Girolamo Ruscelli, Nueva Hispania Tabula Nova, 1562

Ruscelli’s classic map of the Southwest is an enlarged version of master cartographer Jacopo Gastaldi’s prototype map of 1548, which Gastaldi included in his new edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. For that edition, Gastaldi engraved the maps on copper and added to Ptolemy a complete series of plates of the New World, making “Nueva Hispania” the first map specifically devoted to New Spain and one of the first copperplate maps devoted to a region of the American continent. Thirteen years later, noted geographer Girolamo Ruscelli produced a revised version of Gastaldi’s edition, but with important innovations.

The map offered here is the 1562 Latin edition of Ruscelli’s variation that ostensibly follows Gastaldi’s map of Mexico, the American Southwest, and the Gulf Coast. However, it rectifies Gastaldi’s more egregious errors, such as his depiction of the Yucatan as an island. Burden notes that this amendment to the Yucatan was apparently quite last minute; the plate carries the clear signs of an initially engraved island format that was not entirely erased when the land connection was added. Ruscelli correctly shows the Yucatan and the Baja as peninsulae and improves the geography of the upper Gulf Coast to reflect the explorations of the great early Spanish explorers—Piñeda, Cabeza de Vaca, and Moscoso. The Mississippi River, here named Rio de Spiritu Santo was rendered as accurately as the limited experience in the New World allowed. State of the art as the map was, it continued and probably propagated some of the fantastic hopes that fueled the Spanish Entrada: the Seven Cities of Cibola appear and are represented by castles.

Aesthetically, the map marks a turning point in the intaglio printing techniques innovated by Gastaldi’s 1548 work. Ruscelli’s elegant engraving style signals a transition from the earlier, heavier style of woodcut maps and maximizes the potential of the copperplate medium.

Girolamo Ruscelli was an Italian cartographer, scholar, and humanist born in Viterbo in the province of Tuscany. He was a prominent writer and editor during his lifetime. One of his most notable works was a translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia, which was published posthumously. He was a founding member of the Accademia Segreta, the first society of experimental science known to history. It is generally accepted that he authored the famous work The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont, published under the pseudonym Alessio Piemontese. While Ruscelli’s career as a professional writer flourished at a time of exceptional freedom and innovation in Venice, he was perhaps wise to maintain secrecy around certain of his activities, as the Inquisition eventually censored most of the experimental ideas that were current.

Refs.: Burden, Mapping of North America, no. 31; Martin & Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, p. 69 (plate 3); Nordenskiöld, Facsimile-Atlas pp. 26-27; Phillips, Atlases, nos. 371, 372, 373; Stevens, Ptolemy’s Geography, pp. 19–20, 50–51; Wagner (1937), no. 48, see Gastaldi 1548.