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Click to enlarge36. Les Indes Orientales
A Venetian edition of the East Indies, re-engraved by Paolo Santini from the Robert de Vaugondy Atlas Universel. A late instance of the room's defining pattern: authoritative French geography copied and recirculated across Europe, here for the Italian market.
Authorship and object
Paolo Santini, working for the Remondini press in Venice, reissued the Atlas Universel of Gilles and Didier Robert de Vaugondy with all plates freshly engraved; this sheet is from the 1784 issue, with relief shown by hill-sketches.
A reissue by design
The map adds little new geography. Its interest is as a node in the European circulation of cartographic authority: the Robert de Vaugondys' mid-century French model — itself heir to the Sanson–d'Anville tradition — re-cut in Venice and sold on. The East Indies appear in the settled, post-d'Anville French manner.
The gaze
By the 1770s the French critical image of India had become common European property, copied from Paris to Venice. The map shows the subcontinent as Europe had collectively agreed to see it on the eve of the survey era — a stable, shared, inherited picture, about to be overturned by Rennell's measurements from within.