Portolan Atlas of Pietro Vesconte

Portolan Atlas of Pietro Vesconte

The science of mapmaking was rapidly evolving during the High and Late Middle Ages, when the first accurate maps that could be relied upon for navigation began to emerge. Pietro Vesconte (fl. 1310–1330) created the earliest signed and dated nautical charts that have survived to the present. The oldest, a portolan chart of the Eastern Mediterranean, dates to 1311 and this atlas from 1318 consists of ten sheets measuring ca. 20 x 20 cm that can be arranged to form a single large map: 1. Calendar, 2. Black Sea, 3. Eastern Mediterranean, 4. South-Central Mediterranean, 6. North-Central Mediterranean 7. Western Mediterranean, 8. Spain and French Atlantic coast, 9. British Isles, 10. Adriatic Sea. Presented in the form of a circle, the calendar is surrounded by the symbols of the Four Evangelists in the corners of a golden frame. The maps are similarly decorated in the corners with dragons and vegetal designs. This historic specimen of cartography is stored today in the Austrian National Library under the shelf mark Cod. 594.

A Pioneering Mapmaker

Although there are no documents concerning his childhood, Pietro Vesconte identified himself as Genoese, but spent most of his career in the rival maritime power of Venice, where he moved in 1313. He fled from a civil war between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in Genoa and once in Venice, Vesconte began to mark his works with a dragon, the enemy of Saint George, who was the symbol of Genoa. He worked in collaboration with the Venetian statesman and geographer Marino Sanuto the Elder (ca. 1270–1343) and created numerous maps of the Holy Land for Sanuto’s Liber secretorum fidelium crucis or “The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross”, a work that intended to inspire a revival of the Crusades. Vesconte’s maps are always south oriented and are usually adorned with both sacred and profane allegorical imagery. As the first professional mapmaker to sign and date his works on a regular basis, his influence can be clearly seen in the work of subsequent generations of Italian and Catalan mapmakers.