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 prominent. Places indicated in northern Europe are: Ireland, England, and Wales, with part of Scotland as a separate island; the whole of France, the Flanders, and part of Denmark. In western Asia, the map shows the northern, western, and southern coast of the Black Sea, Anatolia, and the entire eastern Mediterranean coast including a schematic representation of the Calvary surmounted by three crosses in the Holy Land. 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 Canaries, 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, the whole of South America, Ferdinand Magellan’s Strait and ‘Terra di Foggo’.

Illuminated manuscript portolan chart, pen and ink, and colour wash on vellum; heightened in silver and gold, coastlines drawn in brown ink extending west to east from the Azores to the Holy Land, and north to south from the British Isles to the north coast of Africa, from western Sahara to the Red Sea; islands in red, blue and green; rivers in blue; numerous coastal place-names in red and sepia in semi-italic lettering; twenty-five city views with flags; ten large and small compass roses, all with fleur-de-lys north points, heightened in gold; depiction of the Virgin and Child within a compass rose to the neck, above an inset map of the globe including the Americas supported by three wind-heads, two latitude lines, two large and elaborate scale cartouches; the whole chart divided by red, green, and sepia rhumb lines extending from the compass roses; two ornate foliate lateral red borders of entwined acanthus leaves.

A large, extensive, and richly decorated portolan chart of Europe, by the celebrated cartographer Placido Caloiro e Oliva (fl.1617–1657). Linking the medieval and modern traditions, Oliva adapts an honoured but largely ornamental tool, the Medieval portolan, to the realities of early modern navigation. In the seventeenth century, 

 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 and including an inset globe showing the Americas, surmounted by the Virgin and Child.

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. 

s 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 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, extensive, 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, surmounted by the Virgin and Child.

Oliva Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean