A striking and scarce Italian Dutch-based world map with additional arms or "brachia".



Little is known about Giovanni Battista Cavazza who signs his name on the map; he was a Jesuit priest and was known as an artist, engraver, and student of the Bolognese School of the early 17th century. The Church of Nunziata bears frescoes which have been identified as being painted by his hand. Possibly this would explain the heavy religious overtones together with Biblical references and Jesuit theories of the circumference of the earth added to this map.



Geographically, the map is based on Visscher's of 1639 which in turn was heavily influenced by Blaeu's map first issued in 1606. All three maps share the characteristic of a distorted North America stretched east and west and a correspondingly shrunk Eurasian landmass. There are several updates on the Visscher and Cavazza maps, especially on the east coast of North America which now shows a clear Labrador together with the Davis Strait and Hudson Bay. With the exception of that area and the inclusion of the course of the St. Lawrence River, the three maps are extremely similar, even sharing the same title.



However, Cavazza adds another title above the existing one, a quote from Psalm 23, which translates approximately as "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof". Cavazza also adds a reference to Matthew 24 on the unknown Southern Land. Matthew 24 is known as the Olivet Discourse or "Little Apocalypse" and refers to Christ's prediction of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. Another change which Cavazza makes is the erasure of two small inset spheres showing the North and South Poles on the lower corners. The erasure is crude and traces of the spheres can still be seen on the map. Cavazza replaces these with diagrams explaining the curvature of the earth by the noted Jesuit scientist Giovanni Battista Riccioli. The reference to Riccioli is a valuable aid in sourcing the work from which this map came: "Geographicae crucis fabrica et usus ad repraesentandam ... omnem dierum noctiumque ortuum solis et occasum", a work on how to create maps and charts, published in 1643.



Cavazza eschews the decorative borders present on both of his source maps and seems to be aiming for a far more scientific approach, choosing to leave the map black and white, which accentuates the contrast between the known and unknown worlds, particularly in the case of the interior of North America. The amount of information he portrays on the map is astonishing, despite so much of it being speculation and often based on hearsay, reports many times removed from their original source and accounts which were hundreds of years old, such as those of Marco Polo for the Far East.



Unfortunately, this scientific approach is undermined by a glaring typographic error present on the panel in the centre of the North American continent. On it, it is stated that Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1592 and Americo Vespucci explored South America in 1599. It then goes on to refer to the voyages of Francis Drake in 1579, Thomas Cavendish in 1587 and several Dutch mariners in the early 17th century. This was an error made in the earlier 1639 Visscher map which either Cavazza or his engraver faithfully copied. It was corrected in later editions of the former map but to our knowledge there is only one edition of Cavazza's map.



Apart from being an extremely rare map from an Italian source, this is also a literally graphic example of 17th century human fallibility.

[Shirley 357] [WLD2924]