fl 1680-96.
Not much is known of Vooght's personal life beyond his own description of himself as a 'surveyor and teacher of mathematics and the art of navigation' on which he was a prolific writer. He is noted as the author of charts in Johannes van Keulen's Zee-Fakkel; indeed, on some editions only his name appears and in consequence the Zee-Fakkel is often catalogued under his name.
Sophianos was well known as an expert on Greek history and geography. He was sent to Greece in about 1543 by Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the Spanish envoy to Venice, to acquire Greek manuscripts for the Escurial Library. It is about this time – possibly in 1540, the date found at the end of Sophianos text on this map – that Sophianus compiled his great map of Greece, although there is no surviving example.
In 1544, Johann Oporinus, a printer and publisher in Basle, published an eight-sheet version of Sophianos map, cut by Master Christoph of Strasburg. Of this earliest printing, there is also no known extant example. Indeed, the earliest surviving printing of the map recorded by Zacharakis or Karrow was printed by Johann Schroeter in Basle in 1601.
It appears that Oporinus reprinted the map in 1545 to accompany his edition of Gerbelius “In Descriptionem Graeciae Sophiani, Praefatio….”. Although the book gives instructions on colouring the map, and contains additional gazetteer, the map seems not to ha...
Bland arbeten.
Descriptio nova totivs Graeciae per Nicolavm Sophianvm. Basle, 1544-1545, large woodcut wall-map of Greece, on eight sheets uncut, each sheet approx. 380 x 280mm., with an additional sheet with letterpress gazetteer. Of great rarity. The earliest surviving wall-map of Greece and the first significant modern map of Greece, compiled by Nickolaos Sophianos, a Greek cartographer from Corfu, born of a noble family there. This example is apparently the second state of the map. It retains the date 1544 just above the scale bar on the bottom right hand skeet, but the letterpress text in the left hand cartouche on the lower left sheet may have been reset, in whole or part, as it ends with the date “prid[ie] Calend[is]. Septembr[is]. Anno salutis publiae M D X L V”.
Sotheby's. Zacharakis, Printed Maps of Greece: Sophianos 2242; Karrow, Mapmakerers of the Sixteenth Century, 71/1.2.
Bland arbeten.
Geografia di M. Livio Sanuto distinta in XII libri. Venice: Damiano Zenaro, 1588.
The first printed atlas of Africa. Sannuto’s Geographia was intended as a compendium of world geography, but the project was curtailed by his death. Only the first part, devoted to Africa, was ever published, and that posthumously. Skelton describes the Geographia as a “methodical and precisely documented description of the geography of Africa” and notes the “critical sense” exercised in the compilation of the maps, engraved by Sanuto’s brother Giulio.
It is unfortunate that the work was left incomplete, as Skelton suggests it would have been “among the masterpieces of Renaissance geography”; the fact it was incomplete may help explain its rarity on the market today.
Skelton, Bibliographical note to the facsimile of Livio Sanuto’s Geographia dell Africa.
Sotheby's. Mendelssohn (1957) II, p. 269; Nordenskiöld Collection 2, 277; Skelton, Bibliographical note to the facsimile of Livio Sanuto’s Geographia dell Africa.3 5000-7000
Gulddistriktet Klondike - ca 1897.
'Stellaeburgum sive Observatorium Subterraneum...' - Johannes Blaeu 1662.
