[Map of Paraguay, South America] Paraquariae, Provinciæ, Soc. Iesu

Antique map of Paraguay which also covers the present-day territories of Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. It indicates the location of the missions of the Society of Jesus that were established on the continent between 1609 and 1767. A particularly interesting aspect of this original map is that it is based on cartographic information gathered by the Jesuit missionaries, who controlled the area and had the most advanced and up-to-date geographical knowledge of their time, until their expulsion in 1767. Detailed, it contains abundant toponymy, and even some of the names are in the original languages. It includes hydrographic network, orography in profile, territorial division, roads, cities, and of course, the location of the missions. The course of the Río de la Plata stands out, from its origin in Lake Xareyes to its mouth in the Atlantic. It identifies cities such as Buenos Aires, Cuzco, Montevideo, Copiapó, Mendoza, Santiago and the Potosí hill, among others. It includes a compass rose and presents hand-applied colours. It was engraved by the German Matthew Seutter (1678-1757), official cartographer of the Holy Roman Emperor and one of the most notable of his time. He was an apprentice of the famous Johann Baptist Homann towards the end of the 17th century in Nuremberg. He then settled in Augsburg to establish his own publishing firm where he published his Atlas Geographicus (1725) and the Grosser Atlas (1735). Seutter’s son, Albrecht (1722-1762), joined him in the publishing business, who on his father’s death continued with the family enterprise in partnership with Tobias Lotter (1717-1777), thus beginning the Seutter-Lotter dynasty that would produce important cartographic works until the 1790s.