“BECAUSE THIS SPACE WAS EMPTY, AND LIFELIKE
PICTURES OF EXOTIC THINGS ALMOST ALWAYS
PLEASE SCHOLARS”
Fig. 7. “Cuzco, main city in the province of Perú” in the third volume of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Delle Navigationi et viaggi
(Venice: De Giunti, 1565; 1st ed. 1556), p. 412. Within the city, the Inca sovereign Atahualpa is carried in a litter towards the temple.
Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University (1-size H554.R 184n).
In his first known map, published by Gerard de Jode in Antwerp
incorporating here the images of these two cities, as they have
in 1564, the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598)
come to us and that we can consider as genuine.
included in the lower right corner the images of the two most
Those “genuine” Aztec and Inca cities that covered the emptiness
important American cities of that time, Cuzco and Tenochtitlan
of the border of this world map were very likely copied from
(Mexico City; plate 20), as he explained in a cartouche above them:
Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Delle Navigationi et viaggi, a collection
Because this space was empty, and lifelike pictures of exotic
of explorers’ firsthand accounts of their travels, and more specifically
things almost always please scholars, I have taken care of
from the third volume, first published by De Giunti in Venice in 1556
16