Around 1466 Nicolaus Germanus was able to convert information contained in Ptolemy’s Geography into an atlas of the world that he would eventually present to renowned patron Borso d’Este of Ferrara. The atlas is rather large, and needs to be laid out on a table and studied from above in order to properly absorb what it has to show. The first map shown in the atlas is that of most of the known world from the time, stretching from Iberia in the West to India in the East. Each of the following pages in the atlas proceeds to focus in on a smaller section of the world. The geographical markers on the maps are all in Latin, as are each of the paragraphs of information about each regional/subsectional map that can be read on the preceding page. These paragraphs are helpful for learning more about the region and can show us how Europe thought about various reaches of the world in the 1460s. Each map in the atlas displays country names in gold, region names in red, regional boundaries as dotted red lines, and cities as small golden dots accompanied by their respective names. Rivers and seas are deep royal blue and mountain ranges are swaths of light and dark brown. Perhaps the most eye-catching and noteworthy of all the features on these maps, however, is the longitudinal and latitudinal coordinate system that borders each. This is information that Germanus took directly from Ptolemy’s Geography (which was one of many new manuscripts that had just recently been brought west from Constantinople) and plotted visually. Ptolemy had noted in his work that maps of such a large scale as the entire known world would require “curved and inclined” lines to properly mimic the form of the earth, so Germanus listened. These curved lines can be best seen on the first map in the atlas, which really shows the projected shape of Earth better than any of the smaller, regional maps in the rest of the atlas that seem to neglect Earth’s curvature altogether. The first map also shares the same shape as one of Ptolemy’s earliest graticules (drawn in his Geography), adding confusion and suspicion to understanding whether or not Germanus copied these maps from Ptolemy’s work or if he crafted them himself. Regardless of this ambiguity, this atlas is still one of the earliest examples of Ptolemy’s theory in praxis, and was quickly adopted as a “visual companion” for Ptolemy’s work and thought.
Biblioteca Estense Universitaria di Modena: Il Bulino, edizione d'arte, 2006.
Special Collections, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
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Special Collections (Horizontal Shelving) G1005 1466 .F4 2006