Manuscript portolan chart of the Atlantic Ocean, including Western Europe,South America, and West Africa by Vianna, Manoel José - 1786

Portugal: Manoel Jose Vianna, 1786. A RARE AND MAGNIFICENT EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PORTOLAN CHART OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN Manuscript chart on vellum: 33 7/8" x 26 3/4" Oporto, signed "Manoel Joze Vianna a Fes no Porto," 1786 This highly decorative late eighteenth-century Portuguese manuscript chart shows the Atlantic Ocean extending east-west from England to Argentina, and north-south from Newfoundland to the Cape of Good Hope. The map is a unique document, finely hand-painted on vellum by an artist rather than printed on paper, and it includes some beautifully ornamental passages along with its detailed geographical information. The chart is set within a vivid red border, and shows the coastlines of eastern South America, western Africa, and western Europe as far north as Holland. First produced in the Middle Ages, sea charts or portolans were originally meant purely for utilitarian purposes of navigation. As a result, they tend to assume a characteristic visual format. Because they were meant for seafaring rather than inland travel, portolans show highly detailed coastlines but little if any interior information. Portolans also have a network of lines, called "rhumb lines," that form a lattice across the map's surface, corresponding to directions of the compass. To chart a course, a mariner simply had to connect his ports of departure arrival, choose the rhumb line that most closely approximated that path, and then point his ship in that direction (with the assistance of an onboard compass). Although portolan charts were ostensibly practical tools, by the sixteenth century they were frequently adorned with calligraphic flourishes, compass roses, exotic animals, and even religious figures. This striking portolan is relatively restrained and elegant, with beautiful fleurs-de-lis patterns, compass roses, and the flags of Portugal and Spain (which show that these works did not dispense with political and geographical information but rather aestheticized it). With the invention of printing in the late fifteenth century, the era of the portolan began to wane, for it was much costlier and more time-consuming to produce maps by hand than with the printing press. This unique eighteenth-century example, therefore, is a rare late portolan, and one that follows the high style and presentation of the previous centuries. Yet even while the map emulates an earlier format, it was a statement of current Portuguese interests in the world, particularly in Brazil. The deliberately archaic style might reflect some nostalgia for the a preceding era, when Portugal's colonial empire was considerably more stable. By the late eighteenth century, when Vianna drew this map, Portugal was no longer a world power. Its income from the American colonies had considerably diminished, and Portugal had begun a slow but inexorable decline that would last until the twentieth century. Indeed, just a few decades after this map was made, in 1822, Brazil declared its independence from Portugal, which contributed to a period of political chaos and civil war in the mother country. This map is a masterful example of cartographic draftsmanship, and was probably drawn up for a prominent trader or noble family. Although the practice of executing sea charts on vellum had almost ceased by the eighteenth century as printed sea atlases took their place, there were a number of mapmakers still working on vellum charts in Spain and Portugal as late as the 1770s. In part, this reflects the growing value placed on portolans as aesthetic objects, appreciated as works of art rather than straightforward geographical tools.. Book.