Vincenzo Coronelli, born in Venice in 1650 of a humble family, got his education by the Conventual Franciscans who recognized his talent and sent him to Rome to pursue a degree in theology. He advanced quickly in the Franciscan order, of which he eventually became, for a brief period, minister general (1701-1704). Notwithstanding this successful career, he dedicated most of his energies to the pursuit of geography. In 1680 he produced two giant celestial globes (1,75 meters in diameter) for the Duke of Parma, then he went to Paris to produce two even more enormous terrestrial globes (more than 3 meters in diameter) for Louis the XIV of France, currently displayed in the French National Library.
In 1684 he returned to Venice to found a geographical society, the Accademia degli Argonauti (Academy of the Argonauts), with the aim to finance his future geographical work. The society soon gathered key figures of Catholic Europe’s scientific and political elite. In 1685 he was nominated Official cosmographer of the Venetian republic and in 1689 professor of Geography in Venice. His Atlante Veneto (Venetian Atlas) (1690-1701) in 13 volumes was the first (and only) Italian attempt to emulate the Great Dutch Atlases of Blaeu and Jansson. The extended title of the Atlante proclaims it “a geographical, historical, sacred, profane and political description of the empires, kingdoms, and states of the Universe, their divisions and boundaries, with the addition of all the newly discovered countries, augmented with many geographical maps, never before published.” The most interesting part of the Atlas is the Isolario Veneto (“Venetian Book of Islands”) in two volumes (1696 and 1697), from which our map is taken. Isolarii (“Books of islands”) were a Mediterranean tradition, combining freely cartography with ethnographic information. Coronelli extends this tradition to cover the whole world, as after all, as he says in the introduction, “the whole world is divided into islands, starting from the four continents, which might be described as large islands, and ending with islands so small that they do not deserve the name and are called rocky islets.”
The present map of Guangdong and Fujian is mainly derived from Martino Martini’s Atlas Sinensis. As the bottom right cartouche states, it is dedicated to the Jesuit Carlo Trigona, an Italian theologian member of the Accademia degli Argonauti.
The small cartouche on the upper right provides the map scale in Italian miles, while the text at the bottom left gives demographic information about the two Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, including population, main cities, as well as catholic churches and missions.
Following the tradition of the Isolarii, emphasis is given to the islands: Hainan, Taiwan (called Bella Isola [Italian for “beautifull island] or Isola Formosa [“Formosa” meaning “beautiful” in Portuguese]), Luzon in the Philippines and the islets in the Pearl River Delta, called here Gulf of Macao, including Macao itself (still shown as an island even though the isthmus connecting it to the mainland was already in place at the time). The map shows Quangcheu (Guangzhou 廣州) and Hiang Xan (Xiangshan 香山, nowadays Zhongshan 中山).
The sea between Hainan and Taiwan is shown full of many elaborately drawn Chinese vessels and junks.
Junk
Chinese Vessels
- Caterino, Aldo (ed), Riflessi d'Oriente : l'immagine della Cina nella cartografia europea. Trento : Il Portolano ; Centro studi Martino Martini, 2008, 121-122.
- Massimo Quaini, Michele Castelnovi, Visioni del Celeste Impero. L’immagine della Cina nella cartografia occidentale, Genova, Il Portolano, 2007, 137
- Cosgrove, Denis E., Apollo's eye : a cartographic genealogy of the earth in the western imagination, Baltimore, Md.; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 188 ff. (pp. 120 ff on the tradition of the books of islands)
- George Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century”, in David Woodward (ed.), The History of Cartography, Vol. 3: Cartography in the European Renaissance, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007, 263-284.
- Mosley, Adam. “Vincenzo Maria Coronelli’s Atlante Veneto and the Diagrammatic Tradition of Cosmography.” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 42 (2011), 27-53.
- De Ferrari, Coronelli, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/vincenzo-coronelli_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/
- Online copy of the Isolario: http://iccu01e.caspur.it/ms/internetCulturale.php?id=mag_GEO0008143&teca=GeoWeb+-+Marciana
- Link to the maps: http://geoweb.venezia.sbn.it//geoweb/ods/index.aspx?s=285c1718/b/&i=8143&n=310&p=9j&t=bp