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From about the 10th century onwards, Venice was one of the determining great trading powers of the Mediterranean - and thus of the 'western', the European world. It is easy to see that maritime navigation and cartography were existential for a maritime republic like Venice - about as important as the proverbial 'German engineering' was for Germany from the end of the 19th century. Battista Agnese is one of the most important cartographers in late medieval Venice - and yet already one whose works illustrate the end of Venice's supremacy. And one about whom little is known, although there was no shortage of official or private notes in the 16th century. All that is known about him is what he himself noted on his maps between 1536 and 1564. He was born around 1500 in Genoa, the former great power in the western Mediterranean, and worked in Venice from about 1515 until his death around 1564. His workshop - the production sites were distributed in Venice, Mallorca, Lisbon and Seville - is considered the most productive of the time. More than a thousand maps have been preserved, manuscripts, individual nautical charts (portolans) and atlases with up to 30 sheets spread all over Europe. Although printing technology for reproduction existed even then, Agnese's maps were intricately hand-painted parchments.
The cards have since been meticulously studied, and it has been found, for example, that namings can be assigned to a particular hand, symbols again to another hand. Agnese must have employed specialized calligraphers and experts for the colored or golden decorations and illustrations. The dimensions and shape of land and sea were already relatively accurate at that time, despite some distortions, but there is no grid of longitude and latitude, but a confusing network of lines radiating from sixteen ray centers to the edge of the map, which were used to determine direction and course.
Agneses nautical charts include information on countries, coasts, and port cities (hence the name "portolane") in addition to the chart itself. They were supplemented and updated over time with new incoming information from merchants and sailors. Thus, from the end of the 15th century, with Columbus' Atlantic crossing and Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, the "map horizon", the mapping of the known land masses and their coasts, moved beyond the "rim" of the Mediterranean into the vastness of the West. Battista Agnese even dedicated a separate sheet to Magellan's circumnavigation, a world map showing Magellan's itinerary. Unexplored land is blurred and nebulous on world maps, and only slowly do the outlines of the just-discovered continents take shape. Thus, southern California is missing from Agnese's early maps, only to gradually take shape as a peninsula. Battista Agnese's Venice, however, a major trading power in the Mediterranean, had to be the big loser of this development, because now trade shifted westward to the Atlantic - just as for about a hundred years the Atlantic riparians have been losing importance to the countries on the Pacific.
From about the 10th century onwards, Venice was one of the determining great trading powers of the Mediterranean - and thus of the 'western', the European world. It is easy to see that maritime navigation and cartography were existential for a maritime republic like Venice - about as important as the proverbial 'German engineering' was for Germany from the end of the 19th century. Battista Agnese is one of the most important cartographers in late medieval Venice - and yet already one whose works illustrate the end of Venice's supremacy. And one about whom little is known, although there was no shortage of official or private notes in the 16th century. All that is known about him is what he himself noted on his maps between 1536 and 1564. He was born around 1500 in Genoa, the former great power in the western Mediterranean, and worked in Venice from about 1515 until his death around 1564. His workshop - the production sites were distributed in Venice, Mallorca, Lisbon and Seville - is considered the most productive of the time. More than a thousand maps have been preserved, manuscripts, individual nautical charts (portolans) and atlases with up to 30 sheets spread all over Europe. Although printing technology for reproduction existed even then, Agnese's maps were intricately hand-painted parchments.
The cards have since been meticulously studied, and it has been found, for example, that namings can be assigned to a particular hand, symbols again to another hand. Agnese must have employed specialized calligraphers and experts for the colored or golden decorations and illustrations. The dimensions and shape of land and sea were already relatively accurate at that time, despite some distortions, but there is no grid of longitude and latitude, but a confusing network of lines radiating from sixteen ray centers to the edge of the map, which were used to determine direction and course.
Agneses nautical charts include information on countries, coasts, and port cities (hence the name "portolane") in addition to the chart itself. They were supplemented and updated over time with new incoming information from merchants and sailors. Thus, from the end of the 15th century, with Columbus' Atlantic crossing and Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, the "map horizon", the mapping of the known land masses and their coasts, moved beyond the "rim" of the Mediterranean into the vastness of the West. Battista Agnese even dedicated a separate sheet to Magellan's circumnavigation, a world map showing Magellan's itinerary. Unexplored land is blurred and nebulous on world maps, and only slowly do the outlines of the just-discovered continents take shape. Thus, southern California is missing from Agnese's early maps, only to gradually take shape as a peninsula. Battista Agnese's Venice, however, a major trading power in the Mediterranean, had to be the big loser of this development, because now trade shifted westward to the Atlantic - just as for about a hundred years the Atlantic riparians have been losing importance to the countries on the Pacific.