Beschreibung:

DUDLEY, Sir Robert, self-styled Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Warwick (1573-1649). Arcano del Mare . Florence: Giuseppe Cocchini for Jacopo Bagononi and Anton Francesco Lucini 1661. A superb complete set of 'arguably the most sumptuous [atlas] ever produced ... it was superior to any previous work' (Burden). It is celebrated as: The first sea-atlas of the whole world The first atlas with all the charts using Mercator ’ s projection The first to give prevailing winds and currents The first to give magnetic declination The first to expound the benefits of ‘ Great Circle Sailing ’ ‘ The Arcano del Mare was a monumental and totally original task, the charts, representations of instruments and diagrams all engraved on huge quantities of copper over many years with an exactitude incorporating the minutest detail and printed on the best possible paper. The whole surpassed anything published before and not equalled in quality until fifty years later ’ (Wardington). Dudley's great sea-atlas Arcano del Mare was first published in 1646-1647, and is an extreme rarity in itself. The present, somehwat extended, edition was published in 1661 with the name of the Grand Duke of Tuscany on the titles as dedicatee. Both are extremely rare in complete and fine condition. The work is divided into six books (or parts): book 1 deals with Longitude; book 2 details errors existing in sea charts and includes the portolano for the Mediterranean and 15 general maps; book 3 covers discipline within the navy and military, and includes a plan for the construction of a navy in five grades of vessel; book 4 is devoted to naval architecture and describes the method of designing and building ships of the 'Galerato' and 'Galizaba' types; book 5 deals with navigation and methods of measuring the sun's declination and the relative positions of the stars; and book 6 is the sea atlas. No standard collation for the second edition of Dudley's atlas exists, but the present set is extremely close to Wardington’s description. The 15 coastal charts in part 2 consist of large-scale maps of the four continents: five relate to the Americas, including a map of Central America and Peru with a detailed inset showing the California coast, which is the first printed sea chart of the west coast of North America (Burden 266), and a map of the eastern seaboard that is the first printed sea chart by an Englishman of the eastern north American coast, as well as the first to record methodically soundings. The soundings in Chesapeake Bay are recorded only here: '[they are] curiously lacking in the more detailed chart published in the sixth part... The most interesting area is that of New York where any indication of the Dutch presence is removed' (Burden 267). In the dedicatory epistle to the second edition of 1661, the engraver Lucini states that 'he worked on the plates in seclusion for twelve years in an obscure Tuscan village, using no less than 5,000 pounds of copper in the making' (Phillips). Based largely on first-hand reports of English and other pilots of the period, the charts are exceptionally accurate for the time. Burden The Mapping of North America I, 266, 267, 274-284; JCB (3) III:53-55; Phillips Atlases 3428; Nordenskiöld 70; PMM 134 (first edition); Sabin 21089; Lord Wardington, ‘Sir Robert Dudley and the Arcano del Mare , 1646-8 and 1661’ in The Book Collector , Vol. 52, no 2, Summer 2003, pp.199-211 and Vol. 52, no 3, Autumn 2003, pp.317-355. Six parts in two volumes, broadsheets (565 x 420mm). 364 engraved illustrations on 180 sheets as detailed below. Contemporary Italian tree-mottled vellum over thick pasteboard, red and green morocco gilt spine labels, red and green mottled edges (endpapers replaced with full sheets of 18th-century north European paper, 565 x 840mm, horn watermark, countermarked 'RIOLA', extremities lightly rubbed, corners slightly more heavily). Provenance : unidentified armorial stamps on titles. COMPRISING: Volume I, Part