The Most Important Atlas of Brazil from the Baroque Age - Baerleus'

The Most Important Atlas of Brazil from the Baroque Age. VAN Baerle, Caspar (1584–1648). Casparis Barlæi, rerum per octennium in Brasilia Et alibi nuper gestarum, Sub Præfectura Illustrissimi Comitis I. Mauritii, Nassoviæ, &c. comitis, Nunc Vesaliæ Gubernatoris & Equitatus Fœderatorum Belgii Ordd. Sub Auriaco Ductoris, Historia. Amsterdam: Joan Blaeu, 1647. First edition. Here is what AI says it’s worth: $201,000. Folio (17 1/8” x 12 1/8”, 435mm x 310mm): binder’s blank, π2 *2 **2 A-Ssss2, binder’s blank [$2 signed; –**2]. 180 leaves, pp. [12] (title, explanatory text for dedication, engraved dedication, blank, 6pp. dedication, list of plates, engraved portrait), 1-340, [8] (8pp. index). With 58 engraved plates; of which 2 are integral to the text (the dedication and the portrait of Prince Maurits after Th(eodor) Matham); 25 double-page maps, 29 double-page views and 2 folding views (Recife and S. Paolo de Loanda). Collated complete against the list of plates (nos. 1-55 plus one outside numeration). Bound in contemporary mottled calf (re-backed, with the original back-strip laid down) with a quadruple gilt fillet border. On the spine, six raised bands. Title and imprint gilt to red morocco in the second panel. Gilt roll to the edges of the boards, continuing to the inside dentelle. Pink marbled end-papers. Re-backed, with the original back-strip laid down. Worn at the extremities, with loss by the hinges. End-papers renewed, with a hinge-split to the front free end-paper. Tanned, in places heavily, with some foxing principally to the verso of some plates. Wormed throughout, with inexpert repairs. Ink manuscript shelf-mark (?) to the title-page: “H.Li./2432” Altogether solid, but not without the scars of a long life. Johan Maurits (Maurice) of Orange, Count and eventually Prince of Nassau-Siegen (1604–1679), distinguished himself as a military commander on behalf of the Dutch West Indies company (WIC) in Brazil. He was governor-general from 1636–1644 (the octennium or eight-year span of the title) and fought almost constantly against the Spanish-Portuguese forces to defend and even to expand Dutch holdings in South America and, eventually, in Africa (in order to re-open the transport of enslaved people to the Americas). The Dutch would come to sell Brazil to the Portuguese in 1661, and so Maurits’s governorship represents the high-water mark of their power in the Americas. Caspar van Baerle (latinized to Barlaeus; 1584–1648) was a versatile Dutch humanist and panegyricist; his Medicea Hospes of 1638 recounts the triumphant entry of Marie de’ Medici, then Queen Mother of France, into Amsterdam. As early as 1622, his eye turned to the New World, translating Antonio de Herrera’s Historia general de los hechos… que llaman Indias Occidentales into Latin. He was, therefore, the perfect candidate to write an encomium of Maurits, interwoven with accounts of the geography, history and natural life of Brazil. The genre of the “res gestae” — the “deeds done” or accomplishments — is most closely associated with the Emperor Augustus, comparison with whom Maurits would no doubt have enjoyed greatly. Barlaeus, with Maurits’s own archives and, more importantly, financial support, enlisted the great minds of his day as collaborators. The images are, for the most part, the work of Frans Janszoon Post (1618–1680), the first European artist to paint the New World. Post was in Brazil at the same time as Maurits, and his images — disseminated through these engravings, executed by Jan van Brosterhuisen and Salomon Savery — defined Europe’s vision of the exotic lands of South America. Georg Marcgraf, along with the publishers Willem and Joan Blaeu, contributed the maps. Eventually Marcgraf would issue the four sectional maps of Brazil into a large and influential wall-map. The work in its first edition is quite rare, although many sources (including Sabin and Rodrigues) cite Clement’s Bibliotheca Curiosa II.430 attesting that a fire ravaged the warehouse of Blaeu and destroyed most copies of the work. The cataloguer is unable to locate such a book. The Blaeu warehouse fire was in 1672, 25 years after the present work came off the presses. Borba de Moraes, Bibliographia Brasiliana (1983) pp. 78–79; John Carter Brown II.2, p. 350; Rodrigues, Catalogo... Livros sobre o Brasil 346; Sabin 3408. van den Boogaart, Ernst. “A Well-Governed Colony: Frans Posts’s Illustrations in Caspar Barlaeus’s History of Dutch Brazil.” The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 59, no. 3 (2011) 236–271.

Stima:€71,536.08

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