A Worldview In The Sixteenth Century

By acquiring a 430-year-old atlas, American collector David Rumsey has been able to reconstruct the world's largest map designed in the sixteenth century. A rare and unknown work that tells us about the state of knowledge during the Renaissance and about its author, the Italian Urbano Monte.

Founded in 1587, this card long by 2.75 meters wide, is probably the world's largest map ever in the XVI th century. Yet, for 430 years, no one had ever seen it in this form ...

This cartographic project is the realization of Urbano Monte (1544-1613), a Milanese scholar who tried to present in a single atlas the state of the geographical knowledge of his time. This book - which exists in three copies - consists of 60 sheets to be assembled to form a monumental card, which no one has realized so far.

Last September, the great American collector David Rumsey was able to acquire the second copy of this atlas and had each sheet scanned. Thanks to a computer work, the complete map could be reconstructed, and his facsimile has just been presented at Stanford University.

Azimuthal projection

This card is amazing in many ways. Its circular representation, for example, is very unusual for the time. This is a polar azimuthal projection that has been popularized at the XXth century and which is found in particular on the emblem of the United Nations, a desired shape by the cartographer to facilitate its consultation on a rotary table.

Another sign of modernity, Urbano Monte has integrated - based on the work of major cartographers - all newly discovered lands. It will be noted how much of the continents are correctly represented. Nevertheless, we can distinguish all the approximations of the time. The North Pole is thus represented in the form of four islands, according to a description presumably inspired by Genesis.

Urbano Monte also sprinkled his card with a fantastic bestiary: unicorns, centaurs, sirens, and even a bird flying with an elephant between the greenhouses ...

Urbano Monte, a poor draftsman, was clearly inspired by other cartographers - notably Michele Tramezzino - to sketch these monsters. The copy is rarely up to the original ...