Sold on November 27, 2024
Robert Dudley’s Arcano del Mare, or, “Mysteries of the Sea”, was the first Maritime Atlas to collect the seas and coastlines, of all the known world, in a single grand Encyclopedia. It was also the first to use the innovations of the geographer, cosmographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator, as a foundation for its maps. Mercator had devised a new method of map projection (the plotting of a sailing course using a map), which rendered the course as a straight line. Nautical charts still employ this innovation today. It was also the first Nautical Atlas to note prevailing winds and currents.
This marvellous, erudite encyclopaedia immediately became a reference work for navigation, cartography, shipbuilding, and naval warfare. Following publication of the first edition in 1647, a second edition appeared in 1661. Printed in Florence by Giuseppe Cocchini, for Jacopo Bagononi and Anton Francesco Lucini, the second edition is now the rarer of the two.
This second edition is also the more significant. It contains over 350 engravings. It features numerous representations of nautical protractors and Aliades (a device which allows one to plot angle and elevation and sight a distant object), as well as highly accurate nautical charts drawn in a singular Baroque Style.
DUDLEY (Sir Robert)
Arcano del Mare
Florence: Giuseppe Cocchini [for Jacopo Bagononi and Anton Francesco Lucini], 1661.
Six parts in two volumes, broadsheets (420 x 560 mm). Contemporary binding.
Celebrated as the first sea-atlas of the whole world
€350,000 / 500,000
Result: €407,776
The Second Edition – Most Rare and Most Comprehensive
The encyclopaedia took fifteen years to complete. Dudley began around 1631, and his engraver Lucini, in 1634. The first edition, four folio volumes of various sizes, finally appeared in 1646-1647. The second edition followed, twelve years after Dudley’s death, in 1661. It contains the same engravings as illustrations, but as it is bound in two large, twin volumes, it is much more impressive. The first volume collects books I to V, which contain advice on all aspects of navigation, shipbuilding, military manoeuvres and instructions on drawing accurate charts. The second volume, Book VI, is the atlas proper, containing all 131 maps and charts.
The Authors
Robert Dudley
The life of Sir Robert Dudley (1574-1649) is just as remarkable as the exquisite craftwork of the Arcano. Dudley was the Illegitimate son Baron Howard of Effingham’s daughter and Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester (also lover of Queen Elizabeth I of England). Dudley, the son, found fascination in navigation and the sea. Dudley studied shipbuilding and seafaring at Oxford, before setting sail in 1594-1595 for Guyana and South America. Thereafter, he pursued a successful naval career as a privateer for the Crown.
Denied the titles of both his father, Earl of Leicester, and his uncle, Earl of Warwick, Dudley decides, in 1604, to leave England for France. He abandons his wife and their seven daughters, but takes his cousin, Elizabeth Southwell, with him, disguised as a page. They marry in Lyon in 1606.
A disinherited, Catholic convert, Dudley manages to obtain a position, as naval advisor and engineer, at the court of Grand Duke Ferdinand I of Tuscany, in Florence, in 1607. He publishes his first treatise in 1610. He goes on to modernize the Tuscan Armada, build a new harbor at Livorno and drain the marshes between Pisa and Livorno. At a time when the Dutch dominated the market, he was the first English scholar to publish an encyclopaedia of this kind.
Antonio Francesco Lucini
Dudley commissions the Florentine Antonio Francesco Lucini (circa 1605 – 1661) to cut his engraving plates. An artisan shrouded in mystery, Lucini was influenced by Baroque craftsmen such as Jacques Callot and Stefano della Bella. He adorned his titles with some of the most beautiful examples of Baroque calligraphy. Lucini declared that he spent twelve years in seclusion in a small village in Tuscany, working on the plates and using 5,000 pounds* of copper for the engravings: dials, circular diagrams, instruments, maps and other images.
Many of these diagrams are made up of superimposed moving parts, 2 or 3 concentric diagrams rotating around an axis, completed by alidades.
*5,000 pounds of copper is the equivalent of 2 tones.
The Maritime Encyclopaedia: A Monumental Work of Pure Originality
The Arcano del Mar is divided into 6 books. The first deals with longitude, the second with errors in existing nautical charts, the third with naval tactics, and the fourth with architecture and shipbuilding. In the fifth book, devoted to scientific navigation calculated according to positioning in relation to the sun and stars, Dudley expounds on “Great Circle Navigation”, which he had adopted in 1620. The ship follows the path of a Great Circle, a Great Circle being the intersection of a sphere (the Earth) and a plane passing through the sphere’s centre point. Such a path represents the shortest distance between two points on such a sphere.
The first five books contain abundant, detailed and complex illustrations; ornate titles, an engraved patron dedication, and numerous images of medieval nautical instruments, charts, shipbuilding diagrams, and naval battle scenes, among others.
The sixth and final book contains 131 highly accurate general maps of the world’s seas, adorned with titles drawn in Baroque calligraphy. Dudley used various sources for his cartography. We know that he exchanged maps with his brother-in-law, the navigator Thomas Cavendish, the third person to circumnavigate the globe on 1586-1588.
Attuned to the latest discoveries of his time, a polymath and a mathematician, Dudley dedicated himself to producing “modern” maps. He drafted them according to the Projection standard set by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. The maps were bigger, greater in size and scope, than any before. The resulting planisphere, by preserving the integrity of the angles of navigation, provided a reference which enabled sailors to accurately determine their position at sea. The coastal surveys, with complemental indications of prevailing winds, currents and magnetic deviations are further examples of the innovation of this great work.
Sale on November 27, 2024
Tajan, 37 rue des Mathurins, 75008 Paris
CONTACTS
Alexia Taiclet – Director
+33 1 53 30 30 84 – [email protected]
Ségolène Beauchamp – Expert
+33 6 64 67 12 60 – [email protected]
Communication, Press & Photos
Ariane de Miramon – Director
+33 1 53 30 30 68 – [email protected]