Carta Nautica Vitr 4-21

Carta Nautica Vitr 4-21

Plácido Caloiro y Oliva (b. ca. 1611) was a prolific cartographer and the master of a workshop in Messina. He produced 29 signed nautical charts that have survived to the present, as well as three more that are attributed to him based on their design and features, including this fine specimen. His family name was originally Ollives, but after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, they moved from Mallorca to Sicily and Italianized their name to Oliva. The chart is pasted on parchment and has three folds so that it closes like a folder with the parchment collar superimposed, which was a fairly common way of preserving this type of document. The inclusion of a medallion miniature of the Madonna and Child is one of the characteristics that allowed researchers to attribute the map to him because he, like Juan de la Cosa (ca. 1450–1510), included it on virtually all of his maps.

A Splendidly Furnished Map

Although there are no cities, which is unusual, the map is still richly adorned and other decorative elements include a camel walking across North Africa, a grotesque labelled gattumanuni signia or “image of a human cat”, a mosque, the Red Sea painted literally, Mt. Sinai, Mt. Ararat with Noah's ark, and three crosses on Golgotha. The island of Sicily serves as the main compass rose of the map, which has 10 altogether as well as two half-roses, some ornately decorated. There are also two windroses independent of this system: one off Sagres Point, the southwesternmost tip of Europe, and in the Eastern Mediterranean to the northwest of Alexandria. Place names are written in Italian in a manner that allows them to be read from any direction when the map is laid out on a flat surface.