The Bianco World Map is a map created by ''Andrea Bianco'', a 15th-century Venetian sailor and cartographer. This map was a part of a nautical atlas including ten pages made of

vellum Vellum is prepared animal skin or membrane, typically used as writing material. Parchment is another term for this material, from which vellum is sometimes distinguished, when it is made from calfskin, as opposed to that made from other anima ...

(each measuring 26 × 38 cm). These vellum pages were previously held in an 18th-century binding, but the current owner, Venetian library

Biblioteca Marciana The Marciana Library or Library of Saint Mark ( it, italic=no, Biblioteca Marciana, but in historical documents commonly referred to as ) is a public library in Venice, Italy. It is one of the earliest surviving public libraries and repositori ...

, separated the pages for individual exhibition. To confirm his authorship of the atlas, Bianco added to the first page a signature flag with the text "Andreas Biancho de Veneciis me fecit M cccc xxx vj". Roughly translated, this reads "Made by me Andreas Biancho in Venice, 1436." Andrea Bianco also collaborated with

Fra Mauro Fra Mauro, O.S.B. Cam., (c.1400–1464) was a Venetian cartographer who lived in the Republic of Venice. He created the most detailed and accurate map of the world up until that time, the Fra Mauro map. Mauro was a monk of the Camaldolese ...

on the Fra Mauro world map of 1459.

Content

The first page, or ''Tavola 1'', shows a diagram of the '' Raxon or Toleta of Marteloio'', a navigational technique that enabled sailors to calculate how to return to their intended course after being blown off-course. The next eight pages contain seven local and one Europe-wide Portolan charts. The ninth page contains a circular world map measuring 24 cm in circumference. The final page illustrates a Ptolemaic world map based upon

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; grc-gre, Πτολεμαῖος, ; la, Claudius Ptolemaeus; AD) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance ...

's first projection with a graduation of the latitudes. The map also contains two different estimates of the size of the world sphere.

References

{{reflist Historic maps of the world 1436 works 15th-century maps and globes

Content

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Further reading

References