# The Behaim Globe (Erdapfel) > Martin Behaim, with Georg Glockendon the Elder and workshop - 1492-1494 (commissioned by the Nuremberg city council from 1490; the brass horizon ring was added around 1510) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/martin-behaim/behaim-globe-erdapfel-nuremberg/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-25 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Martin Behaim, with Georg Glockendon the Elder and workshop - **Date:** 1492-1494 (commissioned by the Nuremberg city council from 1490; the brass horizon ring was added around 1510) - **Medium:** Two clay-moulded hemispheres laminated in linen, reinforced with wood, then overlaid with parchment and paper gores in tempera paint; wrought-iron meridian stand; engraved and punched brass horizon ring - **Dimensions:** 51 cm diameter (globe); 133 cm total height on its stand - **Object type:** Clocks and instruments - **Period:** German, late fifteenth century - **Current location:** Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A 51-centimetre painted sphere finished in Nuremberg in the winter of 1492, the Erdapfel is the oldest terrestrial globe to survive anywhere. It was made by a named team of craftsmen working from a design supplied by the merchant-patrician Martin Behaim, who had spent the preceding six years in Portugal and at its Atlantic outpost of Faial claiming, on evidence that a century of scholarship has largely failed to confirm, a place at the elbow of King John II.Because the globe was finished the same year Columbus sailed and before any word of his landfall reached Europe, it shows an Atlantic that runs directly into an oversized Asia, with no Americas at all. It has been read ever since as a snapshot of the exact moment the old geography ran out, and it has just as often been mistaken for something Columbus consulted, which the surviving chronology makes impossible.Bought for the city that made it in 1937 in a transaction jointly financed by the mayor and the German head of state, and rarely if ever removed from its case since, it has been examined, restored, darkened by an old varnish, digitally scanned twice, and in 2023 inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register. ## 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. - **1492-early 17th century** City of Nuremberg `[documented]` (installation) Displayed in reception rooms of Nuremberg's town hall (successively the Ratskanzlei and the Obere Regimentsstube) from its completion until the early seventeenth century. - **early 17th century-1906/1907** The Behaim family `[documented]` (inheritance) Custody passed to the Behaim family. Storage over this long period was imperfect; the globe's condition record attributes at least one dent to inadequate handling during family ownership. In 1927 the family moved to sell the globe to a buyer in America; the object was listed as nationally valuable German cultural property in 1929, which functioned as a bar on export and set up the eventual sale to the museum. - **1906/1907-1937** Behaim family (on loan to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum) `[documented]` (loan) Loaned to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; sources consulted differ on the exact year, giving either 1906 or 1907. - **1937-present** Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg `[documented]` (acquisition) Purchased for the museum after the 1929 export-preventing listing and subsequent negotiation. The purchase price was raised jointly by Nuremberg's mayor Willy Liebel and Adolf Hitler, then head of the German state. No source consulted here publishes the sum paid or its division between the two. ## Open questions - Whether Behaim actually sailed on Diogo Cao's African expedition of 1485-86, or invented the claim afterward; the globe's own coastal inaccuracies are cited against his direct participation, but no independent record settles it either way. - What, if anything, Behaim actually contributed to King John II's Junta dos Mathematicos beyond Joao de Barros's single secondhand sentence written more than fifty years later; no corroborating Portuguese source has been found. - The identity of Georg Glockendon's wife, credited by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum's own catalogue with painting on the globe alongside her husband but named nowhere in the sources consulted here. - The exact year the globe was first loaned to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum; sources consulted give 1906 and 1907 without reconciling the discrepancy. - What price the museum paid in 1937, and what portion came from the city versus from Hitler personally; no source consulted here publishes the figure. - Why Joao de Barros, writing in 1539, singled out Behaim by name among the Junta's members when no other contemporary source mentions him at all. - The total cost the Nuremberg city council paid for the globe's manufacture in 1492; Ravenstein's biography references a Statement of Expenses as an appendix, but the figures within it were not recovered from the sources consulted for this record. ## Sources - [1] E.G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe (London: George Philip and Son, 1908), full text. - [2] E.G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe (1908), Introduction, hosted transcription. - [3] E.G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe (1908), Chapter VI, on the Junta dos Mathematicos claim, hosted transcription. - [4] E.G. Ravenstein, Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe (1908), Chapter VIII, 'Behaim's Knighthood, 1485', hosted transcription. - [5] Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 'Behaim Globe', collection page. - [6] Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Objektkatalog, 'Erdglobus, sogenannter Behaim-Globus' (WI1826). - [7] Historisches Lexikon Bayerns, 'Globus des Martin Behaim'. - [8] Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission, 'Behaim-Globus'. - [9] UNESCO, Memory of the World Register, 'Behaim Globe'. - [10] Der Behaim-Globus / The Behaim Globe, digital research portal, Germanisches Nationalmuseum and Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg. - [11] Wikipedia, 'Erdapfel' (the article is also reached via the title 'Behaim Globe'). Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with the Focus Behaim Globus (1992) exhibition catalogue and current GNM cataloguing. - [12] Wikipedia, 'Martin Behaim'. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with Ravenstein 1908 and Portuguese archival scholarship. - [13] Wikipedia, 'Georg Glockendon'. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with dedicated art-historical scholarship on the Glockendon workshop. - [14] Encyclopedia.com, 'Martin Behaim', summarising the assessment of the historian John Noble Wilford. Tertiary source, flagged for replacement with a full citation to Wilford's own text. - [15] Wikipedia, 'Hunt-Lenox Globe'. Tertiary source, used only for the comparanda in related_works. - [16] Wikipedia, 'Johannes Schoner globe'. Tertiary source, used only for the comparanda in related_works. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.