Portolan chart fragment in the Roselli style

[Africa - Portolan]. Chart fragment of Northwest Africa from the circle of Petrus Roselli.

€ 18.000,00

Rare survival of a working section from a fifteenth century portolan chart, preserving the Atlantic littoral of northwest Africa with an unusually deep inland reach. Inland place names are written in Latin script and Latinized forms including Tafilet, Aurata, Lauda, and Litibia, reflecting the transmission of Arabic geographical knowledge into Mediterranean cartographic practice. The interior is animated in the Catalan Majorcan tradition by a surviving section of the green Atlas mountain chain, elephants bearing castle superstructures, and a camel rider in green. A crowned ruler sits beneath a tent, turbaned beneath the crown and holding a mace or staff, serving as conventional political signposting.

Particularly significant are two inland head roundels, preserved with notable clarity. Their form, scale, and placement correspond closely to a recurring motif associated with Petrus Roselli and the circle of his workshop, where such roundels function as visual anchors within the inland decorative program. The handling of the facial features and framing aligns with known Roselli examples from the 1460s, reinforcing an attribution to his immediate milieu rather than to a generic Majorcan hand.

The chart also preserves the standard portolan convention of the Red Sea rendered in red pigment, a visual shorthand inherited from medieval Arabic and classical sources and consistently maintained in Majorcan production. Its presence underscores the conceptual unity of the known world within portolan cartography, where distant regions were integrated through established chromatic and symbolic codes rather than strict geographic continuity.

The fragment exemplifies the characteristic balance of the portolan genre, combining precise navigational coastline with emblematic inland imagery, appealing simultaneously to sailors, merchants, and elite patrons, and preserving workshop specific visual language associated with Petrus Roselli.