Albert Ganado uncovers some rare maps



Part I



The island of Malta, a honey-coloured speck in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, holds pride of place in the history of 16th century cartography. It can safely be said that the record number of maps that appeared on the European market on the occasion of the Great Siege of 1565 was not equalled by any other historical event of the 16th century. In 1565 alone, at least 53 siege maps were disseminated in Italy, three in Germany, three in France and one in the Netherlands.

On 19 May 1565, the Maltese islands were subjected to a four-month siege by the largest armada that had ever left the Bosporus. The fate of Europe hung in the balance. From day to day, most Christian countries were anxiously awaiting news of the stoic resistance of the Knights of the Order of St John and the people of Malta to the massive, unrelenting onslaughts of the Turkish invaders and the Barbary corsairs who came to offer their support and assistance.

Letters and dispatches to Pope Pius IV, Don Garcia de Toledo (the Sicilian Viceroy) and other Christian kings and princes were sent out of Malta under the cover of darkness, and these accounts of the siege were published in the form of Avvizi, Lettere and Relazioni consisting generally of just a few pages. They were the forerunners of the newspaper we know today.

However, more important and much more interesting were the news-maps showing the progress of the siege. These illustrated war reports produced from copper engravings – only a few were woodcuts – and gave a day-to-day picture of the salient events of the Maltese saga. In Italy, the centres of production were Rome and Venice. There is no doubt that the Avvizi and similar publications were made use of by the compilers of the siege maps, especially to update the copperplate of a map already on the market. But some of these maps were actually modelled on sketches which were drawn by the military engineers of the Order at the height of the siege and sent over to Sicily, Rome and Venice. Indeed, for instance, the title of a siege map which came out of the Roman establishment of Antonio Lafreri stated explicitly: Ritratto dallo istesso disegno mandato da Malta. Another Lafreri map was described as the Vltimo disegno delle forti di Malta uenuto nuouamente, while Giovanni Battista Pittoni wrote on a map disseminated by him in Venice that it showed il uero disegno (of Malta and the Siege) carried to Sicily by Fra Raffaele Salvago and another captain whose name was not disclosed. It is known from other sources that Salvago left Malta in the early hours of 5 June by Bernardino Rispolo’s frigate.

It is pertinent to point out that all the historians of the siege have ignored the value of these maps as a primary source of information. This is mainly attributable to the fact that most of the 60 odd siege maps disseminated in 1565 as broadsheets were not accessible to them. As loose sheets, they had a very low survival rate and they are all of extreme rarity. Most of those that have resisted the ravages of four centuries are preserved in public libraries and museums, but a few have found their way into private collections. Only one exemplar is known of 16 of these broadsheet maps and not a single copy has so far come to light of another six known to have been published. This is the result of research carried out in 70 public and 23 private collections in 16 different countries. Now that the whole corpus of these maps has been brought together in a book written by the author in collaboration with Maurice Agius-Vadalà, one hopes they will survive as a valuable source of reference.

Fortunately, at some stage, publishers and print dealers started assembling from stock in a single volume the broadsheet maps of various countries of the world and the Lafreri-type atlas was born. This happened in the mid-1560s, with Venice probably preceding Rome in this field. The earliest of these composite atlases so far recorded seems to have been put together in 1565. A very small number of these atlases are – or were until very recently – in private hands and there were occasions when they were torn up. The destruction of a similar cartographic treasure is to be deplored but, on the other hand, it is a boon to the collector of individual items. Almost invariably, maps of Malta are present in these atlases, with as many as six or seven different ones in a single volume in quite a number of cases.

It is not easy to discover the authorship of the printed Malta siege maps. More often than not, one finds the name of the engraver, the printer, the publisher or the owner of the copperplate on the map itself. However, the name of the compiler or the draughtsman is very rarely mentioned. The same problem as to authorship also applies to the manuscript sketches made in Malta. They were presumably made by the engineers of the Order who were in Malta throughout the siege. The two outstanding names are Evangelista Menga and Girolamo Cassar. Very recently, in the book co-authored by the author, one of these manuscript sketches – which has the monogram ICI – was ascribed to Cassar; the capitals probably stand for Ieronymus Cassar Invenit.

Between the 1550s and the 1570s, the map trade in Rome was dominated by Antonio Lafreri (1512-1577) who was born in the Burgundian diocese of Besancon. He settled in Rome around 1540 and eventually the best engravers of the period gravitated towards his business establishment in Via del Parione. They were a mixture of Italians, French, Belgians, Dutch and Germans. Lafreri became the envy of all those engaged in the print trade and rivalry was intense. The map of Malta published in 1551 is the first dated map issued by Lafreri, and another eight maps of Malta came out of his workshop in the year of the siege. Other Roman siege maps were signed by Nicholas Beatrizet, Mario Cartaro, Maitre T B and the Palombis of Novara.

A larger output of siege maps engraved and published in Venice in 1565 reveals the signatures of Nicolò Nelli, Giovanni Battista Pittoni (already mentioned), Domenico Zenoi, Giovanni Francesco Camocio and Paolo Forlani.

We came across the names of Matthaus Franck, Hans Wolf Glaser and Mathias Zundt on the German maps, Pierre Bouzey de Woeiriot and Andre Thevet on the French maps and Hieronymus Cock on a Dutch map.

Copperplates were a valuable asset in the print trade and they passed from one dealer to another, either by purchase or exchange, or through inheritance. The re-issues of the 1565 Siege Maps are signed by Claudio Duchetti (Lafreri’s nephew), Gaspare Alberti, Luca and Donato Bertelli, Pietro de Nobili, Giovanni Orlandi and Henrik van Schoel. Most of these print dealers are known to have placed on the market Lafreri-type atlases.

The writer has found at the National Library in Valletta an atlas probably assembled by the de Nobili towards the end of the 16th century, and another one by Orlandi in the 17th century.

Part II will be carried next week.

Dr Albert Ganado is a specialist in the cartography of Malta. He is the author (with Dr Maurice Agius Vadalà) of “A Study in Depth of 143 Maps Representing the Great Siege of Malta of 1565” (1994-95). He is also the author of “Valletta Città Nuova: A Map History” (1566-1600) (2003).

This article first appeared in the Easter 1995 issue of “Treasures of Malta”, which is published by “Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti”. “Treasures of Malta” is a magazine about art and culture which is published three times a year, and is available from all leading bookshops.