ABOUT THE WORK

The extremely rare Ramusio-Gastaldi map, which may be considered as the “birth certificate” of the Philippines, is the antique map t hat should remind us of our identity and enhance our self-esteem. In this “upside-down” map, the name “Filipina” appears for the very first time on a European document. This map, which does not yet show Luzon, gives the name “Filipina” to a narrow island to the east of Mindanao. As a matter of fact, the Spanish expedition leader Ruy Lopez de Villalobos bestowed the name “Felipina” on either Leyte or Samar in honor of the young Crown Prince Philip (later Philip II) in1543. Although Italy never sent expeditions to Southeast Asia, it pio neered in mapmaking in the 16th century. Acknowledged as one of the most excellent cartographers of the time, the Italian Giacomo Gastaldi, who li ved from ca. 1500 to ca. 1565, produced three fine maps of Southeast Asia: the first in 1548, the second in 1554, and the third in 1561. In question here is Gastaldi’s 1554 woodblock map “Terza Ostro Tavola” which first appeared in the second edition of Volume One of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Delle navigationi et viaggi racolte de Maximiliano Transilvano. For this reason, it is called the Ramusio-Gastaldi map. The map offered here is the copperplate version in the third edition of Volume One of Ramusio’s collection of voyages in 1563. The 1554 woodblock map was destroyed by fire in 1557. How did “Filipina” come to appear on this map, barely eleven years after the naming of the island by Villalobos? The 1554 Ramusio-Gastaldi map not only relied on Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage but also benefited from newly published sources at the time. Among these sources prominently figure the account of the voyage from Mexico to the Philippines by Juan Gaytan (Italianicized by Ramusio as Gaetano) and that of Ruy Lopez de V illalobos. In 1554, Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Giacomo Gastaldi literally put the Philippines on the map, by choosing its Italian version. Aptly, they named our Inang-Bayan “Filipina”.