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WD_091/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings | | Medium: | oil pastel and wax crayon on paper | | Size (inches): | 25 x 19.9 | | Size (mm): | 640 x 510 | | Catalog #: | WD_091 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
-Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)/ www.quotationspage.com/
First map of America makes $1m: Wednesday, June 8, 2005
LONDON, England (CNN) -- A 500-year-old map which was the first to use the word "America" and the first to portray the Earth as a globe has been sold in London for $1,002,267 -- a world record.
The amount paid for the 1507 Martin Waldseemuller map, also the first to distinguish north and south America and the first to depict the Pacific Ocean, was the highest ever for a single sheet map, auction house Christie's said.
The hammer price was £480,000 pounds ($880,000), just below the lower estimate of £500,000 set by Christie's. The full price included the auctioneer's premium.
The map was bought by Charles Frodsham and Co. Ltd., a company that makes, collects and deals in clocks, watches, chronometers and associated items, including maps and books.
"We are absolutely delighted to have bought the map," Richard Stenning, a director of Charles Frodsham, told The Associated Press. Asked why the company bought the map, he replied: "I can't disclose why we bought the item or who for. It may be in the fullness of time that I can say something."
One of four known examples, the map was discovered by a European man who one morning in February 2003, was drinking a cup of coffee when he read a newspaper article about the Waldseemuller map -- and realized he had "something similar" in his own collection with the same distinctive, jagged outline.
A much bigger version of the map produced in 1515 and often referred to as "America's birth certificate" was bought by the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington DC for $10 million in 2003.
The map dates from the "Great Age of European Exploration and Discovery" from 1492 to 1522 when the leading explorers from Spain, Italy and Portugal sailed the Atlantic and returned with stories and information about the New World.
Although Christopher Columbus is credited with discovering America in 1492, he was convinced that the land mass was Asia.
Another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, argued that the new land to the West was a new continent altogether -- and until the Waldseemuller map was published, the conception of the world was based on the knowledge of the ancient Greeks.
In 1505, Rene II, the Duke of Lorraine, gathered a group of scholars to the Monastery of Saint Die des Vosges, near Strasbourg, to work on a new map of the world.
The scholars, led by Martin Waldseemuller, were provided with a French translation of Vespucci's voyages that Rene II had received from Lisbon earlier in that year.
This account gave them enough material to start to plot a new map to include the New World to the West.
In 1507, the scholars published a work titled "Cosmographiae Introductio," which argued the existence of a new land mass to the west. They called this land mass America, after Amerigo Vespucci.
Within a month of publishing the book, they produced the first map of the world to include the Americas.
"This is one of the most exciting discoveries of my career, and represents the pinnacle in the history of map making," said Tom Lamb, Director of Christie's Book and Manuscript Department, London.
"This simple sheet of paper holds so many new and anticipated discoveries, all created with an enormous leap of faith by a venerable geographer in a small town in Lorraine."
One of the other three copies of the Waldseemuller map -- the first to be discovered, in 1871 -- is at the University of Minnesota. A second was discovered inside a Ptolomy atlas and is at the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
In 1992, a third copy was discovered bound into an edition of Aristotle in the Bibliothek Stadtbucherei Offenburg, a public library in Germany.
-www.cnn.com/ Copyright 2005 CNN.
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