Page 87 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

fig. 6. Cantino World Map. 1502. Biblioteca Estense, Modena. The anonymous Portuguese compiler of this portolan mappamundi refused to speculate about the
westward extension of the lands reached by Columbus, Cabral, and Corte-Real

across the Western Ocean thirty years earlier distance from west to east; the others which are only extant example, although other smaller
without such global thinking. Calculations of across show the distance from north to world maps by him survive (cat. 129). It is quite
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the size of the earth, the disposition of its conti- south... " The map is lost, but it was clearly possible that Columbus saw such a globe or map
nents, and the distance westward from Europe intended to show the distance from Lisbon to which was graduated in latitude and longitude
to Asia were necessary for the Enterprise of the Quinsay in China (26 spaces of 250 leagues and implied that only 90 degrees needed to be
Indies, erroneous though Columbus' actual cal- each) using the coordinate space of parallels and crossed between the Canary Islands and Japan.
culations were. Although he claimed that maps meridians. As Toscanelli himself suggests, a The Martellus maps —or at least those that
were of no use to him in the execution of the globe would perhaps have provided even more have survived — did not show the whole earth.
enterprise (how could they be?), it is believed dramatic evidence of the modestly perceived But they explicitly extended the world beyond
that maps as well as written descriptions of the distance to be traversed on the Western Ocean, the 180° of Ptolemy's second projection to 275°.
width of the Western Ocean influenced his deci- but there are few references indeed to such arti- Martin Waldseemtiller in 1507 extended it fur-
sion. A copy of a letter dated 1474 from Paolo facts in the late fifteenth century. There is not ther to 360° in his Cosmographia universalis
Toscanelli intended to urge Afonso v, king of even any solid evidence that Columbus saw the (cat. 132), again using Ptolemy's projection as
Portugal (r. 1438-1481), toward the goal of famous globe which Martin Behaim had been the core, but did not extend it to both poles. The
westward exploration came into Columbus' contracted to produce for the city of Nuremberg process was taken to its logical conclusion in
hands. It described an accompanying map: 'And in 1492. Nevertheless, clear references are made 1514 when Johannes Werner extended Ptole-
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although I know from my own knowledge that to globes and large printed and manuscript maps my's projection to cover the globe. No maps of
the world can be shown as it is in the form of a of the world in circulation during the 1480$, the whole earth survive from the fifteenth cen-
sphere, I have determined... to show the same such as those prepared by Henricus Martellus tury, but interest in the concept of showing the
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route by a chart similar to those which are made for the Vatican Library. One of these maps earth as a globe was obviously present. The
for navigation The straight lines which are may have formed the model for Behaim's globe. references to globes before Behaim's globe of
shown lengthwise on the said chart show the Martellus' large 1489 manuscript map is the 1492 attest to it. It is curious, therefore, that the

86 CIRCA 1492