Cantino planisphere 1502

Cantino planisphere

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Cantino planisphere or Cantino world map is the earliest surviving map showing Portuguese geographic discoveries in the east and west. It is named after Alberto Cantino, an agent for the Duke of Ferrara, who successfully smuggled it from Portugal to Italy in 1502. The map is particularly notable for portraying a fragmentary record of the Brazilian coast, which the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral explored in 1500, and for depicting the African coast of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a remarkable accuracy and detail. It was valuable at the beginning of the sixteenth century because it showed detailed and up-to-date strategic information in a time when geographic knowledge of the world was growing at a fast pace. It contains unique historical information about the maritime exploration and the evolution of nautical cartography. The Cantino planisphere is the earliest extant nautical chart where places (in Africa and parts of Brazil and India) are depicted according to their astronomically observed latitudes.

• 1 History
• 2 Construction
• 3 Discoveries
• 4 North American section
• 5 See also
• 6 Notes
• 7 Bibliography and references
• 8 External links