Sean Roberts

Poet and ‘World Painter’: Francesco Berlinghieri's Geographia (1482)

ABSTRACT Although Francesco Berlinghieris Geographia (Florence, 1482) is now regarded as representative of a thriving humanist geographic enterprise, modern scholars universally agree that its author had no significant role in the production of its maps. Yet Berlinghieris contemporaries regarded the poet as a cosmographer and ‘world painter’ and associated his work so closely with its principal source, Ptolemy, that it was referred to as el tolomeo. From an examination of the Geographia’s text, maps and illuminations, I argue that Berlinghieri, and the artists who worked for him, portrayed the poet as author of both the textual and the cartographical components. This poetic and artistic project served to frame Berlinghieris endeavour as one that emulated the achievements of classical geography and conformed to fifteenth-century expectations for the role of the geographer.

The Lost Map of Matteo de' Pasti: Cartography, Diplomacy, and Espionage in the Renaissance Adriatic

The sculptor Matteo de’ Pasti left Rimini in 1461 bound for Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II ’s court at Constantinople with gifts from Sigismondo Malatesta. When his ship stopped in Crete, Matteo was detained by the island’s Venetian authorities on charges of espionage. Contemporaries report that he carried with him a map, now lost, but assumed to be a strategically valuable one of the Adriatic. Discussions of Matteo’s mission claim that it attempted to supply the sultan with essential intelligence for an invasion of Italy.Yet, this spy story finds little confirmation in historical sources. Indeed, our knowledge of the map’s very existence derives from the reports of Sigismondo’s enemies. I examine this prominent embassy as a means to reconsider attitudes toward the utility of maps in the scholarly imagination and the role of art and artists in early modern diplomacy. Revisiting documentary evidence and the claims scholars have grounded therein, I explore how we have told the tale of this journey in ways that conform to our own shifting expectations, sometimes at the expense of fidelity to the sources at hand. Overwhelming focus on the absent map has obscured both Matteo’s role as envoy and the distinctive place of evidently skillful and delightful visual culture in this attempted exchange.

Inventing engraving in Vasari's Florence

Scholars generally agree that printed images were first pulled from engraved plates during the first half of the fifteenth century, somewhere beyond the Alps in Northern Europe. Undoubtedly, these stand-alone impressions were preceded by more rudimentary techniques of inking metalwork and stamping these on paper and fabric to record designs within workshops. Thus, while subject to slight variations, it is probably safe to say that the origins of engraving as a graphic technique in Europe are securely established. My essay provides no smoking gun to situate the earliest engravings any more precisely, nor can I reveal any profound contradictions or errors in the contours of this brief sketch. Instead, I want to investigate why for art historians, engraving, in one highly significant sense, was invented in Florence over a century following these events. For it was in that central Italian city that the painter, goldsmith, and historian Giorgio Vasari proffered two different foundation myths for the process in his vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori, e architettori. The vite were first published in Florence in 1550 and appeared in a significantly revised and expanded second edition of 1568. These biographies and their framing apparatus were the product of decades of Vasari’s labor and drew on the author’s expansive art collection, on recollections of his own workshop training, on anecdotes gathered over the course of a profitable career, and on interviews, conversations, and epistolary exchanges with cognoscenti and artisans alike. Printed images and their makers constitute only a tiny fraction of Vasari’s expansive history but they have occupied a pivotal place in scholarly evaluation of his work. Moreover, Vasari’s attitudes toward prints came to exert tremendous sway over the formation of the nascent discipline of art history. Vasari situated both of his origin stories on the Italian peninsula. In the first edition of 1550, the development of engraving was confined to the life of the Mantuan painter Andrea Mantegna (ca. 1431–1506) to whom this marvelous invention was attributed. This most valuable contribution ensured that “the world has been able to see not only” Mantegna’s engravings—a list of which Vasari included—“but also the manners of all the craftsmen who have ever lived.” The vite thus established both an inventor for the engraving process and the raison d’être for its invention. Further, for future art historians, Vasari initiated a tenacious tradition that considered Mantegna’s prints as among the most significant components of his oeuvre and as among the earliest engravings produced in Italy—a legacy which has far outlived the credibility of this story of