Fra’ Mauro’s World map

Fra’ Mauro’s World Map, datable to around 1450, is one of the most precious—and best-known—items preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice.

Produced by the Camaldolese monk Fra’ Mauro, who lived and worked for many years in the monastery on the island of San Michele in Venice, it may be regarded—on account of its workmanship, its monumental scale, and, above all, the history of its creation and its geographical content—as one of the most important documents of Venetian cartography in the period of transition between the medieval conception of the world and the new knowledge brought about by voyages of exploration and navigation.

The work is executed on parchment sheets pasted onto a wooden support (approx. 230 × 230 cm), densely covered with inscriptions—around 3,000 in total—containing information of every kind concerning the various regions of the world as it was conceived prior to the discovery of the Americas.

Particularly important, among other aspects, is the definition of the geography of Africa, based on drawings and information drawn from sources to which Mauro appears to have had exclusive access.

These sources clearly affirm the circumnavigability of the African continent, half a century before Portuguese navigators would test its feasibility. The question—crucial in the debates of the time—concerning the origin and course of the Nile is likewise resolved through recourse to sources unknown to many contemporary authors.

Of remarkable interest is the depiction of Asia, based on the accounts of travellers such as Marco Polo and Nicolò de’ Conti. Of exceptional importance, moreover, is the original “dialogue” that Mauro weaves with Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography, a work that from the fifteenth century onwards served as the touchstone of all geographical discourse.