Cartography is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.
Muhiddin Piri, better known as Piri Reis, was an Ottoman corsair, navigator, geographer, and cartographer. He is primarily known today for his cartographic works, including his 1513 world map and the Kitab-ı Bahriye, a book with detailed information on early navigational techniques as well as relatively accurate charts for their time, describing the ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea.
Julius Caesar Scaliger, or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism against the New Learning. In spite of his contentious disposition, his contemporary reputation was high. Jacques Auguste de Thou claimed that none of the ancients could be placed above him and that he had no equal in his own time.
Vittore Carpaccio (UK: /kɑːrˈpætʃ oʊ/, US: /-ˈpɑːtʃ-/, Italian: [vitˈtoːre karˈpattʃo]; was an Italian painter of the Venetian school who studied under Gentile Bellini. Carpaccio was largely influenced by the style of the early Italian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina, as well as Early Netherlandish painting. Although often compared to his mentor Gentile Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio's command of perspective, precise attention to architectural detail, themes of death, and use of bold color differentiated him from other Italian Renaissance artists. Many of his works display the religious themes and cross-cultural elements of art at the time; his portrayal of St. Augustine in His Study from 1502, reflects the popularity of collecting "exotic" and highly desired objects from different cultures.
Costanzo Porta was an Italian composer of the Renaissance, and a representative of what is known today as the Venetian School. He was highly praised throughout his life both as a composer and a teacher, and had a reputation especially as an expert contrapuntist.
Treviso is a city and comune (municipality) in the Veneto region of northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Treviso and the municipality has 85,188 inhabitants. Some 3,000 live within the Venetian walls or in the historical and monumental center; some 80,000 live in the urban center while the city hinterland has a population of approximately 170,000.
The Fra Mauro map is a map of the world made around 1450 by the Italian (Venetian) cartographer Fra Mauro, which is “considered the greatest memorial of medieval cartography." It is a circular planisphere drawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame that measures over two by two meters. Including Asia, the Indian Ocean, Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic, it is orientated with south at the top. The map is usually on display in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice in Italy.
The earliest known world maps date to classical antiquity, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm. World maps assuming a spherical Earth first appear in the Hellenistic period. The developments of Greek geography during this time, notably by Eratosthenes and Posidonius culminated in the Roman era, with Ptolemy's world map, which would remain authoritative throughout the Middle Ages. Since Ptolemy, knowledge of the approximate size of the Earth allowed cartographers to estimate the extent of their geographical knowledge, and to indicate parts of the planet known to exist but not yet explored as terra incognita.
Angelo Beolco, better known by the nickname Ruzzante or Ruzante, was a Venetian (Paduan) actor and playwright. He is famous for his rustic comedies, written mostly in the Paduan variety of the Venetian language, featuring a peasant called "Ruzzante". Those plays paint a vivid picture of Paduan country life in the 16th century.
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia or Elena Lucrezia Corner, also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
The history of cartography refers to the development and consequences of cartography, or mapmaking technology, throughout human history. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world.
Giovanni Matteo Contarini (1452-1507) was a cartographer and likely a member of a prominent Venetian family. In 1506, Contarini created a world map that Francesco Rosselli later engraved. The Contarini-Rosselli map is the first world map to have Columbus' discoveries incorporated. It was first discovered in 1922 and currently resides in the British Library. On the map, Contarini refers to himself as "famed in the Ptolemaean art" but no other maps by him have surfaced.
Pictorial maps depict a given territory with a more artistic rather than technical style. It is a type of map in contrast to road map, atlas, or topographic map. The cartography can be a sophisticated 3-D perspective landscape or a simple map graphic enlivened with illustrations of buildings, people and animals. They can feature all sorts of varied topics like historical events, legendary figures or local agricultural products and cover anything from an entire continent to a college campus. Drawn by specialized artists and illustrators, pictorial maps are a rich, centuries-old tradition and a diverse art form that ranges from cartoon maps on restaurant placemats to treasured art prints in museums.
Alessandro Leone Varotari (4 April 1588 – 20 July 1649), also commonly known as Il Padovanino, was an Italian painter of the late-Mannerist and early-Baroque Venetian school, best known for having mentored Pietro Liberi, Giulio Carpioni, and Bartolommeo Scaligero. He was the son of Dario Varotari the Elder and the brother of painter Chiara Varotari, who accompanied him on his travels and assisted with his work.
Piero Falchetta is an Italian cartographer, writer and translator. He is head of the department of ancient maps at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and a specialist of medieval travel writing, history of cartography and history of navigation. He currently lives in his native Venice. One of his most recent contributions to medieval cartography is a critical edition of Fra Mauro's World Map, published in 2006. Recent contributions to the history of navigation are the essays on Michael of Rhodes' nautical writings, and the edition of Benedetto Cotrugli's treatise De navigatione (1464–65). He is also the author of literary essays and translations. His most notable translation is La scomparsa (1995) Italian translation on Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La disparition (1969), which was awarded the 1996 Leone Traverso debut prize in the Monselice Literary Prize.
Venetian painting was a major force in Italian Renaissance painting and beyond. Beginning with the work of Giovanni Bellini and his brother Gentile Bellini and their workshops, the major artists of the Venetian school included Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto (1518–1594), Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) and Jacopo Bassano (1510–1592) and his sons. Considered to give primacy to colour over line, the tradition of the Venetian school contrasted with the Mannerism prevalent in the rest of Italy. The Venetian style exerted great influence upon the subsequent development of Western painting.
A city map is a large-scale thematic map of a city created to enable the fastest possible orientation in an urban space. The graphic representation of objects on a city map is therefore usually greatly simplified, and reduced to generally understood symbology.
A rutter is a mariner's handbook of written sailing directions. Before the advent of nautical charts, rutters were the primary store of geographic information for maritime navigation.
Harley MS 3686 is an early 15th-century Venetian hand-written re-creation of Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia. It is part of the Harleian Collection at the British Library.
Lilian Armstrong (1936-2021) was Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Art at Wellesley College. She was an internationally renowned expert on Italian Renaissance manuscripts and early printed books.
