Penisola dell’India di qua dal Gange et isole intorno ad essa adiacenti

1683

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 20.75 x 16.25 in (52.5 x 41 cm)
Sheet size: 22.25 x 17.25 in (56.5 x 43.5 cm)
Folded size: 11.22 x 16.93 in (28.5 x 43 cm)

A superb 1683 Italian map of the Indian Peninsula—one of the most decorative and influential early modern renderings of Southern India, the Maldives, and Ceylon, by Cantelli and the De Rossi workshop

Giacomo Cantelli da Vignola, chief geographer to the Duchy of Modena and one of Italy’s most innovative seventeenth-century cartographers, produced this elegant and richly detailed map of the Indian Peninsula for the De Rossi family’s celebrated Mercurio Geografico. Published in Rome in 1683, the map represents one of the earliest broadly accurate Italian depictions of Southern India and the Indian Ocean islands, combining classical geographical knowledge with contemporary Jesuit reports, Dutch nautical intelligence, and Mediterranean cartographic conventions.

The entire peninsula—stretching from the Gulf of Cambay and Goa to Cape Comorin—is presented with meticulous coastal articulation. Major ports and entrepôts such as Goa, Calicut, Cochin, Cannanore, Madurai, Nagapattinam, and the rising European strongholds on the Coromandel Coast (notably the Dutch and Portuguese factories) are precisely located. The island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) is described in a distinctive outline, reflecting the heightened European attention to Dutch Ceylon following the expulsion of the Portuguese in the mid-seventeenth century.

One of the defining features of the map is the unusually prominent and accurately formed Maldives archipelago, rendered as a long constellation of low coral islands straddling key monsoon routes. Cantelli’s placement and draughtsmanship of these islands mark an important shift from schematic mediaeval representations to more recognisable hydrographic forms, revealing the growing circulation of Portuguese and Dutch navigational data across Europe.

The map is crowned by a majestic cartouche, engraved in the high Baroque style of the De Rossi atelier. This elaborate composition incorporates an elephant, a warrior, and classical figures—elements that combine triumphal iconography with the period’s imaginative evocation of India as a land of imperial grandeur and natural abundance.

As one of the foundational Italian maps of the subcontinent, the Penisola dell’India di qua dal Gange played a critical role in shaping European perceptions of Southern India and its maritime world. Well-preserved examples with period colour and full margins are increasingly scarce.

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