Page 229 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

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tude. In the absence of a thorough critical edition manuscripts have a note added to Book vm that
WORLD MAP of the Geography, some aspects of the original "Agathos Daimon, a technician of Alexandria,
text remain obscure and certain questions unre- drew the whole world from Ptolemy's Geogra-
from Claudius Ptolemy, Geography solved, especially as regards its cartographic illus-
c. 1466 phy." Although the historical Agathodaimon, as
manuscript on vellum, 124 fols. tration. The oldest Greek manuscripts known It we would call him, probably lived in late antiq-
century.
today date from
the late thirteenth
2
5
44 x 29.5 fi7 /4 x n /s) uity, it seems improbable, for various reasons, that
references: Fischer 1932, 215, 335-340, 344; seems to have been a Byzantine scholar, Maximus the world map found in the Byzantine manu-
Fischer in Stevenson 1932, 3-15; Pagani 1975; Planudes, who "rediscovered" Ptolemy's book. scripts of the Geography copies a classical proto-
Dz'Mce 19,27, 268 Because the manuscript he obtained had no maps, type; the Byzantine maps were probably drawn in
he had some drawn to illustrate the text. The the late thirteenth or fourteenth century based on
Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, MS V.F. 32,
fols. ji.v-j2r result pleased the Byzantine emperor Andronicos the instructions found in Ptolemy's text.
ii Paleologus (1282-1378) so much that he had the About 1400 the Florentine merchant Palla
manuscript copied. Strozzi first brought a Byzantine manuscript of
Ptolemy's Geography, written in the second cen- The illustrated manuscripts of the Geography Ptolemy's Geography to western Europe and it
tury A.D., is in some ways the quintessence of can be divided into two groups: the "A" recen- was later translated into Latin by Emanuele Chry-
classical cartographical knowledge. Its table of sion, which contains twenty-seven maps, and the soloras and Jacopo Angelo de Scarperia (Dilke
coordinates provided the basic information for "B" recension, with sixty-five. For Ptolemy, the 1987, 268). MS v.F.32, which contains this transla-
mapmakers, giving the positions of major cities known world occupied half of the northern hemi- tion, includes the twenty-seven maps of the "A"
and towns according to their longitude and lati- sphere and extended south of the equator. Various recension. The new interest in Ptolemy's Geogra-

228 CIRCA 1492