Copper engraving, hand-coloured at the edges, 500×560 mm. Depicts Piedmont, the Duchy of Milan and Liguria. Well preserved. Copper engraving, hand-coloured at the edges, 500×560 mm. Depicts Piedmont, the Duchy of Milan and Liguria. Well preserved. French cartographer and geographer, born in Paris in 1688, died in 1766; he compiled various atlases, including the *Atlas des révolutions du globe*, comprising 66 maps, which remained unpublished, and the *Atlas Universel*, comprising 108 maps, first published in 1758. He was the King’s court geographer, as was his son Didier, born in Paris in 1723 and died in 1784, who continued his father’s work, expanding and improving Gilles’s atlases. He also produced a work entitled Institutions géographiques, published in 1766, and a major Géographie ancienne, on which he worked from 1774 but which remained unpublished. Didier also contributed to the Encyclopédie and drew the maps for Buffon’s Histoire naturelle and for other widely circulated works. The Atlas Universel, the de V. family’s best-known work, in its most complete edition of 1786, consists of 117 maps, of which 13 are historical, 102 geographical, and one is a plan of Paris. This highly accurate work is preceded by an introduction on the origins and progress of geography (written by Didier), which also examines the most important