36. Les Indes Orientales

The object and its issue

The plate is dated 1779 and credits Santini and ‘Robert’, referring to the Robert de Vaugondy cartographic lineage. It was incorporated into the Remondini atlas tradition at Venice, including later issues. Plate date and atlas issue date should therefore be distinguished.

Re-engraving as publication

Santini did not merely reproduce a sheet photographically; the French model was recut for an Italian publishing market. Cartographic authority circulated through copying, translation, new engraving and altered commercial presentation.

A settled atlas image

The East Indies appear within the mature mid-eighteenth-century French geographical tradition. Its forms are clear and authoritative, but much of the content remains inherited and compiled. The sheet stands close to the chronological threshold at which Rennell and later surveyors would claim a different basis of authority: measurement from within.

The gaze

By the late eighteenth century, Europe possesses not one national image of India but a shared cartographic repertoire traded between Paris, Venice, Amsterdam and London. The stability of that image is precisely what the survey era will unsettle.