Fernão Vaz Dourado ( in
Goa – in
Portuguese India
The State of India, also known as the Portuguese State of India or Portuguese India, was a state of the Portuguese Empire founded seven years after the discovery of the sea route to the Indian subcontinent by Vasco da Gama, a subject of the ...
) was a
Portuguese cartographer
Cartography (; from , 'papyrus, sheet of paper, map'; and , 'write') is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an imagined reality) can ...
. He belonged to the third period of the old Portuguese nautical cartography, which is characterised by the abandonment of
Ptolemaic influence in the representation of
the Orient and better accuracy in the depiction of lands and continents. Little is known about this historical figure.
Works
His known works are of an extraordinary quality and beauty. He is considered one of the best cartographers of the time. Most of his charts are of relatively large scale and are included in nautical atlases. The following six atlases survive:
* 1568 - 20 manuscript sheets on parchment, dedicated to D. Luís de Ataíde (Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid)
* 1570 - 20 manuscript sheets on parchment (Huntington Library, San Marino, USA)
* 1571 - 20 manuscript sheets on parchment, from which 2 (the frontispiece and the Eastern Mediterranean) were stolen in 1851 (
Torre do Tombo, Lisbon).
* c. 1576 - 20 manuscript sheets on parchment (
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon)
* 1575 - 21 manuscript sheets on parchment (British Library, London)
* 1580 - 20 manuscript sheets on parchment (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon)
The plates of all the atlases are reproduced, mainly in monochrome in ''Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica''. The 1571 atlas was reproduced in colour, with a reconstructed frontispiece, and, inexplicably, with the Eastern Mediterranean plate from the 1576 atlas included without any explanation, in ''Atlas de Fernao Vaz Dourado : reprodcao fidelissima do exemplar do Torre do Tombo, datado de Goa, 1571''", Porto: Livraria Civilizacao, 1948. The 1571 atlas was again reproduced in colour, in a boxed set of 18 loose sheets, as ''Universal Atlas of Fernão Vaz Dourado'', Barcelona:
M. Moleiro Editor, S.A., 2012.
The 1568 atlas contains the first large-scale charts of Ceylon (
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, also known historically as Ceylon, is an island country in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean, southwest of the Bay of Bengal, separated from the Indian subcontinent, ...
) and
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
, later copied by many other cartographers.
His chart of the northwestern coast of
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...
is executed using the so-called "plain chart model", where observed
latitudes and
magnetic
Magnetism is the class of physical attributes that occur through a magnetic field, which allows objects to attract or repel each other. Because both electric currents and magnetic moments of elementary particles give rise to a magnetic field, m ...
directions were plotted directly into the plane, with a constant scale, as if the Earth were flat. Until the adoption of the
Mercator projection charting method, this was Europe's most advanced charting method.
References
* Fialho, João Ramalho (2007) – ''Navegações Portuguesas: Fernão Vaz Dourado''.
* Cortesão A. and Mota, Teixeira da (1987)– ''Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica''. Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, Lisboa (in Portuguese and English).
Gallery
Image:Fernão Vaz Dourado 1570-1.jpg, Atlas of 1570 (Huntington Library, San Marino, USA)
Image:Fernão Vaz Dourado 1575-1.jpg, Atlas of 1575 (British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...
, London)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dourado, Fernao Vaz
1520s births
1580s deaths
16th-century Portuguese cartographers