Mapping and Voyages

Home , Antoniotto Usodimare, Giacomo Gastaldi

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Francesca Fiorani

Mapping and voyages

Fundamentally human is the need to know the places that we inhabit and to dominate them through mapping. In the process of mastering the geography of our world, we define our place within it and our relations to others. If the need to represent the surrounding space is universal, how to map it, what to include and what to omit, is always a selective cultural process that involves choices, reductions, and distortions. Renaissance mapping is traditionally associated with the beginning of modern cartography, and its history has often been reduced to documenting the gradual conquest of mathematical accuracy in the representation of a world of expanding borders. Early European voyages beyond the Columns of Hercules (at Gibraltanuptiisr) and the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia [Geography], the foundational text for locating places precisely on a cartographic grid, date from the late fourteenth century. But Ptolemy’s mathematical geography, which has become the dominating concern of modern cartography, coexisted in the Renaissance with the verbose descriptions of places that other ancient authors had presented in their geographical texts and which have disappeared from modern maps. As cultural artifacts, maps participated in major cultural trends of the period, from humanism to the exploration of trading routes and the emergence of the printing press as well as in the planning of religious expeditions and the formation of overseas dominions. Their techniques and conventions of representation emerged in relation to the intentions of their makers and the expectations of their patrons and users. In this process of defining the practices of Renaissance mappings and the conventions Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:51 Page Number: 58

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of cartographic representations, humanists, courts, and cities of the 1 Italian peninsula played a significant role. In the Renaissance, mapping was not an independent discipline or a distinct profession but an integral component of geography, the study of the Earth’s globe. A laborious endeavor, mapping required the skills of such diverse disciplines and crafts as philology, surveying, computa- tion, mathematics, geometry, drawing, painting, engraving, printing, the making of instruments, and knowledge of Greek and Latin. Because only rarely did one single person master the full array of skills required to make maps, Renaissance mapping resulted from the close collaboration of humanists, artists, merchants, and printers, who were all obsessed with the measurement of the universe, the visualization of the Earth’s globe, the philological exegesis of ancient texts, and the trade of exotic goods. Based in Florence, Venice, Ferrara, Rome, Genoa, Naples, and Mantua as well as in Paris, Seville, Lisbon, Nuremberg, and later also in London, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, these heterogeneous groups of mapmakers operated within a European network of relations that often intersected with the network of the republic of letters, the courts of rulers, the councils of the church, the associations of merchants and bankers, and the mercenary armies of European powers. Each center and group was under a different rule, pursuing cartography with different gains in mind and often keeping news of travels and lands jealously from others, but nonetheless legal and illegal exchanges abounded in cartographic matters. Typical were the interactions that brought a Genoese sailor to lead an expedition sponsored by the Spanish king, a Florentine engraver to print maps in Venice, an Italian diplomat to smuggle nautical charts from Lisbon to Ferrara, a Venetian monk to make maps for the Portuguese king, or a Vicentine sailor to search for a north-west passage to China on behalf of the French king. Images destined for a restricted public in the Middle Ages, maps became one of the most favored forms to represent the world in the Renaissance. By the end of the sixteenth century millions of maps representing the whole world, continents, individual countries, regions,

1 For a cultural approach to Renaissance cartography see: Cosgrove (1999); Fiorani (2005); and the introduction to Woodward (2007); this latter volume includes important essays on various aspects of Renaissance cartography, including cosmography, nautical charts, star maps, cadastral maps, city views, maps and literature, printing, collecting, mapmaking techniques, and projections. Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:51 Page Number: 59

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2 and cities were produced in Europe. The emergence of the printing press contributed to this unprecedented diffusion of maps, which were sold as individual prints but also used as illustrations in bibles, history books, classics, and contemporary texts. Editions of such famous books as Pliny’s Natural History, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Petrarch’s Opere vol- gari, and Dante’s Divine Comedy contained maps, while Renaissance authors started to use the space of maps as an inspiration for their 3 literary compositions. Maps came to be used for a variety of purposes. Objects of learning and delectation, they were collected and displayed in audience halls, libraries, and studies. In Italy they were also painted in city residences, villas, and princely palaces. They were used as visual aids in estimating the daily reports on European wars and in establish- ing merchandising franchises. Some were visual aids to study the bible and the classics, to learn history, or to facilitate the contemplation of the divine through the study of nature. The burst of activity that characterized Renaissance cartography was due to a set of concomitant factors. It built on the long-standing 4 western tradition of representing the Earth visually and verbally. Although ancient maps were unknown until the late fifteenth century, medieval maps of the world, the Mediterranean and the Holy Land were well documented and continued to be made throughout the sixteenth century. Medieval mappaemundi [world maps] represented the three continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia schematically, placing Jerusalem at the center of the globe, and were mainly intended as memory-images to visualize and recall encyclopedic knowledge. Charts of the Mediterra- nean recorded coastlines, ports, and directions of navigation (rhumb lines); their origin is still hotly debated but it is plausibly due to the interactions of Islamic, Pisan, Genoese, and Venetian sailors and mapmakers in the thirteenth century. Maps of the Holy Land, the first area of the world to be represented individually in Western maps, served for biblical studies but also for planning pilgrimages, crusades, and commercial expeditions. Also popular were geographical descriptions of the world and its regions included in ancient texts, among which Pliny’s

2 It has been calculated that only a few thousand maps existed in the years 1400–72, but that their number jumped to about 56,000 from 1472 to 1500, while millions of maps were produced from 1500 to 1600; see Woodward (2007) 11. 3 On the relation between cartography and literature, see Conley (2007). 4 On medieval maps, see Campbell (1987); Harvey (1987); Woodward (1987); Scafi (2006); and Edson (2007). Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:52 Page Number: 60

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Natural History, Macrobius’ Commentarius in somnium Scipionis [Commentary on the Dream of Scipio], Solinus’ Collectanea rerum memorabilium [Collection of Remarkable Things], and Martianus Capellas’ De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii [On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury] held authoritative status, while the fourteenth-century travel report written by the Venetian Marco Polo about his journey to Cathay was favored reading of early humanists, nobles, clergy, and bankers across Europe. Equally important for the diffusion of maps in the Renaissance were the rediscovery of ancient geographical texts by Pomponius Mela, Ptolemy, and Strabo, and the journeys of European travelers beyond the Columns of Hercules and in central Africa. The recovery of these geographical texts coincided with defining moments in the early history of humanism, while the texts themselves rapidly generated a widespread interest that exemplifies the different motivations coexisting in Renais- sance mapping and the wide-ranging cultural relations from which it emerged. More importantly, these texts were systematically read against each other, in the effort to reconcile their contradictory information on the shape of the world, the size of continents, and the extension of oceans. They were also read in conjunction with modern travel reports from northern Europe, the Atlantic, and Africa, which related that these lands were not inhabited but situated beyond the world known by the ancients. Initially the recovery of ancient geographical knowledge and early travels were independent pursuits, carried out by different people for different purposes. Eventually they came to interact in such significant ways that by the late fifteenth century the study of ancient geography and the recording of modern voyages became part and parcel of Renaissance mapping. Indeed, the Renaissance notion of mapping as a mathematical and descriptive record of the entire world emerged from the practice of comparing ancient texts to modern voyages. The first-century CE author Pomponius Mela enjoyed a long- standing reputation in geographical matters, given Pliny’s praise of him in the Natural History. But no text by Mela was known until the 1330s, when Petrarch discovered his De chorographia [On Chorography, 5 or Descriptive Geography] in Avignon. Petrarch was fascinated with

5 Romer (1998). Mela did not include a map in his text, but it has been suggested that he had in mind the map of the known world that Agrippa had started and Augustus completed. Displayed in the Porticus Vipsania in Rome, this map was known as chorographia, a name possibly recalled by the title of Mela’s text. Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:52 Page Number: 61

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Fig. 3.1 Pomponius Mela, World Map, from P. Bertij tabvlarvm geographicarvm contractarvm libri septem (Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia). The Earth’s globe is surrounded by water and divided into five climatic zones, of which only one is inhabited. The two polar zones are too cold, the central zone is too torrid, and the southern temperate zone is unknown. The northern temperate zone corresponds to the known world and it is divided into three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Mela’s brief and engaging text and had copies made for fellow humanists, including Giovanni Boccaccio, facilitating the wide circulation of the manuscript for almost a century, until it was printed in Milan in 1471. Mela conceived the Earth’s globe as a sphere surrounded by water and divided into five climatic zones, of which only the orbis situm [northern temperate zone] was known and inhabited (Fig. 3.1), and he describes a journey across the orbis situm, which started and ended at the Columns of Hercules. Typical of ancient authors who regarded geography and ethnography as intertwined, Mela’s description includes reports on geographical features along with information on peoples, plants, animals, marvels, and legends. In addition, Mela imagines a circumnavigation of the entire globe through the outer waters surrounding the Earth. Starting at the Columns of Hercules, this sea journey proceeded along the Atlantic coast of Spain and Britain; Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:52 Page Number: 62

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it passed through northern Europe, northern Asia and China, reached the Indian Ocean and the Arabic Sea, circumnavigated Africa, and finally returned to Gibraltar. Mela’s fictive circumnavigation captivated the imagination of Renaissance readers fascinated by the possibility of reaching the East Indies, which Marco Polo had done by land, through an alternative sea route. Such a novel route would have given direct access to spices and exotic goods, eliminating the onerous taxes of traditional land routes. The reading of Mela’s text acquired a new dimension in the late fourteenth century, when a Greek copy of Ptolemy’s Geography was 6 brought by the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to Florence. Ptolemy’s text was not an easy read, however, requiring knowledge of geometry, mathematics, and astronomy, and mastery of the Greek language. Ptolemy imagined the Earth’s globe covered with a spatial grid of coordinates of parallels and meridians, which would be used to define the degrees of latitude and longitude (Fig. 3.2). He explains how to connect terrestrial locations to astronomical observations and shows how to make projections that maintain proportional distance between the roundness of the Earth and the flatness of the map. Ptolemy’s theoretical geography was difficult, but his discussion of the differences between geography and chorography was quite accessible and indeed resonated with Renaissance readers. Geography aimed at representing large areas of the Earth with its general features, while chorography recorded small places pictorially. Consequently, the geographer dealt with the quantitative values of positions and distances while the chorographer dealt with the qualitative details of individual places. The geographer made schematic drawings representing a coast with a line and a city with a point, while the chorographer, a skilled draftsman, portrayed the likeness of a place illusionistically. Ptolemy’s work is only geographical, and the bulk of his manual is a dry list of of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates for roughly 8,000 places of the known world. Although Ptolemy’s Geography had arrived without maps, its Renaissance editors eventually provided a general map of the world along with twenty-six regional maps (ten maps of Europe, four of Africa, and twelve of Asia).

6 Ptolemy (2000). On the diffusion of Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance, see Dalché (2007). On Renaissance interpretations of Ptolemy’s geographical theory, see Milanesi (1984); Cosgrove (1992); and Fiorani (2005) 93–108. Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:52 Page Number: 63 th degree of latitude and 50 s globe is covered with an imaginary grid of parallels and meridians. ’ (first half of fifteenth century, illuminated manuscript on vellum, Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo Laurenziana). World Map Ptolemy, 2 . 3 from the Atlantic coast of Europe and Africa to China. The Earth The known world is divided into three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia. It extends from the equator to the Fig.

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In spite of its difficulties, Ptolemy’s Geography enjoyed a rapid circulation in manuscript form, and from 1477 also in print. To make the text available to a larger readership Chrysoloras himself started a Latin translation which his pupil Jacopo d’Angelo da Scarperia completed before 1410. Many scholars cooperated in collating, emending, and interpreting the text, and in making the maps. Palla Strozzi, the richest Florentine of the early fifteenth century and a discerning patron of art and architecture, owned one of the oldest copies. The bibliophile and antiquarian Niccolo Niccoli produced lavishly illuminated manuscript copies for illustrious patrons, including Cosimo de’ Medici, Carlo Marsuppini, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a circle of patrons and friends who often met at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence to discuss geographical matters. Francesco Rosselli illuminated maps for Vespasiano da Bisticci to which his brother, the painter Cosimo, contributed cartoons for the heads of the winds. The study of Ptolemy’s Geography spread from Florence to the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, and Naples and the republic of Venice, while interests in Ptolemy arose also in Paris and Vienna. D’Angelo dedicated his translation first to Pope Gregory XII and then to Alexander V (this was the moment of the Great Schism, with rival claimants to the papal throne) and brought the text to Rome, which became a center of cartographic studies. The first edition of Ptolemy with maps was printed there in 1478. Ancient geographical knowledge was further enriched by Strabo’s Geographia [Geography], a text written in the first century CE that had been completely ignored by the major geographers of imperial Rome and Alexandria and was thus completely unknown in the early Renais- 7 sance. A Greek version of Strabo arrived in Florence in 1439 with the Byzantine philosopher George Gemistus Plethon who, while attending the Council of Florence, also delivered influential philosophical lectures on Plato and Aristotle that initiated the study of Platonic philosophy in Florence. Like Mela, Strabo’s encyclopedic description of the world combines geography and ethnography, but it also contains the welcome novelty of articulating the relation between geography and history. For Strabo, history studies human actions in time, while geography describes the same actions in space. Thus geography was considered a

7 Strabo (1917–1932). On Strabo’s geography, see Clarke (1999). Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:53 Page Number: 65

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philosophical enterprise with the political and ethical mission of edu- cating statesmen and commanders in the government of the world. The humanist Guarino Guarini, who translated Strabo’s text into Latin in 1458, shared this notion of geography and regarded the text as suitable reading for his aristocratic students, the future rulers of the Gonzaga, d’Este, and Montefeltro dynasties. Strabo might have consulted maps during the compilation of his work or imagined his readers as familiar with a map of the known world, yet he was not concerned with the visual description of the Earth’s globe, let alone with its measurement. The wide Renaissance success of these ancient geographical texts can be ascribed to different, albeit compatible, reasons. Humanists cher- ished the recovery of ancient texts and painstakingly tried to restitute them to their original form. Antiquarians enthusiastically embraced the reconstruction of the ancient world with an accuracy that was unimagin- able before. Ptolemy’s list of names and coordinates was invaluable to identify and locate cities, mountains, rivers, and lakes mentioned in ancient sources, while Mela’s and Strabo’s descriptions added specificity and details of peoples, flora, and fauna. Scholars of mathematics and geometry welcomed a geographical theory that assured the univocal correspondence of places on Earth and places on the map. Philosophers and theologians, but also merchants and bankers, compared Ptolemy, Mela, and Strabo, trying to reconcile the shape and measurement of the Earth’s globe that they proposed as well as their different ways of describing it. For Renaissance mapmakers, Ptolemy offered a system to fix the position of places mathematically and to measure distances, while Mela and Strabo provided vivid descriptions of geographical features, people, animals, natural resources, and marvels. Unwilling to discard “the mass of reports about the characteristics of people and 8 places” that Ptolemy wished to exclude from geography, Renaissance mapmakers chose instead to blend geography with chorography, combining Mela and Strabo’s literary tradition with Ptolemy’s mathematical geography. Their expanded notion of geographical description came to include not only the mathematical location of a place, as Ptolemy had suggested, but also whatever that place contained, as Mela and Strabo had done. It is this wider notion of geography that informed Renaissance mapping.

8 Ptolemy (2000) II.1, 95. Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:53 Page Number: 66

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Parallel to the elaboration of geography as a mathematical and verbal description of places were the early voyages by Europeans who ventured beyond the Columns of Hercules, along the west coast of Africa and into 9 the Atlantic Ocean. Portuguese sailors, who were the first Europeans to travel along the Atlantic coast of Africa, certainly did not plan their voyages with Mela’s descriptions in mind. They had no knowledge of Ptolemy’s mathematical geography and, as far as one can tell, did not carry maps on board. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, sailing beyond Gibraltar never involved losing sight of the coast for more than a couple of days. As with the Mediterranean, early Atlantic navigation was based exclusively on first-hand experience and indigen- ous knowledge of currents, winds, and coastal landmarks, which were recorded in written travel reports known as portolans. Using portolans, information gathered from local travelers, and motivated by the search for mercantile trading routes, Portuguese sailors reached the Madeira Islands in 1419, the Azores in 1427, the Canaries in 1434, and the Cape Verde Islands in 1460. They sailed along the coast of Guinea in 1434 and crossed the Tropic of Cancer the following year. In 1473 they crossed the equator, two years later they found the island of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea, and in 1488 they rounded the Cape of Good Hope, opening a sea route to the East Indies. Just as the Atlantic islands acquired a fixed position on the world map, the Atlantic Ocean shrank in size reaching an extension that was imaginable to sail across. As voyages became longer and moved farther into the ocean, sailors had to learn new ways to adjust directions of navigation, which were increasingly affected by the curvature of the Earth. With no coastal landmarks visible, sailors resorted to astronomical observations to record their position at sea and the locations of the places they visited. Ancient geographical knowledge became increasingly useful, and coupled with advanced knowledge of Atlantic navigation it might well have encouraged inclined patrons to underwrite longer expeditions. Mela’s shape of the world suggested that the Indian Ocean could be reached either by circumnavigating Africa or by sailing across the Atlantic, while Ptolemy’s geographical theory made it possible to estimate distances. The relations between ancient geography and modern voyages remains sketchy, but some occasions of direct contact are well

9 On Portuguese and Spanish travels and maps see Brotton (1997). On the use of nautical charts in the Renaissance, see Dalché (2007) 327–33; and Astengo (2007). Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:54 Page Number: 67

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documented. The humanist text Imago mundi [Image of the World] written by Pierre d’Ailly, bishop of Cambrai, around 1410, was a comparative reading of Mela and Ptolemy on the issue of the Earth’s inhabitability, shape, and measurement, and deals with a possible voyage to reach the southern temperate zone that Ptolemy did not map and that Mela considered deserted. Among d’Ailly’s Renaissance readers was Christopher Columbus, who filled his own manuscript copy – extant today in Seville – with comments and observations on the feasibility of such a voyage and on the size of the oceans. Sailors and merchants from the Italian peninsula were quick to seize the commercial opportunities offered by Portuguese ventures, and they wrote extensively about their voyages in letters and travel reports, 10 contributing to the growing genre of travel literature. Among the first Italians to board Portuguese ships were the Genoese, followed by Florentines and Venetians. Antonio Malfante went to Segelmessa in Africa in 1447, Antoniotto Usodimare was in Gambia and Guinea in 1455, and Antonio da Noli sailed to the Cape Verde Islands in 1460. The Florentine merchant Benedetto Dei visited north Africa, going as far as Timbuktu. The Venetian Alvise Cadamosto traveled to Senegal, sailed to the Madeira and Canaries Islands and led the first Portuguese expedition to the Cape Verde Islands in 1456. Cadamosto wrote a travel report, which was used by his fellow citizen, Grazioso Benincasa, to make maps in 1467 and which was printed in Milan in 1507–08. The Venetian Andrea Bianco, a sailor and mapmaker, worked extensively for the Portuguese and later collaborated with Fra Mauro (about whom see below). Independent from Portuguese voyages was the travel of the Franciscan friar Alberto da Sarteano who, in 1441, was sent by Pope Eugenius IV to convert Ethiopia to the Roman church. Upon his return, he reported that central Africa was populated, even if located outside Ptolemy’s known world, shattering traditional views of the Earth’s inhabitability and initiating the universalizing scope of cartography 11 for religious, political, and commercial purposes. Other Italians joined Spanish ships, most notably the Genoese Chris- topher Colombus, who had resided in Lisbon from 1476 but convinced the Spanish king to sponsor an unprecedented, westward expedition to

10 On Italian travelers, mapmakers, map printers, and writers of geography, see the essays by Woodward, Sereno, Quaini, Casti, Rombai, Valerio, and Cachey Jr. in Woodward (2007). 11 On globalism and Renaissance mapping, see Cosgrove (2003); and Headley (2008) 9–62. Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:54 Page Number: 68

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the East Indies. In 1492 his ship landed on one of the Bahamas that he named San Salvador; he was convinced he had arrived in the East 12 Indies. In 1500, the Florentine Amerigo led another expedition for the Spanish king. In his travel report of 1505, Mundus Novus [New World], he was the first to understand that Columbus had not reached 13 Asia, but rather a different land that was as extended as a continent. In 1519, Antonio Pigafetta from Vicenza, Leone Pancaldo from Savona, and Giovanni Battista da Poncevera from Genoa joined the first circumnavigation of the globe sponsored by the Spanish king and led by the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan. While Magellan never made it back to Spain – he died in Mactan – Pigafetta returned and wrote the voyage’s official account, the Viaggio attorno al mondo [First Voyage around the 14 World], a colorful account that became popular reading across Europe. In 1524, the Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano led a French expedition in search of a mythical north-west passage to China that would avoid circumnavigating South America. He thought he had found it and made his discovery public in a famous letter addressed to King Francis I, while his brother published a travel report and a map documenting the 15 passage. Soon it became clear that Verrazzano had mistaken the Outer Banks in North Carolina for the mythical north-west passage, but the “Sea of Verrazzano” continued to appear in maps for many years, including the popular charts and atlases made by Battista Agnese. Seizing on public enthusiasm for travel reports and maps, Italian authors and printers specialized in a new kind of publication: collections of miscellaneous texts and selected maps relating to modern voyages around the world. The unquestionable best-seller among travel collections was Gian Battista Ramusio’s three-volume Navigazioni et viaggi [Navigations and Voyages], published in Venice in 1550–59 and 16 illustrated with maps by the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi. Also conspicuously Italian was the creation of the isolario [island book], a new literary genre of texts about and maps of the world’s islands. Started by the Florentine monk Cristoforo Buondelmonti around 1420 and followed by Henricus Martellus Germanus, a German engraver who resided in Florence in the 1480s, and by the Venetian Bartolomeo delli Sonetti, a shipmaster who wrote his descriptions of

12 Cohen (1969); and Columbus (1989). 13 Vespucci (1992) and (2012). 14 Pigafetta (2007). 15 Verrazzano (1970). 16 Ramusio (1970); see also Milanesi (1984); and Headley (2008). Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:54 Page Number: 69

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islands in verses around 1485, the isolario culminated with the printed works by the Paduan illuminator Benedetto Bordone (1528) and the 17 Venetian letterato Tommaso Porcacchi (1572). Printers and editors engaged in fierce competition to publish the most updated maps and travel reports. Armed with this rich baggage of ancient geographical knowledge and news from recent voyages, Renais- sance editors, scholars, and mapmakers aimed at completing the work of ancient geographers: to map the world that ancient geographers did not know, and to describe the entire globe of the Earth both mathematically and pictorially. This process of integrating ancient geography with modern voyages was pervasive in Renaissance mapping, affecting many different kinds of manuscript and printed maps made both for the wider public and selected viewers. Maps that differed in terms of purpose, medium, context, and technique shared nonetheless a syncretistic approach to their visual and verbal cartographic sources. This kind of syncretism, rather than the search for cartographic accuracy, characterized Renaissance mapping, as it can be elucidated through the analy- sis of Italian printed editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, manuscript nautical charts, and printed world maps. Between 1477 and 1561, Ptolemy’s Geography was printed in twenty- five editions in Latin, Greek, and Italian, making it one of the most successful printed books of the Renaissance. These editions varied in format, from luxurious folio formats with hand-painted maps to pocket editions in the vernacular. The great success of this text was due to the fact that its Renaissance – and particularly Italian – editors regarded it not only as an ancient text to be restituted to its pristine form, but also as the repository of the mapping of the modern world. They interpreted the newly discovered lands as extensions of the Ptolemaic continents and made maps illustrating northern Europe, central and south Africa, south-east Asia, and the West Indies. When later sailors, scholars, and mapmakers realized that the West Indies were physically separated from Asia, they added a fourth continent to the traditional three, thus expanding the canonical number of Ptolemaic maps to represent the world that Ptolemy had not known. The process of integrating Ptolemaic and modern maps, which started in the 1420s when the French Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre

17 On island books, see Tolias (2007). Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:54 Page Number: 70

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added a map of northern Europe to his manuscript of the Geography, became routine for Renaissance manuscripts and editions prepared in Florence. In the 1460s, Nicolaus Germanus made copies for Borso d’Este and Pope Paul II that included modern maps of Spain, Italy, northern Europe, France, and the Holy Land, introducing also a trapezoid projection that was widely adopted later. In the 1470s, the Florentine painter and miniaturist Pietro del Massaio added six modern maps – Spain, Italy, Tuscany, the Peloponnesus, Crete, and Egypt – to the copies prepared in his workshop as well as nine city views of Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Constantinople, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Alexandria. Later city views developed as individual prints and as illustrations 18 in books of cities, another popular cartographic genre. Particularly significant in this process was Francesco Berlinghieri’s Septe giornate della geografia [Seven Days of Geography], published in Florence in 1482, which contained twenty-seven Ptolemaic maps and six modern maps of northern Europe, the British Isles, Spain, France, Italy, and Palestine. Using Ptolemy’s original text as a springboard for a personal, poetic description of the world written in Italian and composed in verse, Berlinghieri effectively synthesized the Renaissance notion of geography. Modeled after Mela and Strabo, his text was an engaging description of places and their ornaments – peoples, animals, plants, rocks, historical and mythological events – while his maps, made according to Ptolemy’s 19 grid, represented ancient and modern places mathematically. As time passed, modern maps increased steadily from edition to edition, eventually outnumbering the Ptolemaic maps, while at the same time Ptolemy’s text was complemented with modern commentaries conveying new information regarding projections, instruments, travels, and lands. Unlike northern editors of the sixteenth century, such as Willibald Pirckheimer, Desiderius Erasmus, and Gerhard Mercator, who regarded Ptolemy’s text as historical and thus deleted modern commentaries and maps from their editions, Italian scholars regarded their editions as a summa of modern geography. Giacomo Gastaldi and Girolamo Ruscelli, who published editions in Venice in 1548 and 1561, respectively, with over a hundred modern maps, produced not only the earliest translations into any vernacular language but also the earliest map books that intercalated Ptolemaic and modern maps. Unlike earlier

18 On city views, see Nuti (1994); and Ballon/Friedman (2007). 19 See Roberts (2013). Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:55 Page Number: 71

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editors who had published modern maps as a separate appendix at the end of the book, Gastaldi and Ruscelli placed them in correspondence with the pertinent Ptolemaic map, so that the modern map of northern Europe followed Ptolemy’s maps of the old continent, the map of the newly discovered Moluccas islands completed Ptolemy’s maps of Asia, and so forth (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). By intercalating the modern maps with the Ptolemaic maps these late-sixteenth-century editors integrated, graphically and conceptually, Ptolemy’s authority with modern cartography. They made explicit that the mapping of the modern world was accommodated within the study of ancient geography, indeed it was structured according to Ptolemy’s authority, just as the natural world was organized according to Pliny, and architecture was measured according to Vitruvius. Another way to integrate ancient and modern geography is exempli- fied by the magnificent world map that the Camaldolese monk Fra Mauro made in Venice in the mid fifteenth century (Fig. 3.5). Although Fra Mauro was well informed about ancient and modern geography and certainly knew Ptolemy’s text – it is quoted repeatedly here – he chose to disregard Ptolemy’s cartographic grid and instead modeled his map after medieval mappaemundi. He represented the three continents circled by the oceans and filled his map with inscriptions pertaining to trading routes, spices, luxury goods, wonders, botany, zoology, ethnography, and religious beliefs and practices. He surrounded the globe with cosmographical diagrams and boldly moved Paradise outside the Earth’s geographical perimeter. In addition to the wide range of ancient geographical literature available to him through the rich libraries of his monastic order, Fra Mauro had easy access to first-hand information from merchants and sailors who often visited him in the monastery of San Marco on the island of Murano; and his friend and collaborator, the mapmaker and traveler Andrea Bianco, brought him Portuguese charts from which he learned about the shape of the African coast, the Atlantic islands, and northern Europe. Arab maps provided the inverted orien- tation for Fra Mauro’s map, with south at the top, and they showed him that the Indian Ocean was an open sea filled with islands. With the help of the painter Francesco da Cherso, Fra Mauro combined these heterogeneous elements on a large parchment sheet about 6 feet square, and the resulting map visualized the new and the old worlds so effectively that the king of Portugal, owner of the most up-to-date maps, commissioned a copy for the considerable sum of 62 ducats. Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:55 Page Number: 72 (Tracy W. McGregor Library Geografia ), engraving, from Ptolemy, Tabula Europa I ( First Map of Europe 3 . 3 Fig. of American History, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia).

72 Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:55 Page Number: 73 ), engraving, from Ptolemy, Anglia et Hibernia Nova ( Modern Map of the British Isles (Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Giacomo Gastaldi, 4 . 3 Fig. Geografia Library, University of Virginia).

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Fig. 3.5 Fra Mauro, World Map (1459, illuminated manuscript on vellum, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice).

The most reliable information regarding voyages and mercantile trading routes was found in nautical charts made for the Portuguese and Spanish kings. Treated as secret documents and jealously kept from public view, these maps have not survived and are known only indir- ectly, through the illegal copies commissioned by other European rulers. One of the most accurate and spectacular of these was made in Lisbon for Alberto Cantino, the Ferrarese ambassador at the Portuguese court, who paid 12 gold ducats for it (Fig. 3.6). Cantino was well aware that this smuggled nautical chart would have been highly appreciated by Duke Ercole d’Este, whose ancestors had recognized the importance of geography and the prestige associated with map ownership since the early fifteenth century. In 1435–37, Borso d’Este had commissioned Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:55 Page Number: 75 , Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena). 1502 ( Cantino Map The 6 . 3 Fig.

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Guglielmo Capello to update the long didactic poem Dittamondo,a popular travelogue of an imaginary journey around Europe and Africa written in Dantean tercets by the Florentine Fazio degli Uberti, but left unfinished at its author’s death in 1367. Around 1450, Borso was able to acquire a precious Catalan world map (now in Modena) thanks to his familial and political connections with the Aragonese king of Naples; and following his father’s lead, Ercole d’Este had his children’s tutor, the humanist Guarino Guarini, translate Strabo into Latin. Based on secret Portuguese charts and travel reports, the Cantino Map was never intended for navigation but rather as a presentation map, and its cartographic features declare its princely destination. Rhumb lines coexist with the equator and the tropics, which are proper to medieval mappaemundi and Ptolemaic maps; coastlines and port names, typically recorded in sea charts, mingle with city views and landscape details in bright color, useless for sailors but extremely informative for armchair travelers. Notable are the trees and parrots along the coast of Brazil. They are represented in an odd, albeit effective, perspective that combines the plan-view of the general chart with the perspective-view of the trees as they would appear from a moving ship. Elaborate legends inform about the richness of West Africa: gold, slaves, pepper, and other highly valued items. An inscription situated near Sumatra asserts its identification with Taprobana, the mythical island described by Ptol- emy as rich in “gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls and very big and 20 fine rubies and all kind of spices and silks and brocades,” that Renais- sance mapmakers had difficulty in placing on their maps. Clearly marked is the line of Tordesillas that the Spanish Pope Alexander VI established to divide Portuguese and Spanish conquests overseas, while same nations’ flags mark their respective dominions of ports, lands, and trade routes throughout the world. Mathematically and choro- graphically, the Cantino Map charted new lands, overseas dominions, and exotic goods. Typical of the maps that reached the wider public is the small copper engraving made by the Florentine Francesco Rosselli in Venice in 1507, possibly in relation to a pocket edition of Ptolemy’s Geography which 21 was never realized (Fig. 3.7). Conceived as a Ptolemaic map based on

20 Brotton, (1997) 22–26. On the Cantino Map, see also Baldacci (1993) 53–57; and Caraci Luzzana (1996–99) 478–80. 21 Woodward (2001); and Boorsch (2004). Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:56 Page Number: 77 , hand-painted engraving). 1507 ( World Map Francesco Rosselli, 7 . 3 Fig.

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a cartographic grid, it recorded modern discoveries much more approximately than the Cantino Map, but its aim was to reach a large international public, as suggested by its Latin inscriptions. An illuminator, engraver, and the owner of a successful print shop in Florence, Francesco Rosselli created a new projection for his world map, that made it possible to represent the globe with minimal distortion. This globe is divided into two hemispheres, one representing Europe and Africa, the other Asia and America. The first hemisphere is represented at the center of the map, while the second is divided into two crescents, each of them attached to the sides of the first hemisphere. The resulting image is an unbroken panorama of the Earth from America to Asia, an unprecedented image of the globe offered to the human eye from a point of view that no one, not even God, could enjoy from the heavens. Like Fra Mauro’s world map and the Cantino Map, Rosselli’s panoramic view of the world was also based on heterogeneous sources: modern travel reports, ancient texts, and religious writings. A masterful synthesis from different sources is the label that Rosselli used to identify the West Indies, Terra Sancta Crucis sive Mondus Novus [The Holy Land of the Cross or the New World]. The traveler Pedro Alvares Cabral, who landed in Brazil in 1500, had named it Terra Crucis [Land of the Cross]; Cabral’s patron, King Manuel of Portugal, added the adjective Santa [Holy]; while the alternative name Mundus Novus [New World] referred to the title of Vespucci’s printed travel report of 1504 (or 1505), in which he had suggested that Brazil was on a different continent. Rosselli’s ambivalence about the status of the West Indies appears throughout his maps. Unable to decide whether the West Indies were in Asia, as Columbus believed, or on a different continent, as Vespucci suggested, he combined both options in his map: he accepted Vespucci’s name Mundus Novus, but he also labeled places in Asia with the names that Columbus had assigned to the new lands he “discovered,” which were on the new continent but which Columbus believed throughout his life were located in Asia. Finally, in this newly discovered land, Rosselli placed four large rivers, which perhaps represent schematically the large rivers of South America but which, in their symmetrical convergence, recall too closely the four rivers of Paradise. Indeed, having lost its place in the old world, Paradise seems to have been relocated in the newly discovered one. A culminating synthesis of Renaissance cartography is Giacomo Gastaldi’s Cosmographia universalis [Universal Cosmography], published in Venice in 1561, a magnificent nine-sheet woodcut representing the Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:57 Page Number: 79

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22 Earth’s globe (Fig. 3.8). The Piemontese Gastaldi worked as a civic engineer for the Venetian republic and acquired a solid reputation for both the maps of his 1548 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography and Ramusio’s collections of geographical writings. For his world map he adopted Rosselli’s oval projection, complementing it with other images. At the top, portraits of Strabo and Ptolemy stand symbolically for descriptive and mathematical geography, the two branches of ancient geography that were reunited in Renaissance maps, while personifications of cosmography and astronomy hold their respective instruments, an armil- lary sphere and a globe. Terrestrial globes and celestial charts adorn the corners, relating geography to cosmography. Gastaldi ordered this cosmographical representation of the world around the city of Venice, represented with an allegorical personification and the lion of St. Mark, the symbol of the city’s patron saint. Compiled from a multitude of published and unpublished sources Gastaldi had obtained from his friend Ramusio, this map made available to a large public coasts and islands mapped by Portuguese and Spanish sailors, relating them to ancient geographical knowledge. Similarly to Fra Mauro, Gastaldi filled his world map with a plethora of qualitative details. Philip II’s imperial ship crosses the Atlantic, marking Spanish ownership of Atlantic trade routes, while the Strait of Anian, a fictional sea passage between Asia and Africa, is prominently displayed for the first time (it will reappear in many later maps). Legends, cartouches, and inscriptions inform the viewer about the main geographic features of the mapped territory, the coordinates of its major cities, the main rivers and lakes, the mountain chains and the flat lands as well as the ethnography and history of their diverse peoples, their habits and beliefs, and the look of their dwellings and their costumes. These descriptive elements are represented on a larger scale than the mapped territory itself and are represented in perspective rather than in orthographic view. Gastaldi’s map was ostensibly different from Ptolemy’s maps, but the difference involved not so much the cartographic accuracy of the mapped places or the extent of the known world (this would hardly be surprising), but rather its very content, which was both mathematical and descriptive.

22 On G. Gastaldi’s Cosmographia universalis (Venice, 1561), see Shirley (1983) 122–23; and Karrow (1993) 240–41. Gastaldi’s world map is known only through a seventeenth- century reprint, now at the British Library in London, though it was accompanied by a booklet that survives in numerous copies. Comp. by: KNarayanan Stage: Proof Chapter No.: 3 Title Name: WYATT Date:31/1/14 Time:20:47:57 Page Number: 80 1561 (seventeenth-century reprint of the original map published in the World Map ). Giacomo Gastaldi, 8 . 3 Cosmographia universalis Fig.

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The maps we have examined embodied the comprehensive Renais- sance notion of geography. They effectively combined in one single image different systems of representation: the orthographic grid; the bird’s-eye prospect; and the perspective view. While maintaining the Ptolemaic grid of coordinates, they also included additional qualitative descriptions of places in the form of lengthy legends, lively vignettes, and proliferating inscriptions, which were not mere embellishments of the cartographic content but rather an integral part of the map. These maps reflected Renaissance knowledge of geography and place-names (toponymy), but they also illustrated the history of a territory and its inhabitants, integrating geographical descriptions with historical, mythological, botanical, and zoological details. Ptolemy’s Taprobana had to find a place on modern maps, and – conversely – newly found lands had to be located in relation to Ptolemy’s coordinates. To please the expectations of their audience of kings, merchants, and humanists, Renaissance mapmakers made their maps according to Ptolemy’s grid and then filled them with descriptions of marvelous details ransacked from Strabo, Mela, Pliny, and the Bible. As contradictory as it may seem to us, Renaissance cartographers were convinced that the shape of the modern world could emerge only by combining modern measurements with classical texts, mathematical geography with humanistic philology. As skilled mathematicians but also as experts on ancient cultures, dealers in antiquities, philologists, or, at the very least, friends of accomplished scholars, the cartographers compiled comparative lists of ancient and modern place-names, made historical maps and discussed ancient geography in the legends of their maps. Systematically intermingling Renaissance geography with traditional and mythical toponymy, features, and legends, Renaissance mapmakers constructed a complex image of a place. The cultural value of their maps resided precisely in such a syncretistic approach to different sources in terms of accuracy, chronology, and origin. For Renaissance mapmakers and their public, a map came to be an encyclopedic description of the world projected onto an accurate geographical framework.