# The Hunt-Lenox Globe > Unknown maker - c. 1504-1510 (disputed). The New York Public Library and most secondary sources give c. 1508 or c. 1510. A narrower c. 1504-1506 date is cited only in connection with Stefaan Missinne's contested 2013 claim that the globe was cast from his privately owned Ostrich Egg Globe. > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/unknown-hunt-lenox-globe-maker/hunt-lenox-globe-nypl/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-25 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unknown maker - **Date:** c. 1504-1510 (disputed). The New York Public Library and most secondary sources give c. 1508 or c. 1510. A narrower c. 1504-1506 date is cited only in connection with Stefaan Missinne's contested 2013 claim that the globe was cast from his privately owned Ostrich Egg Globe. - **Medium:** Copper, engraved (or, per a contested theory, cast); two hollow hemispheres of a reddish copper alloy roughly 2 mm thick, joined at the equator and pierced at the north and south poles - **Dimensions:** c. 112 mm (4.4 in) diameter - **Object type:** Map - **Period:** Age of Discovery, early sixteenth century - **Current location:** New York Public Library, Rare Book Division, New York - **Attribution:** unknown ## Summary A small hollow copper globe, about 112 millimetres across, engraved in the early sixteenth century by a maker no source names and dated by disputing scholars anywhere from about 1504 to about 1510. It is held today by the New York Public Library, and it carries, near the coast of eastern Asia, the only confirmed historical use of the Latin phrase HC SVNT DRACONES, here are dragons, on any surviving map or globe.It reached the library by an accident of two names: bought for a trifle in Paris in 1855 by the architect Richard Morris Hunt, who let his children play with it, and recognized as significant only fifteen years later by the bookdealer Henry Stevens, who placed it with the library James Lenox was building and Hunt himself was designing. Who actually made it remains unresolved. A twentieth-century historian linked its workmanship to a globe in Krakow without naming a maker; a twenty-first-century collector has argued, more dramatically and more controversially, that it was cast from a privately owned globe engraved on an ostrich egg, by a hand connected to Leonardo da Vinci's workshop. That claim has drawn direct, named criticism and has not been accepted.It is not the Waldseemuller 1507 world map already recorded on this site, a separate, flat, printed object with no documented connection to this globe beyond sharing a decade. What the two do share is the argument this record makes throughout: where the evidence stops, the record says so, rather than filling the gap. ## 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. - **undated** Unknown, unrecorded `[unknown]` (manufacture) No maker, patron, or first owner is documented anywhere in the sources consulted for this record. The date of manufacture is itself disputed, generally placed between about 1504 and 1510. - **c. 1504-1510-1855** Unrecorded `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, location, or intermediate event is documented between the globe's disputed date of manufacture and its purchase in Paris in 1855, an undocumented gap of roughly three and a half centuries. - **1855-c. 1870** Richard Morris Hunt (1828-1895), American architect `[documented]` (purchase) Purchased in Paris in 1855. Hunt later recalled buying it 'for a song' and treated it as a household curiosity for roughly fifteen years, at one point allowing his own children to handle it as a toy. - **c. 1870-1895** James Lenox and the Lenox Library, New York `[documented]` (gift and deposit) Bookdealer Henry Stevens, dining with Hunt in 1870, recognized the globe's significance and urged him to place it in the Lenox Library, which Hunt was then designing as its architect for collector James Lenox. Stevens subsequently borrowed the globe and consulted Julius Erasmus Hilgard of the U.S. Coast Survey to help establish its age. - **23 May 1895-present** New York Public Library, Rare Book Division `[documented]` (institutional consolidation) The Lenox Library was consolidated with the Astor Library and the Tilden Trust on 23 May 1895 to form the New York Public Library. The globe passed into the new institution as part of the Lenox Library's contribution and remains there, now digitized and displayed in the Rare Book Division. ## Open questions - Who made the globe. No individual or named workshop has scholarly consensus; the two directional claims in the literature (a French origin, and Stefaan Missinne's Italian workshop and Leonardo da Vinci theory) are each unproven. - What the globe's exact date of manufacture is. Sources in circulation range from c. 1504 to c. 1510, and the narrowest end of that range depends entirely on accepting Missinne's contested claim about the Ostrich Egg Globe. - Where the globe was, and who owned it, between its manufacture and Richard Morris Hunt's 1855 purchase in Paris. No owner, location or event is documented for this interval. - Whether the globe was engraved directly or cast from another object. This remains genuinely contested rather than resolved in either direction by the sources consulted for this record. - What HC SVNT DRACONES specifically referenced when it was engraved: a Komodo dragon report, a generic cartographic warning device, or something closer to De Costa's 1879 reading involving Marco Polo's Dagroians. No single explanation has displaced the others. - What the piercing at the globe's poles was originally for: whether the globe was designed from the outset to sit inside an armillary sphere, or was adapted for that purpose after being made as a standalone object. ## Sources - [1] Wikipedia, 'Hunt-Lenox Globe.' A tertiary source, consolidating citations to B. F. De Costa (1879), Henry Stevens's Recollections of Mr. James Lenox of New York (1886), Gabriel Gravier (1879), R. W. Hill (1937), and the Wouter Bracke 2019 review of Missinne's The Da Vinci Globe. Flagged for replacement with those primary texts and with the New York Public Library's own catalog record where possible. - [2] Missinne, Stefaan, 'A Newly Discovered Early Sixteenth-Century Globe Engraved on an Ostrich Egg: The Earliest Surviving Globe Showing the New World,' The Portolan: Journal of the Washington Map Society, Issue 87 (Fall 2013), pp. 8-24. Read directly from the journal PDF. This is the primary source for the Ostrich Egg Globe claim and is treated in this record as Missinne's own argument, not as an accepted finding. - [3] McGarvey, Kathleen, 'One of the world's oldest globes is ready for its close-up,' University of Rochester Newscenter, 26 February 2020, on the Lazarus Project's multispectral imaging and 3D modeling of the Hunt-Lenox Globe. - [4] Wikipedia, 'Here be dragons,' for the cartographic history of the phrase, its status as an anachronism in general medieval usage, and the more common HIC SVNT LEONES convention. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with Chet Van Duzer's published scholarship on non-Ptolemaic map legends. - [5] The Encyclopedia Americana (1920), 'New York Public Library,' via Wikisource, for the 23 May 1895 consolidation of the Astor, Lenox and Tilden libraries into the New York Public Library, with founding volume counts and endowment figures for each constituent library. - [6] GeographyRealm.com, 'The Map Myth of Here Be Dragons: The Facts and Fictions of Mapmakers,' for the Hunt-Lenox Globe's physical description and its status as the sole confirmed historical use of HC SVNT DRACONES. - [7] James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, exhibition pages on Martin Waldseemuller's 1507 globe gores, for the gores' survival rate, physical dimensions, and the fact that none of the three surviving copies was ever assembled into an actual globe. - [8] Wikimedia Commons, file records and extmetadata (LicenseShortName field) for each image used in this record, retrieved directly via the Commons API to verify CC0 or public domain status. - [9] - [10] --- 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.