An Updated Astrological Calendar from 1544 – Western Hemisphere

An Updated Astrological Calendar from 1544 – Western Hemisphere
|| 7/8/2007 || 12:40 pm || Comments Off on An Updated Astrological Calendar from 1544 – Western Hemisphere || ||

This morning I was looking through the digital collection of maps at the Geography & Mapping Division of the Library of Congress and found this astrological calendar on the 4th page of a Battista Agnese atlas published in 1544 (citation after the fold).

The calendar is built on two concentric circles; the inner circle depicts the Gregorian calendar and the outer circle shows the Zodiac calendar. According to the Wikipedia entry, the Gregorian calendar was not adopted for another 38 years after the atlas was published.

In the original drawing (below) the center of the astrological calendar was a very tiny earth. I believe it was drawn to show the earth’s celestial relationship to the seasons, and while the scale is off, the coloring is surprisingly accurate. By adding the satellite image over top of the original I gave it an update 463 years in the making.

View the Interactive & Original version:

Press + to zoom in!

The Original:

From the Library of Congress:

Agnese Atlas
Between 1536 and 1564 an enterprising Genoese chartmaker, Battista Agnese, produced in Venice a number of remarkably accurate and beautifully decorated nautical or “portolan” atlases on vellum for merchant princes and ranking officials. A version of this oval world map appeared in each of the seventy-one such atlases that have survived.

Agnese liked to show new discoveries and explorations of his maps, and this one includes the route that Magellan took around the world, inscribed in pure silver that later tarnished. He also traced, in pure gold, the route from Cadiz, Spain, to Peru, with overland portage across the Isthmus of Panama. This was the route of the treasure ships — heavily armed galleons that carried vast amounts of silver from Peru to Spain.

On the Agnese map continents are in yellow and green watercolors, mountains in brown, white, and silver, rivers (including the legendary sources on the Nile) in blue, and the Red Sea and Gulf of California in red. (In 1539 the explorer Francisco de Ulloa, noting that the water in the Gulf of California had a reddish tint, named it the Vermilion Sea to distinguish it form the Red Sea.)

In the blue-and-gold clouds surrounding the oval world are cherubs, or wind heads, representing the classical twelve-point winds from which modern compass directions evolved. The symbolic treatment of winds first occurred in world maps of the tenth century on which the windblowers are portrayed as human figures seated on Aeolus bags. With one hand they hold trumpets or horns, and with the other they squeeze the wind out of the bags. This symbolism was at least as old as Homer, who wrote of Aeolus, the son of Hippotes, god and father of the winds and ruler of the island of Aeolia. Figures of old men, cherubs, or angels as windblowers, with or without Aeolus bags, were popular illustrations on maps up to the eighteenth century. In some cases the facial expression and size of the blast emerging from the mouth told a great deal about the wind, without further explanation.

The portolan atlas containing this world map was drawn in Venice in 1543-44. It was originally prepared for and dedicated to Hieronimus Ruffault, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of St. Vaast and St. Adrian in Arras, a French city of Gallo-Roman origin. The map is also known to have been in the library of the old Hanseatic League town of Wernigerode, Germany, in 1916, to have subsequently been offered for sale by Otto Lange in Florence, and to have been in the possession of Lathrop Harper in New York. It was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1943.

Bibliography:

Agnese Atlas
[Portolan atlas of 9 charts and a world map, etc. Dedicated to Hieronymus Ruffault, Abbot of St. Vaast].

Agnese, Battista, 16th cent.

CREATED/PUBLISHED
[ca. 1544]

NOTES
Manuscript, pen-and-ink and watercolor, on vellum.

REPOSITORY
Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20540-4650 USA

CALL NUMBER
G1001 .A4 1544