Giovanni Leardo was a 15th-century Venetian geographer and cosmographer. Leardo made at least four mappae mundi, of which three survive today. [2]
Leardo's 1442 map is held at the Biblioteca Communale Library in Verona. A 1447 map does not survive, but a 1448 map is held at the Museo Civico at Vicenza. [3] A 1452 map was donated by Archer M. Huntington to the American Geographical Society, and is the oldest world map in the library there. [4]
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Florence for whom "America" is named.
Giovanni da Verrazzano was an Italian (Florentine) explorer of North America, who lead most of his later expeditions, including the one to America, in the service of King Francis I of France.
Jacopo Bellini was one of the founders of the Renaissance style of painting in Venice and northern Italy. His sons Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna, were also famous painters.
A mappa mundi is any medieval European map of the world. Such maps range in size and complexity from simple schematic maps 25 millimetres or less across to elaborate wall maps, the largest of which to survive to modern times, the Ebstorf map, was around 3.5 m in diameter. The term derives from the Medieval Latin words mappa and mundus (world).
Visconte Maggiolo, also spelled Maiollo and Maiolo, was a Genoese cartographer.
Cosmographiae Introductio is a book that was published in 1507 to accompany Martin Waldseemüller's printed globe and wall-map. The book and map contain the first mention of the term 'America'. Waldseemüller's book and maps, along with his 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, were very influential and widely copied at the time.
"Here be dragons" means dangerous or unexplored territories, in imitation of a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons, sea monsters and other mythological creatures on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.
The American Geographical Society (AGS) is an organization of professional geographers, founded in 1851 in New York City. Most fellows of the society are Americans, but among them have always been a significant number of fellows from around the world. The society encourages activities that expands geographical knowledge, and the interpretation of that knowledge so that it can be useful to geographers and other disciplines, especially in a policymaking environment. It is the oldest nationwide geographical organization in the United States. Over the century and a half of its existence, the AGS has been especially interested in three regions: the Arctic, the Antarctic, and Latin America. A signature characteristic of the AGS-sponsored exploration was the requirement that its expeditions produce tangible scientific results.
Archer Milton Huntington was an American philanthropist and scholar, primarily known for his contributions to the field of Hispanic studies. He founded the Hispanic Society of America in New York City, and made numerous contributions to the American Geographical Society.
The term "New World" is used to describe the majority of lands of Earth's Western Hemisphere, particularly the Americas. The term arose in the early 16th century during Europe's Age of Discovery, after Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci published the Latin-language pamphlet Mundus Novus, presenting his conclusion that these lands constitute a new continent.
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.
The Geography, also known by its Latin names as the Geographia and the Cosmographia, is a gazetteer, an atlas, and a treatise on cartography, compiling the geographical knowledge of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Originally written by Claudius Ptolemy in Greek at Alexandria around 150 AD, the work was a revision of a now-lost atlas by Marinus of Tyre using additional Roman and Persian gazetteers and new principles. Its translation – Kitab Surat al-Ard – into Arabic by Al-Khwarismi in the 9th century was highly influential on the geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the Islamic world. Alongside the works of Islamic scholars – and the commentary containing revised and more accurate data by Alfraganus – Ptolemy's work was subsequently highly influential on Medieval and Renaissance Europe.
John Kirtland Wright (1891–1969) was an American geographer, notable for his cartography, geosophy, and study of the history of geographical thought. He was the son of classical scholar John Henry Wright and novelist Mary Tappan Wright, and the brother of legal scholar and utopian novelist Austin Tappan Wright. He married Katharine McGiffert Jan. 21, 1921 in New York, N.Y. They had three children: Austin McGiffert Wright, Gertrude Huntington McPherson, and Mary Wolcott Toynbee.
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.
An astrarium, also called a planetarium, is a medieval astronomical clock made in the 14th century by Italian engineer and astronomer Giovanni Dondi dell'Orologio. The Astrarium was modeled after the solar system and, in addition to counting time and representing calendar dates and holidays, showed how the planets moved around the celestial sphere in one timepiece. This was its main task, in comparison with the astronomical clock, the main task of which is the actual reading of time. A complex mechanism, it combined the functions of a modern planetarium, clock, and calendar into a singular constructive device. Devices that perform this function were known to have been created prior to the design of Dondi, though relatively little is known about them. It is occasionally erroneously claimed by the details of some sources that the Astrarium was the first mechanical device showing the movements of the planets.
The Contarini–Rosselli map of 1506 was the first printed world map showing the New 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.
Tabula Hungariae is the earliest surviving printed map of Hungary, which has supposedly been made by Hungarian Lázár deák before 1528. It was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007.
A map collection or map library is a storage facility for maps, usually in a library, archive, or museum, or at a map publisher or public-benefit corporation, and the maps and other cartographic items stored within that facility.
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