The Lafreri School

From the 1540s to around 1600 there existed in the centres of Rome and Venice a group of cartographers, engravers and publishers who were resposible for a highly productive period in Italian mapmaking. It was not the intention of the various practitioners to create coherent atlases in the way that we now understand them but rather to produce loose sheet maps of those regions which were their particular interest. Indeed, what differentiates the output of Rome from that of Venice is that the Roman maps tended to be more focussed on maps of Italy, its regions and towns whereas the maps produced in Venice had a much broader geographical range.
A consequence of this approach was that there was no standardisation with regard to size so that when publishers inevitably began to bind together the various maps available to them, some maps had to be folded while other smaller maps had to be enlarged by means of having margins added to them so that they could all be accommodated in a volume of a uniform size. One publisher, by the name of Antonio Lafreri(1512-1577) went so far as to produce a title-page for one such map compilation. As a result, despite Lafreri being a relatively minor publisher, these bound collections of maps became known as 'Lafreri Atlases' and the disparate group of mapmakers themselves fell under the term the 'Lafreri School'.
The leading cartographer of this group was Giacomo Gastaldi(c.1500-1566)who eventually became Cosmographer to the Venetian Republic and whose work was the ground for many of the maps in these compilations.
Other cartographers and engravers of this period were Paolo Forlani who worked in Venice between 1560 and c.1571.
George Lily, an English Catholic living in exile in Rome. His most famous map being of the British Isles from 1546.
Pirro Ligorio(fl.1552-1563)an architect and cartographer who produced many maps, plans and views principally relating to Rome.