Woodcut, mm 250x340 (sheet mm 310x395), hand-painted. Taken from the rare Italian edition of Geographia Universalis, published in 1558. This is one of the earliest maps of the European continent. The unusual orientation, with north at the bottom of the plate and the Mediterranean Sea at the top, adds to the map's charm. Mole-pile mountain ranges, forests, a naive and simple hydrography fill the territory with major cities, the only major decorative element being a large sailing ship in the Atlantic Ocean.Sebastian Münster was the first to make individual maps of each continent. The map was published in both Geographia and Cosmographia Münster. Münster was a brilliant polymath and one of the most important intellectuals of the Renaissance era. Educated in Tübingen, his surviving university notebooks, the Kollegienbuch, reveal a mind of insatiable curiosity, especially about cosmography. Later Münster became professor of Hebrew at Heidelberg and then, from 1529, at the University of Basel. In the 1530s he devoted himself to translating Ptolemy's Geography, adding new material relating to newly discovered lands in Africa, the Americas and Asia. The result was the publication of his highly regarded Geographia Universalis, first printed in 1540. He was also an innovator in the design and layout of maps, and was one of the first to create a space on his wooden blocks for the insertion of place names in metal lettering. Shirley, The mapping of the world, 92. Good copy with minimal imperceptible defects at lower and upper margins.