Giovanni Maria Cassini, Six Antique Engravings From The "nuovo Atlante Geografico Universale"

Giovanni Maria Cassini
1745 – 1824

Six antique engravings from the "Nuovo Atlante Geografico Universale delineato sulle ultime osservazioni", published in Rome from 1792 to 1801:
– World Map
– Spherical Table
– Europe
– Africa
– America
– Asia

48×34.5 cm each, within green lacquered wooden frames.

A Somascan Regular Cleric, disciple of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, he was a geographer, cartographer and engraver active in Rome in the decades straddling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

He is credited with the invention of a new projection method, called precisely the Cassini projection, also used for the creation of the geographical atlas of the Kingdom of Naples in 32 sheets signed by Giovanni Antonio Rizzi Zannoni.

Among his major works, besides a general map of Italy in 15 sheets published in 1793, we find the New Universal Geographical Atlas in three volumes published in Rome, respectively in 1792, 1797, and the last volume in 1801.

The plates of the first volume are preceded by a brief introductory essay on the study of geography and which also proposes the purpose of outlining the method followed for the creation of the atlas itself. The work was commissioned by the Calcografia Camerale of Rome in order to replace the now outdated Mercurio Geografico. Cassini signs all the maps as engraver. Volume I contains two planispheres, eight separate plates representing, in whose corners are probably collected the plates engraved shortly before by G. Zuliani in Venice on behalf of Antonio Zatta, in the northern one the facades of buildings of four of the major Italian observatories; the Specola of the Roman College, the Specola of Bologna, the Specola of Milan and the Specola of Padua; in the southern one the observatories of Paris, Cassel, Greenwich and Copenhagen.

It is precisely from these volumes that the plates here proposed are extracted, each preserved within a beautiful painted and green lacquered wooden frame.

The state of conservation is good / very good, with some small gaps (highlighted by the attached photographs).