The Gastaldi /Ramusio map of America

Giovanni Battista Ramusio :
Vniversale della Parte del Mondo Nvovamente Ritrovata. Venice, 1556 (state 2, 1565). A fine example of this important early map of the New World. Small stain in South America (as visible in image). $4500.

Ramusio states in I Navigazioni that this map of the Western Hemisphere is the work of Giacomo Gastaldi. It was the finest general delineation of the hemisphere available to the public at mid-century. Assuming Ramusio's attribution of the map to Gastaldi to be correct, the map also represents an important link in the influential Gastaldi's thinking about the continuity of the American and Asian coasts. Gastaldi, long a steadfast champion of the theory that Asia and America were connected along the northern Pacific, here shows only a tentative, possible link between the Northwest Coast and Asia. Five years after this map, Gastaldi categorically abandoned his long-standing belief in the continuity of the two continents, instead claiming that a strait separated the two.

The northern and southern American continents are labelled La Nova Spagna and El Peru respectively. Consistent with Gastaldi's earlier maps, the term America does not appear at all. The eastern seaboard of North America, though lacking detail, is highly unusual. It exhibits an atypical consistent diagonal orientation rather than the common east-west distortion of the mid-Atlantic coast resulting from magnetic declination.

This is the first printed map to show the Sierra Nevada, the "snowy mountains" noted by Cabrillo in 1542. It is also the first to show the exploits of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who led a team of gluttonous Spanish explorers in search of fabulous pueblos rumored to lie to the north of their home base of La Nova Spagna (Mexico).