The Johannes Ruysch and Martin Waldseemüller World Maps: The Interplay and Merging of Early Sixteenth Century New World Cartographies

The Johannes Ruysch and Martin Waldseemüller World Maps: The Interplay and Merging of Early Sixteenth Century New World Cartographies

The famous Johannes Ruysch world map, Universalior cogniti orbis tabula ex recentibus confecta observationibus (Universal Map of the Known World Prepared from Recent Observations), designed by a Flemish monk, painter, and astronomer, engraved on copperplate and published in the Rome Ptolemy of 1508, is one of the first printed maps to show the Portuguese, Spanish and English discoveries in the New World, preceded only by the Contarini-Roselli map (1506) and the Martin Waldseemüller map (1507).

In the earliest maps of America, a distinctive type of cartographic design is the well-known “Lusitano-Germanic.” Henry Harrisse famously identified and defined this familiar type of design of the New World in the maps of Cantino, Caverio, Waldseemüller, Schöner, Fries, and others. One indicator of the type was the Abbey of All Saints place name in Brazil. The world map of Johannes Ruysch, with this place name, was classified by Harrisse as a map of the Lusitano-Germanic group.

The Johannes Ruysch and Martin Waldseemüller World Maps corrects earlier work of Joachim Lelewel, Harrisse, John Boyd Thacher, E. L. Stevenson, and others, and disproves the long-standing, dubious conclusion that the Ruysch map, as originally drawn and engraved, was a map of the Lusitano-Germanic type. This book demonstrates that the New World on the Ruysch world map was originally engraved as a “King-type” map, another cartographic design type of the period that includes the King-Hamy, Maggiolo, Kunstmann No. 2, and Sylvanus maps. The Ruysch map plates were later re-engraved in several separate states to incorporate cartographic designs and place names from a map of the Lusitano-Germanic group.

 

An analysis of the place names demonstrates the wood blocks of two other famous early world maps — Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507 and his “Carta Marina” world map of 1516 — were both recut to incorporate place names from a King-type map. The Abbey of All Saints place name, a later interpolation into the Lusitano-Germanic group of maps, is revealed to previously be the touchstone of the King-type cartographic design.

This analysis of the several engraved states of the Ruysch map critiques accepted assumptions about the sources used by early sixteenth century mapmakers and offers new commentary and explication of their influences upon each other’s work.