Mapmaker and engineer
Giacomo Gastaldi
The Venetian mapmaker who helped move maps from woodcut to copper.
On Picturepops™ cards · 1
The life
about 1500–1566Born Villafranca Piemonte, Italy
Giacomo Gastaldi began as an engineer in the service of Venice and from about 1544 gave himself entirely to mapmaking. His small edition of Ptolemy’s Geography of 1548 was engraved on copper rather than wood and included regional maps of the Americas, and the Council of Ten asked him to paint maps of Asia and Africa on the walls of the Doge’s Palace. Our card, The Cathedral, City of Mexico, opens onto his map of Temistitan, the Aztec city on its lake.