Giacomo Gastaldi

Giacomo Gastaldi (c. 1500 in Villafranca Piemonte – October 1566 in Venice) was an Italian cartographer, astronomer and engineer of the 16th century.

[1] Gastaldi (sometimes referred to as Jacopo[2] or Iacobo[3]) began his career as an engineer, serving the Venetian Republic in that capacity until the fourth decade of the sixteenth century.

[4] According to the author Philip Burden, Gastaldi's 1548 edition of Ptolemy's Geography, "was the most comprehensive atlas produced between Martin Waldseemüller's Geographia of 1513, and the Abraham Ortelius Theatrum of 1570," because it included regional maps of the Americas.

The Ptolemy edition of 1548 was also an innovation in that Gastaldi and his publisher reduced the size of the volume, thereby making the first 'pocket' atlas.

[7] But he also occasionally accepted private commissions, for example, that from Venice's Council of Ten, who invited him to fresco maps of Asia and Africa on the walls of a room in the Doge's Palace.