A Special Collections Exhibition
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Medieval Foundations |
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Facsimile of a chart by Bartolomeo de Pareto, 1455.
This
image shows a portolan chart, which with the mappamundi was the second
main way in which the medieval Europeans delineated their world. This portolan
chart was drawn about 1455 by Bartolomeo de Pareto, and was then re-drawn by
Konrad Kretschmer for his Historische Karten zur
Entdeckung Amerikas.
This particular image is included partly to show the extraordinary
possibilities offered by digital photography. The image was captured in room
light with a very simple digital camera, and yet it gives a perfectly good idea
of the main points of the original. The large oblong island in the Atlantic
Ocean is characteristic of many charts of the period,
and reminds us that Christopher Columbus was by no means alone in
thinking that land lay to the west.
© Special Collections Division
The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries
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