Japan (on the left edge, called the Isola de Cimpagu) appears here for the first time in a Western map. At its corners are four spheres showing the celestial and sublunar worlds, the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and an illumination of the Garden of Eden by Leonardo Bellini (active 1443-1490). The map is painted in rich reds, golds, and blues this last pigment was obtained from rare lapis lazuli, imported from mines in Afghanistan. It is a circular planisphere drawn on four sheets of parchment, mounted onto three poplar panels and reinforced by vertical battens. The Mappa Mundi (literally “map of the world”) was considered one of the wonders of Venice with a reputation that reached the Holy Land. ![]() ![]() The lion of St Mark guards the land gate to the Arsenale di Venezia, except instead of the usual open bible in its hands offering peace, this book is closed, reflecting its martial purpose. This network was protected by fleets of warships built at the famous Arsenale di Venezia, the largest production facility in the West, whose workforce of thousands of arsenalotti built ships on an assembly line, centuries before Henry Ford. Venice was the undisputed commercial power in the Mediterranean, whose trade routes connected east and west, stretching to Flanders, London, Algeria, and beyond. But its impact and significance as a bridge between Middle Age and Renaissance thought certainly rivaled Borges’ imagined map. ![]() 1450s), named for the lay Camaldolite monk and cartographer whose Venetian workshop created it, is not nearly as large, at a paltry 77 inches in diameter (196 cm). In a one-paragraph story called On Exactitude in Science ( Del Rigor en la Ciencia), Jorge Luis Borges imagined an empire where cartography had reached such an exact science that only a map on the same scale of the empire would suffice. This map is the latest in our Vintage Viz series, which presents historical visualizations along with the context needed to understand them. The Incredible Historical Map That Changed Cartography
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