Africa nuova Tavola

  • Translation

Article ID AF0262

Title

Africa nuova Tavola

Description

Map shows almost all of Africa with Madagascar.

Year

ca. 1564

Artist

Ptolemy/ Ruscelli (1500-1566)

Girolamo Ruscelli (1500s-1566) was an Italian polymath, humanist, editor, and cartographer active in Venice during the early 16th century. Ruscelli is best known for his important revision of Ptolemy's Geographia, which was published post humously in 1574. It is generally assumed that Alexius Pedemontanus was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli. In a later work, Ruscelli reported that the Secreti contained the experimental results of an ‘Academy of Secrets’ that he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli’s academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an ‘Accademia dei Secreti’ in Naples in the 1560s. Claudius Ptolemy (arround 100- 160 a.C.) Geographia, gives a list of geographic coordinates of spherical longitude and latitude of almost ten thousand point locations on the earth surface, as they were known at his times. The list is organized in Tabulae which cor- respond to specific regions of the three known continents at that time, Africa, Asia and Europe. Research on Ptolemy’s Geographia has started at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in the eighties, focused mainly, but not exclusively, on data re- lated to territories which are now under the sovereignty of the modern Greek state. The World of Ptolemy is classified in Regions, since each Chapter is referred to one of them, giving by this way the concept of Atlas as it is understood today.

Historical Description

Some of the world's oldest paleoanthropological fossils have been unearthed in South Africa. After these pre-humans, various species of the Homo genus such as Homo habilis, Homo naledi, Homo erectus and finally modern man, Homo sapiens, lived here. The beginning of modern historiography in South Africa is set on April 6, 1652, when the Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck built a supply station on the Cape of Good Hope on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (Dutch Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC). Due to its strategically favorable location, it was supposed to be a rest stop for merchant ships traveling between Europe and Southeast Asia. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the settlement, which slowly but steadily expanded, was owned by the Netherlands. The settlers initially spread to the western Cape region, which at that time was a retreat for the Khoisan. Several hundred French Huguenots, after being persecuted in France from 1686, came into the country via the Netherlands from 1688 and brought the viticulture culture with them. The French-speaking names of wineries and fruit-growing farms in the western Cape can be traced back to them. After reaching the Bantu settlement border eastwards in 1770, they waged a series of wars - the border wars - against the Xhosa people. The Cape Dutch brought numerous slaves into the country from Indonesia, Madagascar and India.

Place of Publication Venice
Dimensions (cm)18,5 x 25 cm
ConditionVery good
Coloringoriginal colored
TechniqueCopper print

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