Americae Retectio

Johannes Stradanus, also known as Jan van der Straet, was a Flemish artist active for much of his career in Florence. His designs were widely circulated through Antwerp print publishing, especially through the Galle family. Americae Retectio, or “The Discovery of America, ” was designed by Stradanus in the late 1580s, engraved by Adriaen Collaert, and published in Antwerp by Philip Galle in 1589.

The series consists of a title page and three engraved plates devoted to Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan. It presents the European “discovery” of the Americas as a sequence of heroic maritime achievements, framed through allegory, classical mythology, and oceanic wonder. Ships, sea gods, nymphs, marine creatures, and personifications turn navigation into a dramatic visual history of encounter, revelation, and possession.

The title page presents the newly revealed Americas through a globe and allegorical figures, while the three following plates arrange Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan as central agents in the history of discovery. Columbus is shown as the first voyager to reach the New World for Europe; Vespucci is associated with the naming and recognition of America; and Magellan represents the opening of a global route through the strait that bears his name and into the Pacific. The sequence therefore links the Americas to both Atlantic discovery and circumnavigation.

This set should be read closely with Nova Reperta (209), with which it is bound in the collection. Alice Bonner McGinty identifies the discovery of America as the main organising theme of Nova Reperta, and Americae Retectio develops that theme more directly through the named navigators Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan. Together, the two series show how late sixteenth-century print culture presented discovery not only as geographical expansion, but as a wider transformation of knowledge, navigation, technology, and European self-understanding.