The discovery of a rare Matteo Perez d’Aleccio copperplate of the Great Siege of Malta

Abstract

One of the copperplates of the prints which Matteo Perez d’Aleccio did of the Great Siege of Malta of 1565 has recently come to light, and is now in the author’s collection. It is Foglio Undecimo of the fifteen prints of the 1582 edition (Fig. 1). Although the plate came from Miami, it actually originated from Peru. The plate belonged to the estate of Eduardo Burbank, who had received it in 1955 as his high school graduation present from his maternal grandfather Eduardo Ferrand Salomone, who was an art and antiques connoisseur and collector. His love for art and objects of art came from his father Jean (Juan) Ferrand Quartino from whom he inherited the copperplate, bought around 1870 from an antiques shop in the old part of the city of Lima. After a thorough examination, mainly through the print which Eduardo Burbank had made from this plate in 2012,2 and which has also been acquired and is now in Malta, it was established beyond doubt that the plate is authentic. This makes this plate one of the earliest copperplates of a map of Malta known to have survived.