The Cosmography of Ptolemy

ad_hlab_min — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 12:41:24 +0000

“The Cosmography”, the major work of the Greek astronomer, mathematician and geographer Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100 – c. 178), the summa of all geographical knowledge of the Greco-Roman world, was unknown in the Christian West until the end of the 14th century, when the Byzantine humanist Manuel Crisoloras (1350-1415) brought a Greek copy to Florence in 1397. He began its translation into Latin, which was then completed by his disciple Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia (ca. 1360-1410 or 1411) between 1406 and 1409 under the title “The Cosmography”. Interest in the work was immediate, due to the richness of the ancient toponymy and the mathematical description of the inhabited lands: Ptolemy taught how to represent the sphericity of the Earth on the plane and provided the geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude for each place. This manuscript was copied by the German Benedictine monk Nicolaus Germanus in the second half of the 15th century in the court of Borso d’Este (1413-71) at Ferrara and translated the geographical data graphically: the plates of the work are preceded by brief descriptions and drawn in conic projection, as is the map of the ecumene created using Ptolemy’s second projection. The Ptolemaic works were not replaced in the West for almost two centuries, when the publication of modern atlases relegated them to testimonies of the geographical and astronomical knowledge of the ancients.

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Jacopo di Angelo da Scarperia - History Lab

The Cosmography of Ptolemy