The gallery was restored and enhanced under Pope Urban VIII a century after it was created. Danti is also credited with the brass orrery that sits in the hall. Koeman mentioned about the Parergon of Ortelius: This atlas of ancient geography must be regarded as a personal work of Ortelius. Abraham Ortelius, Prachtvolle Kupferstichkarte by Auktionshaus Mehlis GmbH. The ceiling frescoes illustrate stories from the lands depicted below. The atlas consists of one engraved portrait of Ortelius by Philip Galle, a woodcut architectural title border, 30 engraved double-page maps and two engraved double-page views. 1595 Sir Francis Drakes Old World Voyages Exploration Vintage Inspired Map by Weatherham Estate Treasures. Each regional map is accompanied by a detailed view of its major city. One map shows the Battle of Fornovo, the first battle in the Italian Wars against France. Details of the large frescoes show the Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto and large-scale maps of the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa.
#ANTIQUE MAPS ORTELIUS INSTALL#
The ambitious project to install 40 enormous and highly accurate maps began in 1580 and took just 18 months to complete. To top that, Gregory set his sights on the 120 meter long corridor on the third floor of the Belvedere Courtyard. Huge maps of the known world capped by a ceiling of stars were painted in the early 1500s in the Loggia della Cosmografia under the guidance of Pope Julius II (primarily remembered for commissioning Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel).
More significantly, before Danti took up his post in Bologna, he had spent a decade creating the magnificent hall of maps known as the Sala delle Carte Geografiche at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence at the behest of Cosimo I de Medici, duke of Florence. By the late 1500s the famous mapmakers Mercator and Ortelius were creating their landmark world maps. The age of exploration had brought new knowledge of distant lands, and technical innovations like the magnetic compass, sextant, and telescope improved accuracy. Portrait of Abraham Ortelius Born into an old Antwerp family, sympathetic to the Reformation, Abraham Ortels adopted the Latinised form of his name in the. Danti had come to Rome from his post as mathematics professor in Bologna to help the pope with his efforts to correct the inaccurate Julian Calendar using modern Renaissance mathematics and astronomy.Īt the time, cartography was undergoing its own renaissance.
Pope Gregory XIII commissioned the maps from his cosmographer, the multi-talented Italian priest Ignazio Danti. Predating a unified Italy by nearly 300 years, the gallery of maps at the Vatican shows the length and breadth of the peninsula circa 1580.