The chart presents highly decorative features that are characteristic of the work of Placido Caloiro e Oliva: the Virgin and Child at the neck, the flagged cities, the elaborate scale bars, the style of the compass roses, the accuracy of the toponyms, and the blue-green rivers.

The inset globe was a feature introduced in portolan charts by Vesconte Maggiolo, and into the family’s oeuvre by Joan Riczo Oliva. It became a constant feature in the work of Placido Caloiro e Oliva and added a modern dimension to a type of map that originated in the Medieval era. A comparison with a signed chart of 1631 held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, reveals further similarities in the construction, the positioning of rhumb lines and names, and the location of major and minor islands. Pfederer (2009) records twenty-seven institutional examples of portolan charts and atlases by Placido Caloiro e Oliva.

This chart is centred on Sicily and the Mediterranean, with Spain and Portugal, France, Italy, and Greece shown prominently. Places indicated in Northern Europe are: Ireland, England, and Wales, with part of Scotland as a separate island; France, the Flanders, and part of Denmark. In Western Asia, the map shows the northern, western, and southern coasts of the Black Sea, Anatolia, and the entire eastern Mediterranean coast. The Holy Land features a schematic representation of the Calvary with three crosses. In North Africa is part of the Red Sea and the Nile, a rider on a camel, palm trees, and a lion. In the Atlantic Ocean, the Canary Islands and the Azores are divided by two latitude scales, one starting at thirty-three degrees (twenty-three degrees) on the western edge of Africa and cropping at thirty-one degrees dividing the Canary Islands, and the second starting below at thirty-two degrees and ending at fifty-six degrees near Ireland. 

At the neck of the chart is an inset globe within a gold border showing the world including Europe with part of Scandinavia and Russia, part of Asia until India, as ‘Goa’, the Arabian Peninsula, the whole of Africa with Madagascar in red; the Americas, part of North America and Canada, with Florida, Mexico, 'Nova Spagna', 'Terranova' and 'Nova Francza' labelled, the West Indies including Cuba and 'Spagnola' (Hispaniola), the whole of South America, Ferdinand Magellan’s Strait and ‘Terra di Foggo’.

The Sunderland Collection

An impressively large and richly decorated portolan chart centring on the Mediterranean Sea by the celebrated cartographer Placido Caloiro e Oliva (fl.1617–1657). Presenting the medieval and the modern in parallel, Oliva has chosen to present the chart in the luxurious portolan ‘antiqued’ style as opposed to using intaglio printing. This opulent illuminated manuscript style is an informed artistic decision and a nod to earlier decadent works, but here, includes the latest geographical ‘discoveries’ and more functional navigational advice. In the seventeenth century, portolan charts such as this were mostly created as luxury objects for wealthy patrons.

Oliva’s map shows the features of a traditional portolan, with ample space for medieval bestiary and typified representations of places, but also a chart that records the relative positions of land masses more accurately than the traditionally calculated angles. North Africa and Western Asia extend from the British Isles to the Red Sea.

This chart is attributed to Placido Caloiro e Oliva, an important mapmaker of the Oliva family cartographic dynasty which dominated portolan production in Europe from the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries. Charts signed by no fewer than sixteen different members of the Oliva family are recorded between 1538 and 1673, and individual members apparently worked throughout the Mediterranean world, as their charts originate from Mallorca, Messina, Naples, Livorno, Florence, Venice, Malta, Palermo, and Marseilles. The exact relationships between the various members of the family are unclear, though similarities in style and content among their works seem to attest to the sharing and transmission of knowledge within the family.

A large and richly decorated portolan chart of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia extending from the British Isles to the Red Sea, and including an inset globe showing the Americas. The 'neck' of the work is surmounted by a depiction of the Virgin and Child, and an inset hemisphere showing the majority of the Americas, Europe, Africa and part of western Asia as if an aid for geographical orientation. This feature was introduced in portolan charts by Vesconte Maggiolo.

Oliva's Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean