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

Terra Australis (Latin for 'Southern Land') was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Its existence was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern... See more