The Venetian Atlas is a recently rediscovered work of the 14th-century Genoese cartographer Petrus Vesconte, thought to have been completed towards the end of his Venetian period (c. 1330). Though the geographer has long been renowned for the accuracy of his nautical maps of the Mediterranean and Black seas, this long-lost portolan chart is... See more

Cartographers have been grappling with their own epistemological barrens. Medieval and Renaissance mapmakers famously demarcated the edges of the discovered world with mythical sea creatures that embodied the limits of exploration and knowledge. As historian Chet Van Duzer argues, those monsters represented a variety of epistemological... See more