Description:

Jean Baptiste Nolin I.
Ca. 1657 – 1725
Jean Baptiste Nolin II.
1686 – 1762
„L’Afrique Dressée Sur les Relationes les Plus Recentes et rectifiées sur les dernieres observations“
1740
Copperplate wall map with original outline color, consisting of four continuous sheets surrounded by text and cartouches depicting landscapes
125 x 139 cm, with frame 140 x 152 cm

A rare and monumental wall map of Africa by a great French master cartographer.

Jean-Baptiste Nolin was one of the most successful and certainly the most ambitious French cartographer of his time. He founded a family empire in Paris in the 1680s. In an extraordinary way, he managed to combine top-class decorative ornamentation with the serious goal of creating maps that reflected the most advanced rendering of geographical details. The artistic verve of his compositions testifies to a style that preserves the rhetorical ambitions of the Baroque while anticipating the playful elegance of the Rococo. His masterpieces, many of which, like the present wall map, were monumental in scale, were an expression of Nolin's desire to overwhelm his competitors in a very demanding market. Nolin, who was highly controversial, occasionally referred to himself as "the king's engraver," an appointment of which, curiously, the royal court never learned. In his quest to provide his maps with the latest geographical details, he rarely hesitated to seek information from his eminent contemporaries, especially Guillaume De L'Isle and Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, Jean-Dominique Cassini, and the Sieur de Tillemon. These competitors were sometimes unhappy about Nolin appropriating their intellectual property, as De L'Isle successfully sued Nolin for plagiarism in 1705. However, the larger-than-life Nolin always seemed to overcome these challenges and left behind a thriving business that was continued by his son. The present map was produced by Jean-Baptiste Nolin II in 1740, drawing largely on earlier maps produced by his father. Geographically, the map is relatively advanced, but has some rather odd speculations. The coastlines are well defined, having been explored for more than two hundred and fifty years, but the heart of Africa remains a mystery. In the absence of direct observations, the European imagination has been given free rein. Thus, Nolin adopts the ideas propagated by De L'Isle and Coronelli in the 17th century that the Nile is somehow connected to the Niger, even though the two rivers flow in different directions and empty thousands of miles apart. Moreover, written descriptions of the continent's inhabitants are full of archaic legends about bizarre and monstrous races. The presented map is an artistically virtuoso composition of monumental scale, with the image surrounded by thirty vignettes depicting events from African history. The focus of the vignettes is on the better known regions of North Africa, but much attention is also given to French trading activities in Guinea. Each vignette is embedded in an elaborate baroque frame and is accompanied by a textual description. The detailed description at the bottom is titled "Description Geographique de L'Afrique". The large title cartouche is framed by period rocailles and includes an optimistic scene depicting friendly trade between Africans and Europeans, as well as a dedication to Louis XV. It is not only a masterful work of art and a fascinating image that explores the frontiers of European geographical knowledge, but also a vivid testament to a dramatic transitional period in the history of cartography and society in general.

Literature:
Tooley, Maps of Africa, S. 86, Tafel 67.

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