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The Royal Library of Belgium acquires rare first state of Camocio’s copy of Mercator’s Map of Flanders
At the October 2020 auction organised by Reiss & Sohn in Königstein im Taunus, Germany, the Royal Library of Belgium acquired a rare state of an Italian copy of Mercator’s map of the county of Flanders. The cartouche in the lower right corner bears the Latin title Exactissima Flandriae descriptio, a short description of the county by Nicolaas Stopius followed by the impressum Venetiis MDLVIII (1558). It is attributed to the Venetian bookseller and publisher Giovanni Francesco Camocio on the basis of a more common later state of the map that does mention Camocio’s name (1559). A coloured copy of the map is kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and can be viewed in Gallica.
