Tabula Nova Indiae
1525
Woodcut on paper
Print size: 13.25 x 17.5 in (33.5 x 44.5 cm)
Sheet size: 15.25 x 21.25 in (39 x 54 cm)
Folded: 15.25 x 10.75 in (39 x 27.5 cm)
India Redefined—Fries’s First Edition of Waldseemüller’s Landmark Map of the Subcontinent (1525)—one of the earliest obtainable printed depictions of the subcontinent, capturing Europe’s first cartographic attempts to define ‘India’ as both a geographical and cultural world
This exceptionally scarce woodcut map of India and Southeast Asia derives from the 1535 Lyon edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, and belongs to the earliest generation of printed cartography shaped directly by Portuguese maritime exploration of the Indian Ocean. First issued in Lorenz Fries’s Strasbourg Geographia of 1522—among the earliest appearances of Waldseemüller’s groundbreaking 1513 modern map of Asia (the first map to show the East Indies and India in a peninsular format)—the plate was reissued in 1525 before passing into two later editions published at Lyon (1535) and Vienne (1541). The present example is of particular importance: the 1535 Lyon issue was edited by Michael Servetus, whose prosecution for heresy in 1553 led to the destruction of copies of the book, rendering surviving maps from this edition extremely rare.
Waldseemüller’s geography represents a decisive break from classical tradition, offering one of the first printed visions to depict India and the East Indies as peninsulas, informed by newly circulating intelligence from Portuguese voyages beyond the Cape. The subcontinent appears in the striking angular form characteristic of early sixteenth-century coastal knowledge, with the western littoral strongly emphasised and Sri Lanka and the Maldives clearly marked offshore. The map further reflects the abandonment of Ptolemy’s closed Indian Ocean, presenting instead an open maritime world newly accessible to European navigation.
The woodcut is enriched with vivid ethnographic imagery and inscriptions. Most prominent is the enthroned ruler of “Narasinga”, a European rendering of the Vijayanagara empire encountered by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century, alongside a dramatic scene referencing the practice of sati. As Susan Gole notes, such imagery constitutes a Western moral commentary layered onto one of the earliest focused maps of the modern Indian peninsula. Additional annotations record pepper cultivation and fantastical accounts of pygmies, revealing the mixture of empirical observation and medieval cosmography that still marked Renaissance geography.
Beyond India, the map extends eastward to Malacca—captured by the Portuguese in 1511—and into the Malay world, where Arabic and Islamic navigational traditions appear to underpin portions of the nomenclature, as discussed by Suarez. As a rare surviving example from the Servetus Lyon edition, this map occupies a central place in the cartographic history of South Asia and remains a cornerstone acquisition for collectors of the earliest printed representations of the Indian Ocean world.
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