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| As the new discoveries of the late 15th and early 16th centuries became more widely known in Europe, cartographers began to "append" the new knowledge to their traditional representations of the world. This was necessarily a slow process, given the hold which traditional concepts had over European thought, and in this splendid map by Bernard Sylvanus we see an attempt to expand the rigid format of the Classical world view to include recent knowledge of Great Britain, Africa and the Indian Peninsula. Although a number of other cartographers were producing similar maps at this time, what makes the Sylvanus exceptional, indeed unique, is its lettering overprinted in red (making it one of the first examples of cartography to use two-colour printing). The combination of decorative appeal and extreme rarity - his atlas is known in only one edition - make Sylvanus' maps among the most sought after of the first half of the 16th Century.thh |
