Italy Map 1683 French Original Color Print - Rome, Naples, Venice, Palermo, Cagliari

This Italie par N. Sanson le Fils was published in Paris about 1683 by Nicolas Sanson. It is a well-engraved map of Italy showing Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and the Gulf of Venice, in fine original color. The Sanson family of Paris is regarded as the founder of the French school of seventeenth-century cartography, and the maps issued under the name of Sanson were a standard for accuracy. This is a map of the whole peninsula, with its seas and the three large islands in view, drawn to the clean, open style that made the French school so widely copied in the Netherlands and England. The original color is still strong on the sheet, which is not always the case with maps of this age.

The date of about 1683 places the sheet in the high summer of Louis XIV's France, when French cartographers set the standard for European geography. Italy was divided among many states, with Spain ruling Naples, Sicily and Sardinia and the Papal States in the center, and the republic of Venice still powerful at the head of the Adriatic. The original hand coloring marks the regions and states, and the engraving is fine and well spaced. A Sanson map of Italy was a staple of the best atlases of the time, and the survival of this one in its original color adds to its appeal.

A collector of French seventeenth-century maps, a family with roots in Sicily, Sardinia or Venice, or a reader of the age of Louis XIV will find a distinguished gift here. TheMapVault's Tavernier sheet of 1640 predates it, whereas this Sanson print of about 1683 is the more refined work, and still in its first color. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.