Cartographers

Battista Agnese

Genoa · Venice

Genoese-born cartographer active in Venice, where his workshop produced richly illuminated portolan atlases for elite patrons during the sixteenth century.

1 map in the collection

Jacopo de’ Barbari

Venice · Nuremberg

Venetian painter and printmaker whose monumental bird’s-eye View of Venice (1500) turns the lagoon city into a single inspectable object while recording its extraordinary material density.

1 map in the collection

Andrea Bianco

Venice

Fifteenth-century Venetian mariner and chartmaker whose 1436 atlas joins portolan leaves, tables and cosmographic material in a single working manuscript.

1 map in the collection

Georg Braun

AD 1541 – AD 1622

Cologne

Canon and editor of the Civitates Orbis Terrarum, the six-volume city atlas that assembled plans, prospects, figures and descriptive texts into a comparable urban world.

7 maps in the collection

Louis Bretez

? – AD 1738

Paris

Architect and perspective specialist who surveyed Paris for the monumental oblique plan commissioned by Michel-Étienne Turgot and engraved by Claude Lucas.

1 map in the collection

Leonardo Bufalini

AD 1500 – AD 1552

Udine · Rome

Architect and surveyor whose 1551 Pianta di Roma joined measured urban fabric, ancient remains and the Aurelian circuit in the first large printed plan of Rome.

1 map in the collection

Heinrich Bünting

AD 1545 – AD 1606

Hanover · Gronau

German Protestant pastor and author of the Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae. His memorable clover-leaf world map turns Europe, Asia and Africa into a Christian emblem whose leaves meet at Jerusalem.

1 map in the collection

César-François Cassini de Thury

AD 1714 – AD 1784

Paris

French astronomer and cartographer (Cassini III) who directed the triangulation-based Carte de Cassini, the first topographic map of an entire nation grounded in systematic geodetic survey.

1 map in the collection

Johannes Honterus

AD 1498 – AD 1549

Kronstadt (Brașov)

Transylvanian Saxon humanist, cosmographer and reformer who mapped his own Carpathian homeland and produced widely reprinted cosmographic works.

1 map in the collection

Muhammad al-Idrisi

AD 1100 – AD 1165

Ceuta · Palermo

Arab geographer at the Norman court of Roger II of Sicily, where he compiled the Tabula Rogeriana (1154) - one of the most advanced world maps of the medieval period, drawn south-up.

1 map in the collection

Olaus Magnus

AD 1490 – AD 1557

Linköping · Rome · Venice

Swedish churchman, historian and mapmaker whose Carta Marina (1539) assembled geographic, ethnographic and maritime knowledge into a monumental printed image of northern Europe.

1 map in the collection

Fra Mauro

AD 1385 – AD 1459

Murano · Venice

Camaldolese monk and cartographer whose monumental world map assembled travel reports, inherited geography and Venetian information networks into a densely annotated south-up image.

1 map in the collection

Gerardus Mercator

AD 1512 – AD 1594

Rupelmonde · Leuven · Duisburg

Flemish cartographer, engraver and instrument-maker whose 1569 projection made rhumb lines straight for navigators - at the cost of grossly inflating the high latitudes. He coined the term "atlas" for a bound collection of maps.

1 map in the collection

Giambattista Nolli

AD 1701 – AD 1756

Como · Rome

Italian surveyor and engraver whose 1748 Nuova Pianta di Roma is renowned for its ichnographic precision and its continuous graphic treatment of streets and accessible interiors.

1 map in the collection

Abraham Ortelius

AD 1527 – AD 1598

Antwerp

Brabantian cartographer and geographer whose Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) is regarded as the first modern atlas: a uniform, bound set of map sheets with a credited list of sources.

10 maps in the collection

Matthew Paris

AD 1200 – AD 1259

St Albans · London

Benedictine monk, chronicler, artist and mapmaker at St Albans Abbey. His manuscript itineraries organise travel from England toward the Holy Land as ordered stations, making sequence more important than uniform geographic scale.

1 map in the collection

Petrus Roselli

Majorca

Fifteenth-century chartmaker in the Majorcan portolan tradition. His signed Mediterranean charts preserve the dense coastal names and rhumb networks through which the sea was made operational.

1 map in the collection

Pietro Vesconte

Genoa · Venice

Fourteenth-century chartmaker associated with the earliest signed and dated surviving portolan chart. His nautical charts and atlas work made ordered Mediterranean coasts available to both navigation and crusading geography.

2 maps in the collection

Martin Waldseemüller

AD 1470 – AD 1520

Saint-Dié-des-Vosges

German cartographer whose 1507 world map was the first to apply the name "America" to the New World, honouring Amerigo Vespucci.

1 map in the collection