Atlas of Lázaro Luis

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his work constitutes one of the most important cartographic documents of the 16th Century. A codex of extraordinary beauty, its author was a man of his time, well educated and cultured.

The Atlas of Lázaro Luis, drawn in 1563 and well known as one of the bibliographical jewels of the Academy of the Sciences in Lisbon, has been meticulously studied by Armando Cortesao, one of its eminent academics.

Through the study of the drawings on terra firma, L de Albuquerque portrays the author as being an extremely cultured and erudite personality. In this sense the Atlas talks us, it is a didactic book teaching through images. It could be the precursor of the famous Biblia Pauperum made known in the first third of the 17th Century. Examples in this respect abound as the Bible followed the best traditions of the Portuguese cartographies giving life to maps through meticulously drawn illustration of people (caravan in the Sahara Desert), flora (equatorial vegetation from Amazonian latitudes), river systems (the River Plate, the Nile Delta, etc), relief (The Andes), human settlements (indigenous American villages, cities like Venice and Alexandria, holy cities like Jerusalem, heraldic elements (flags, coats of arms and crowns over their respective territories).

In this codex, the content of the Atlas is represented by continents (Europe, Asia, Africa and America). It can be said that the plates of the Atlas show the whole coastline known to that moment. Only some posterior expeditions of the 19th Century and even the beginning of the 20th permit more complete maps of the world.

• 20 pages illuminated with gold on both sides.
• Special parchment paper, with the same thickness, touch and smell as the original.
• The volume studied is written in two languages, Castilian and Portuguese and its bound is fabric, sewn with vegetable thread.
• Manuscript Blue Series, number MS-14-1, Kept in the Academy of the Sciences on Lisbon.
• Binding of the manuscript in parchment, completely hand made and sewed with hemp thread.
• Unique and unrepeatable edition, strictly limited to 999 copies, individually numbered and authenticated by notarial deed.

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