# Fra Mauro's World Map (Mappamondo di Fra Mauro) > Fra Mauro - c. 1450 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/fra-mauro/fra-mauro-world-map-marciana/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-15 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Fra Mauro - **Date:** c. 1450 - **Medium:** Ink, tempera and gold leaf on vellum (parchment), the sheets mounted on a wood-panel support, set within a wooden frame - **Dimensions:** Circular map approximately 196 cm in diameter, within a square wooden frame of approximately 223 x 223 cm; general sources commonly round this to just over two meters square - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** Italian (Venetian), fifteenth century - **Current location:** Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A large circular mappamundi made around 1450 in the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele in Isola, Venice, by the lay brother and self-taught cosmographer Fra Mauro, working with the sailor-cartographer Andrea Bianco and a Venetian workshop of writers and artists. Oriented with south at the top and carrying close to three thousand descriptive legends, it broke decisively with the schematic, Jerusalem-centered medieval mappaemundi that came before it, offering instead an empirically-argued geography whose rendering of Africa's shape anticipated, without yet proving, the continent's circumnavigability.In 1457 the court of King Afonso V of Portugal commissioned a copy of the map from the same monastery, paying 28 ducats for work completed and dispatched to Lisbon by 24 April 1459. That Portuguese copy was housed in the royal palace at Sao Jorge Castle and disappeared after 1494; no part of it is known to survive. The commission itself is not in dispute among historians - it is a documented archival fact - only the object is lost. The map's African coastal detail is itself the subject of genuine, ongoing scholarly interest: the West African coast reflects real, near-contemporary exploration data reaching Venice through Italian merchants and travelers, while the far more speculative claim of a navigable route around Africa's south rests on a secondhand Indian Ocean account combined with a classical text, not on any actual Portuguese sighting of the Cape.Only one Fra Mauro world map survives: the one described in this record, generally identified with the copy the Signoria of Venice commissioned and which Andrea Bianco completed after Fra Mauro's death. It remained at San Michele in Isola until the Napoleonic suppression of the monastery around 1810-11, passed into state custody, spent a period on display in the Doge's Palace, and has been held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana since 1924, where it remains on public view today. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1448-1450** Fra Mauro and workshop (with Andrea Bianco) `[documented]` (creation) Made at the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele in Isola, Venice; Fra Mauro left it unfinished at his death and Andrea Bianco completed it. This much is documented. What is NOT settled in the sources consulted is whether the surviving Marciana map is itself the copy the Signoria of Venice commissioned, or an earlier prototype from which both the Signoria's and the lost Portuguese copies were made; this record treats the Signoria identification as the working assumption most sources use, not as a settled fact (see open questions). - **-1464** Fra Mauro, then completed by Andrea Bianco `[documented]` (completion) Fra Mauro died, by the most widely cited modern reckoning in 1464, while still at work on this copy; Andrea Bianco completed it after his death. A minority of sources place Fra Mauro's death earlier, around 1459-60. - **1464-c. 1810** Monastery of San Michele in Isola, Venice `[documented]` (custody) The map remained at the monastery for roughly three and a half centuries, alongside Fra Mauro's other papers, which were themselves sealed in a chest at San Giovanni Battista on the Giudecca after his death and later returned to San Michele. - **c. 1810-c. 1811** Kingdom of Italy (Napoleonic administration), then the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana `[documented]` (confiscation and transfer) Napoleon's suppression of religious orders in the former Venetian territories ended the Camaldolese community's tenure of San Michele in Isola; the map passed into state custody and was moved to the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. - **c. 1811-1924** Displayed in the Doge's Palace (rooms associated with the Venetian Great Council) `[documented]` (display) The map was shown in the Doge's Palace for an extended period before its return to the Marciana; exact dates within this century-long interval are not documented in the sources consulted. - **1924-present** Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice `[documented]` (return and permanent custody) The map returned permanently to the Biblioteca Marciana in 1924 and remains there, on public display in the final room of the Sale Monumenti, reached as part of the shared Piazza San Marco museum circuit that also takes in the Museo Correr. ## Open questions - Is the map that survives today in the Biblioteca Marciana the Signoria of Venice's own commissioned copy (finished by Andrea Bianco after Fra Mauro's death), or an earlier prototype from which both the Signoria and Portuguese copies were made? The sources consulted for this record are not fully consistent on this point. - What became of the Afonso V copy after it disappears from the record at Sao Jorge Castle following 1494? No later trace was found in the sources consulted. - Who was messer Stefano Trevisan, the individual entrusted with carrying the 1459 copy to Lisbon, and what was his relationship to the Venetian or Portuguese courts? Not established beyond the possibility that he was a Venetian patrician. - Does the Cape of Diab circumnavigation inscription preserve a genuine, if garbled, memory of an actual Indian Ocean voyage, or is it substantially a construction built from a vague contemporary rumor projected onto the classical account of Eudoxus of Cyzicus? This remains a live and unresolved question in the literature consulted. - What is the precise, reconciled count of the map's legends and inscriptions? Sources consulted give figures of 2,419 (Falchetta's transcribed place-names), 2,991 (the Museo Galileo digital edition's legend count), and 'more than 3,000' (looser secondary accounts), and these have not been reconciled here. - Where exactly was the map displayed, and under what conditions, during the century between its removal from San Michele in Isola around 1810-11 and its return to the Biblioteca Marciana in 1924? Only the two endpoints of this period are well documented in the sources consulted. - Does any documentary trace of the lost Afonso V copy survive indirectly, for instance through later Portuguese cartographic works that might have consulted it before its disappearance? This was not examined in the sources consulted for this record. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Fra Mauro map', consolidating physical description, sources, the T-O tradition break, the Cape of Diab inscription, and the survival/display history. - [2] Wikipedia, 'Fra Mauro', for the biography, the 1457-59 and c.1480 commissions, and the death date. - [3] Museo Galileo / Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 'Fra Mauro, Cosmographer' (Fra Mauro digital exhibition). - [4] Museo Galileo / Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 'The Copy of the Map for the King of Portugal' (Fra Mauro digital exhibition). - [5] Museo Galileo / Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 'Portuguese Expansion in Africa and into the Indian Ocean' (Fra Mauro digital exhibition). - [6] Museo Galileo / Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 'Andrea Bianco' (Fra Mauro digital exhibition). - [7] Museo Galileo news archive, 'The world map of Fra Mauro', on the March 2022 launch of the open-access digital edition with the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and Nanyang Technological University. - [8] Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 'Fra' Mauro's World map' (institutional page). - [9] Finestre sull'Arte, 'Fra Mauro's Mappamondo, a monument of late medieval cartography', for physical dimensions and the absence of scale/rhumb lines. - [10] Wikipedia, 'Piero Falchetta', for his role as curator of the Marciana's cartographic collection and author of the 2006 critical edition. - [11] Isis (journal), review of Piero Falchetta, Fra' Mauro's World Map: A History (Bologna: Imago, 2013), for the place-name transcription count and Falchetta's standing as the leading documentary authority. - [12] Isis (journal), review of Angelo Cattaneo, Fra Mauro's Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice (Brepols, 2011). - [13] Speculum (journal), review of Angelo Cattaneo, Fra Mauro's Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice (Brepols, 2011). - [14] Cadmus (European University Institute repository), listing and abstract for Angelo Cattaneo, Fra Mauro's Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice, for the book's argument and source analysis (auctores veteres and contemporary networks). - [15] Encyclopaedia of Portuguese Expansion, 'Genoese World Map drawn 1457', for the comparanda object and its distinct format and sourcing. - [16] Wikipedia, 'Alvise Cadamosto', for the 1455-56 voyages illustrated on the map beyond Cape Blanco and the later printed Navigazioni. - [17] Wikimedia Commons, File:(Venice) Fra'Mauro's World Map - Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.jpg, photograph by Didier Descouens, 2023, tagged Public domain. - [18] Wikimedia Commons, File:FraMauroMapAfrica.jpg, tagged PD-Art / CC-PD-Mark. - [19] Wikimedia Commons, File:FraMauroChineseShip.jpg, tagged PD-Art. - [20] Wikimedia Commons, File:Fra Mauro World Map, c.1450 (1806 copy).jpg, William Fraser's 1806 copy, British Library, tagged Public Domain Mark 1.0. - [21] Wikimedia Commons, Category:Fra Mauro map details, for the wider set of detail crops surveyed when selecting images. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. 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