Vaz Dourado’s Universal Atlas depicts the coastlines and interiors of much of the world, as explored by the Portuguese up until that point. Our facsimile of the atlas contains fifteen loose-leaf folios of maps and three folios containing astronomical and navigational charts. An additional folio of the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as the atlas’s frontispiece, are missing from the original manuscript. Each map features a stretch of coastline marked by city names perpendicular to the coast, as well as rivers which extend into the landmasses. Both the water and land are uncolored. The boundaries between land and water are marked by a green outline. Some coastlines remain unbounded, indicating a lack of information about those areas. Vaz Dourado’s remarkable use of color attests to a relatively expensive manufacturing process. The smaller islands in the maps are extravagantly colored and often take on a geometric shape. This intense color also appears in the maps’ exaggerated river deltas and the flags and crests which indicate ownership and often attest to colonial dominion. Other colorful embellishments on the map include its elaborate cartouches, ornamented with geometric and floral details on each page, and its compasses, from which the maps’ rhumb lines emerge. The map includes annotations regarding the European discovery of various landmasses and islands, especially around the Pacific and Indonesia. This emphasis on naval exploration may also justify the inclusion of an almost empty map of the Pacific, which helps record the circumnavigational voyages that the sequencing of the maps can recreate. Compared to his predecessors, Vaz Dourado’s maps of Indonesia feature significantly more detail and mimetic accuracy, both in terms of island shape and place names. Other outstanding features include Vaz Dourado’s depictions of Japan, island chains in the Indian Ocean, Japan, island-dotted river courses in South America and the Middle East, East Asian architecture, and Mexico City/Tenochtitlan.
Universal Atlas of Fernão Vaz Dourado, 1571, Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Colecção Cartográfica, n.º 165.
Dourado, Fernando Vaz. “Fernão Vaz Dourado, atlas universal, 1571.” Barcelona: M. Moleiro Editor, S.A., 2011.
Special Collections, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
Rights for maps held by individual publishers and institutions. Thumbnails displayed constitute fair use.
Archival information and images of the original: https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=4162624 Compare with another atlas by Vaz Dourado: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/46230
Special Collections (Horizontal Shelving) ; G1001 .D68 2011