Cantino planisphere

A Portuguese world chart of 1502 on six joined skins of parchment, about 105 by 220 cm, the earliest surviving map to show the Brazilian and Caribbean coasts and to mark the Tordesillas line. It is named not for the man who drew it, who is unknown, but for Alberto Cantino, the agent of Ercole I d'Este who had it made in Lisbon and sent it to Ferrara. His covering letter of 19 November 1502 survives and gives the only price this object has ever had: twelve gold ducats, by contract.

What makes it a provenance record rather than a cartography lecture is what happened afterwards. The chart went with the Este library to Modena when the family lost Ferrara. At some point before 1859 an owner cut off its top margin, probably removing its title, and pasted the map onto the folds of a screen. In the upheaval of 1859 the ducal palace was invaded and the map stolen. A few years later Giuseppe Boni, the librarian of the Biblioteca Estense, walking down the Via Farini in Modena, saw it doing duty as a screen in the shop of a pork butcher named Giusti. He bought it, lifted the vellum off the screen, and gave it to the library in 1870.

It has been in Modena ever since, shelfmark C.G.A.2. There is one of it. The version risk in this record is not another copy but the facsimiles, which have circulated since 1906 and are routinely reproduced as though they were the object.

Six skins joined, and a title somebody cut off

The chart is drawn and illuminated on parchment: six skins joined, measuring about 105 by 220 cm overall. The Biblioteca Estense Universitaria catalogues it as one sheet, shelfmark C.G.A.2, material parchment, place of production Lisbon, date 1502.

The top margin is missing. Henry Harrisse, who examined the chart in the nineteenth century, recorded that a later owner cut it away and threw it out, and that the margin doubtless carried a title in large gothic letters, of which the tail end of one letter was still visible in his day. That is the physical condition of the object: a world map of 1502 with its own title trimmed off by the man who wanted it to fit a piece of furniture.

A duke's agent, twelve gold ducats, and a letter that survives

Alberto Cantino was in Lisbon as an agent of Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. Five of his letters to the Duke survive in the Archivio di Stato di Modena, among the papers of the Este ducal chancery, written between 7 June 1501 and 19 November 1502. In them he reports on Portuguese political and economic affairs. In the last of them, written from Rome, he reports that he has obtained a map carrying the most recent discoveries.

Harrisse printed a translation of that letter, and its detail is the reason this record can be precise about money. Cantino tells the Duke that he has left the chart at Genoa in the hands of Francesco Cataneo, who has paid him twenty narrow ducats, that is, ducats of three libre each. Then the sentence that matters: 'In truth, the map cost me in Portugal, by contract, twelve gold ducats; but being hard pressed, and not knowing whom to ask, I was constrained to accept this sum.' He signs it at Rome, 19 November 1502.

So there are two figures and they are not the same kind of figure. Twelve gold ducats is what the chart cost to have made in Portugal, under contract. Twenty narrow ducats is what a Genoese intermediary advanced to Cantino, who was short of cash. Neither is a market price for the object, and the first is a commissioning cost, not a purchase.

Whether it was smuggled is the part everyone repeats and nobody documents

The holding library states the traditional account plainly: despite the prohibitions on taking maps recording the most up-to-date geographical discoveries outside Portuguese territory, Cantino succeeded in smuggling the precious map out and sending it to the Este court.

What the surviving letter says is narrower. It says the map was made for Cantino in Portugal by contract, and that he moved it through Genoa. It does not describe an evasion, and Cantino writes as a man worried about the Duke's opinion of the expense rather than about the Portuguese authorities. The espionage reading is the standard one and it may well be right; the document that is usually cited for it does not say it.

This record therefore separates the two. That the chart was commissioned in Lisbon for a foreign prince and delivered to Ferrara is documented. That its removal breached a Portuguese secrecy policy is an interpretation, held by the holding library among others, and it is graded as such.

What is on it, and what had never been drawn before

The chart shows the Caribbean and Brazilian coasts, and marks the raya, the line dividing Portuguese from Spanish possessions under the Treaty of Tordesillas. Coastal outlines are dense with place names written in black and red according to their importance, in the ordinary convention of a working nautical chart.

Inside the landmasses it stops being a nautical chart and becomes something else. There are decorative elements drawn from medieval legend and from the Bible: the kingdom of Prester John, the Tower of Babel, the flight of the Jews from Egypt with the Red Sea shown parted. A chart that a pilot could not use for those things sits on the same parchment as coastal detail a pilot could.

The judgement of the modern cartometric literature on the coasts is severe in the object's favour. The portrayal of the outline of Africa here is described as so good that it was not surpassed for the next two, possibly three centuries. The same analysis finds that the African coastline is a mosaic of accurate regional charts on the plate carree projection, each with its own scale and orientation, and that the projective properties of those regional charts are incompatible with the navigation and charting techniques of the period. That is a live problem, not a compliment.

What the geometry says about how it was made

Joaquim Alves Gaspar's cartometric analysis of the chart, published in Imago Mundi in 2012, assessed the scales of latitude and distance, the implicit grid of meridians and parallels, and the accuracy of latitudes. His conclusion is that the geometry of the Cantino planisphere is fully explained by the cartographic methods in use at the time, and that some of the details obtained contradict previous interpretations.

The relationship to the Portuguese royal pattern chart, the padrao real, is where the argument now sits. A 2022 study of the place names on the African coast argues that the Caverio planisphere of about 1506 was probably not copied from the Cantino chart, as had often been assumed, and that the most likely explanation is that Caverio derives from the padrao real of about 1505 to 1506 while Cantino reflects the previous version of that pattern chart, of 1502.

This desk has read the abstracts of these papers and not the papers. The publisher refuses automated readers, and the Portuguese doctoral thesis that carries the fullest treatment is a scanned PDF with no text layer. That limitation is recorded here rather than papered over, and no claim above goes beyond what the abstracts state.

Ferrara to Modena, when a pope took the duchy

The planisphere reached its destination and was kept in the archives of the House of Este at Ferrara. Harrisse writes that it remained there until 1592, when it shared the fate of the whole ducal library and collections and was transferred to Modena after Pope Clement VIII dispossessed Cesare d'Este of his duchy.

Harrisse's date should be checked. The devolution of Ferrara to the Papal States is normally placed at the end of the 1590s rather than in 1592, and this record does not substitute a different year on its own authority. What is not in doubt is the mechanism: the map moved because a dynasty lost a state, and the Este library went with the family to Modena.

A screen in a shop, and a librarian walking down the Via Farini

Harrisse records what happened next in two sentences that are worth having exactly. The last private possessor 'put it to a very singular use. Wishing to cover a common screen, he had the map pasted on its folds, after cutting off and throwing away the top margin.' Then: 'During the popular outbreak of 1859, the palace was invaded by a mob and the map stolen.'

And then: 'A few years afterwards, the librarian of the Biblioteca Estense, the Signor Boni, happening to pass in the Via Farini, noticed in the shop of a pork butcher, called Giusti, the Cantino chart still put to such ignominious use. He bought the map, removed the vellum from the screen, and presented that all-important geographical monument to the Este Library where it is now preserved.'

The library's own catalogue confirms the ending in its provenance note: gift of Giuseppe Boni, 1870, but already in the old Este collection. Both halves of that sentence are needed. The chart came back to the Estense as a private gift from its own librarian, and it came back to a shelf it had been on before.

Two details deserve holding on to, because they are the sort that get smoothed away. The margin was cut off before 1859, by an owner making furniture, not by the mob. And Boni paid a butcher for a map that had been stolen from the collection he ran, which is the reason the recovery is recorded as a donation rather than a restitution.

What it was for, and why that is not what it looks like

The chart is described in the period as a charta del navichare, a chart for navigating. The Modena facsimile edition, produced with the holding library, rejects that reading: it is a presentation chart, made for contemplation and study, for court geography rather than for a ship.

Everything about the object supports that. The gold heightening, the Tower of Babel, the kingdom of Prester John, the scale of it at more than two metres wide, and the fact that it was commissioned by a diplomat for a duke who had no fleet in the Atlantic. It is intelligence, and it is display. Ercole I was being shown what the Portuguese knew, and being shown that his agent could get it.

It is unique, and the copies of it are not it

There is one Cantino planisphere. That removes the version problem that governs printed maps and printed books, and replaces it with a different one: this chart has been reproduced in facsimile repeatedly since the nineteenth century, at full size and in colour, and those reproductions circulate widely.

Edward Luther Stevenson published it in fifteen sheets in 1906 in Maps Illustrating Early Discovery and Exploration in America. Il Bulino issued a full-size facsimile with the library in an edition of 750 numbered and certified copies. A photograph of a Stevenson sheet or of a modern facsimile is not a photograph of the object in Modena, and the plates in this record say which is which.

Where it is now

The chart is in the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena under shelfmark C.G.A.2, and the library publishes it in its Estense Digital Library with a persistent identifier. No loan out of Modena is recorded in the sources consulted here, and no valuation for it has ever been published: it has been in one institution's care, with one interruption, since the sixteenth century, and the only sums ever attached to it are the twelve gold ducats it cost to make and whatever Giuseppe Boni handed a butcher in the Via Farini.