.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gastaldi, Jacopo |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gastaldi, Giacomo |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian cartographer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1500 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Villafranca Piemonte |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 1566 |
| Place of death | Venice |