Rex Tholomeus portolan chart

This extraordinary portolan chart of the European World, dating to circa 1360, is one of the finest cultural artifacts from the early Renaissance still in private hands. Likely drawn in Venice, this masterwork embodies the dawn of precise, modern cartography, and Europeans’ nascent interest in lands far beyond their own borders; an interest that, in the closing years of the following century, would spill across the globe and forge the world of today. This map stands nearly alone as a cartographic relic of its era; no older complete chart exists anywhere outside of Europe. Now known as the Rex Tholomeus portolan chart, based upon the fine full-length portrait of Ptolemy at the bottom right, the chart was created in the tumultuous aftermath of the Black Death and about 130 years before Columbus first reached the New World. The chart extends from the scarcely-known islands of the open Atlantic to the expansive Eurasian steppes of the Golden Horde. In the west, it shows the convoluted borders of the Hundred Years' War, the crescent flag over the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, and the most complete mapping of the British Isles up to that point. In the east

Date

c. 1360

Place

Europe

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

chart

Original size

20,583 × 13,041 pixels

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