Carte nautiche nell’antichità?: una discussione fra Cinque e Seicento

• Autores: Pietro Janni
• Localización: Geografía y cartografía de la Antigüedad al Renacimiento: estudios en honor de Francesco Prontera / Encarnación Castro Páez (ed. lit.), Gonzalo Cruz Andreotti (ed. lit.), 2020, ISBN 978-84-18254-29-1, págs. 421-434
• Idioma: italiano
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Did the Ancients own and use nautical charts? The question has been much debated in our time, and today it sees the majority (although not the entirety) of scholars inclined to a negative answer: the sailors of Antiquity navigated with empirical means, far from any form of cartography. This discussion has a forgotten precedent in the controversy between two Italian authors at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the polygraph Girolamo Ruscelli (1518-1566) and the naval engineer Bartolomeo Crescenzio (his book Nautica mediterranea was published in 1607). Ruscelli was for the negative, and suggested (so interestingly preceding recent hypotheses) that the so-called ‘portolano cards’, the first reliable depictions of the Mediterranean, had been drawn with the aid of the compass, whose appearance coincides with that of the cards; Crescenzio argued, with arguments unacceptable for the modern historical thought, that the nautical charts, and the compass too, existed in Antiquity, relying on two passages of Plautus.