Sophianos' Foundational Renaissance Map of Greece - A PREVIOUSLY UNRECORDED

A PREVIOUSLY UNRECORDED VARIANT OF THE FOUNDATIONAL RENAISSANCE MAP OF GREECE SOPHIANOS, Nikolaos (ca. 1500–1551). Descriptio nova totius Græciæ per Nicolaum Sophianum. Woodcut map on 8 sheets, joined. Basel: [Johannes Schröter,] 1601. (Neat line: 28 ¼” x 41”; sheet: 31 ¾” x 45 1/8”; frame: 36 ½” x 49 5/8”). Framed floating behind Museum Glass. Here is what AI says it’s worth: $185,000. Cost: Sale of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., Rachel Davis Fine Arts 21 September 2013, lot 413 - $144,600. Nikolaos Sophianos (Νικόλαος Σοφιανός, Latinized Nicholas Sophanius, ca. 1500–1551) was born in Corfu (Corcyra or κερκυρα on the map) and educated in Rome by Ianos Laskaris (Janus Lascaris), the great Greek humanist, at the Quirinal College.[1] Cardinal Bessarion, Laskaris’s patron, was one of the great midwives of the Renaissance, and so Sophianos stands in the grandest tradition of the diffusion of Greek antiquity into the West. The Quirinal College was the Vatican’s answer to Aldus’s Accademia in Venice: a place for integrating Greek culture and learning into the Western tradition, but with a more concrete aim: reconciliation of the Eastern and Western Communions. Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus) was a second-century philosopher living in Roman Alexandria in Egypt. His Γεωγραφικὴ Ὑφήγησις (Geographical Guidance) is the only work of ancient Greek cartography to have come to modernity mostly intact. No manuscripts survive from before the XIIIc, but some XIIIc examples survive with maps that bear some relation to those Ptolemy himself drew. Thus, with the exception of some excavated carved maps, Ptolemy is the source for ancient cartography as well as its culmination. The model of Sophianos’s map is Ptolemaic, but he was able to add the information from Pausanias’ Ελλάδος Περιήγησις (Description of Greece), whose first printed recension was edited by another of his teachers at the Quirinal College, Markos Mousouros. Indeed, the map, first published 1540, acknowledges the layers of its intellectual inheritance. There is only mention of the 1540 Vatican edition — on which strength this is sometimes called a “Lafreri-school” map, being the seemingly uniform designation for Italian maps printed 1540–1570 and beyond — but no examples survive.[2] “1544” appears twice: on the sail of the ship just north of Crete (with the initials CHS, posited by Tolias to be “Master Christoph,” viz. Christoph Schweicker of Strasbourg) and in the plaque held by the tritons just above the scale. Johannes Oporin of Basel printed the map in that year (although no examples of that edition survives either) and in the year following; his mark, Arion on the dolphin’s back with his lyre, can be found a little above the cartouche. Below the scale at bottom right are the initials “CH” (flanking his motto: vive ut post vivas, live so that you may live after): Christman Herlin of Strasbourg, who correlated the four units: stades (the Greek στάδιον, about 500ft. or 165m), German miles, French miles and Italian miles. Extant scholarship misses the important connection between Strasbourg and the Sophianos map: Johannes Oporin studied in Strasbourg for four years where, presumably, he met Schweicker and Herlin. At the lower left is a two-panel cartouche. The left-hand panel is a dedication from I. Iacobus Grasserus (Johann Jacob Grasser), imperial poet laureate, to members of the Brahe family (though not to its most famous member, the astronomer Tycho, who died on 24 October 1601), principally to Steen Ottesen Brahe (1547–1620), Tycho’s younger brother. The right-hand panel, addressed to the reader, also contextualizes the Basel context of the map: the sister of the printer, Oporin, took as her second husband the humanist Conrad Wolffhart, the scholar of travel literature. Her son from her first marriage was the geographic scholar Theodor Zwinger. (See below for the text and translation.) The map itself spans from the heel of Italy in the West to Laodicea Combusta in the East (modern Sarayönü in Central Anatolia, Turkey), Tibiscum in the North (modern Jupa, Romania) and Crete in the South. This is much of the Hellenic sphere as recorded in ancient historians, geographers and literary sources; the immediate antecedents of the map are the 1513 Waldseemüller “Tabula moderna Bossine, Servie, Greciae et Sclavonie” and the corresponding map in the 1538 Isengrin-Petri edition of Solinus’s Polyhistor. Sophianos, however, uses his knowledge of Greek and the wide range of sources in that language to lard the map with place-names and appropriate iconography, e.g., the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens, the temple of Athena Pronaia in Delphi, the ruins of Troy. The visual language of the map is wholly of the Renaissance; the cartouche reflects the clean classicism of the Neoplatonists and the scrollwork and putti throughout correspond to the decorative schemes of Italian villas and palazzi. Dotted through the seas are ships and sea-monsters, Arion riding his dolphin and other mythological vignettes. The scholarly erudition of the North is here brought to bear on the iconography of Italy inflected with Greece. Tolias’s study traces the lineage of the various versions of the map. The present item is a variant of his 71.1.17, which he calls a “reissue” of the original 1544 woodcut map, no examples of which survive. Entry 71.1.17 is instantiated by a single example: Basel, UBH AA 89a-c. In that example, the dedication is made to Andreas Ryff, dated the first of January 1601 (in the left-hand panel); the right-hand panel has Grasser’s name at the top and lacks a place and a date at the bottom but is otherwise essentially identical. With the complete resetting of the left-hand portion to shift the dedication to the Brahe family, Schröter made corresponding changes to the right-hand portion. Altogether only three examples of the woodcut map have come to auction: the 1545 edition (sold Sotheby’s London 18 November 2004, lot 219), a 1558 (Zisska and Schauer 2013, lot 3101) and the present item. Purchased from the sale of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., Rachel Davis Fine Arts 21 September 2013, lot 413; Goodyear had purchased the map from Nico Israel in January 1985. Text and translation of the cartouche Dicebatur olim λαβὼν ἀπόδος ἄνδρωπε,[3] καὶ λήψῃ πάλιν, quod & mihi nunc faciundum esse arbitrabar. Postquã enim pulcherrimam illam totius Græciæ, omnium scientiarum & artium matris, descriptionem, quam summâ diligentiâ olim doctißimus Sophianus elaborauit, heic superesse intellexi, nullum non lapidem moui ut pristino suo nitori restituta, & elencticâ veste amicta, in lucem ederetur. Quo autem ea quæ indagamus faciliùs sese nobis offerant, magno illo Lycosthene præceptore usi (cuius labores cuiusdã doctrinâ & antistitio viri reverendi hortatu, ex CL. D. I.[4] Zuingeri Med. FE. Bibliothecâ descripsimus) pennâ lineas transuersas à gradu in gradum ducemus, obseruatâ quadraturâ, in quam locorû numeri, qui in Indice sunt, nos deducunt. Aut appensæ ad parietem tabulæ perpendiculum ritè accommodabimus cum globulo, qui ad omnes latitudinis gradus commodè moueri potest. Frueris nunc, Lector humanißime, compendio hocce, quo omnia quàm citißimè, apud Strabonem, Pto Paus. Plin. Pomp. & alios plures fusiùs tractata, repperies. vale. Basileæ ∞. Iↄ cI. It used to be said “give up what you get, man, and you will get it back,” which I think should be done even now. For afterward, the most beautiful map of all Greece, mother of all the sciences and arts, which with the utmost care the most learned Sophianos once fashioned, I know has survived here. I have not moved a single stone so that it be returned to its pristine splendor and, garbed in critical vestment, it is restored to the light. Indeed when those things after which we strive offer themselves up to us simply, used by that great teacher Lycosthenes (whose undertakings we described, and by whose erudition & pious office with encouragement from the esteemed gentleman, from the library of the learned and distinguished medical doctor Zwinger)[5]. With a pen we could draw horizonal lines step by step, with orthogonality observed, onto which reckoning of the places, which are in the Index, lead us. Or, the map, hung properly perpendicular on the wall, we can conform to the globe, which is able to be moved conveniently to all degrees of latitude. Now may you enjoy, most humanistic reader, since in this summary you will straight away find all those things that are more fully treated in Strabo, Ptolemy, Pausanias, Pomponius (Mela) and many others. Farewell. Basel 1601 Condition: Some tanning from the adhesive at the joins. Lower corners strengthened verso (not examined out of frame), with the backing tanned. Some wrinkling along the central vertical join. Compare: Karrow 77/1.11; Tolias 71.1.17; Zacharakis 3416. [1] The standard reference remains G. Tolias, “Nikolaos Sophianos’s Totius Graeciae Descriptio: The Resources, Diffusion and Function of a Sixteenth-Century Antiquarian Map of Greece” in Imago Mundi 58.2 (2006) 150–182. Tolias’s analysis underpins the present description. [2] This was an engraved map, and so might be considered as completely separate, as the title (“Descriptio nova”) indicates. [3] This must be a typographical error for ἄνθρωπε. [4] Can this be a typoraphical error for “T”? [5] Conrad Lycosthenes (Wolffhart, 1518–1561) was the second husband of Christina Herbster, sister of the map’s initial Basel printer Johannes Oporin, and mother of Theodor Zwinger (1533–1588), one of the great exponents of travel literature.

Utropspris:SEK 1,476,659.85

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