Vincenzo Coronelli (August 16, 1650 – December 9, 1718) was a Franciscan friar, cosmographer, cartographer, publisher, and encyclopedist known in particular for his atlases and globes. He spent most of his life in Venice. He produced celestial and terrestrial globes of different sizes and was one of the leading representatives of Italian globemaking art. His more noteworthy productions include the two entirely manuscript globes of about four meters in diameter built for Louis XIV (1638-1715), King of France. He drew many geographic maps published in atlases including the Atlante veneto (Venice, 1691) and the Isolario (1696-98). In about 1684, he founded the Accademia Cosmografica degli Argonauti in Venice. But Coronelli was not only a mapmaker. In fact, he took an interest in many areas of science. A fairly well known figure across Europe, he played a lively part in the scientific discussions over the astronomical discoveries of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727). He was also a friend of eminent scientists of his day such as Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and Giovanni Domenico Cassini (1625-1712). [Museo Galileo – Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence (Italy)]
Coronelli was the first globe-maker to produce an atlas of globes. Such was his Libro dei Globi, first published in 1697. Within the covers of a book he provided a record of all the globes he had made, from the smallest, the 2-inch printed globes, to the largest, the 15-foot MS globes made in Paris and presented in 1583 to King Louis XIV of France. The Libro dei Globi thus combined the two cartographic art-forms in which Coronelli excelled, the atlas and the globe. [H. Wallis. Coronelli’s Libro dei Globi. British Museum, London, 1969]
In the present celestial globe, the gores for the 15-foot version were scanned at high resolution and reduced to form a 15 cm diameter globe. A blue background and a yellow color to the stars were added.
This celestial globe is part of the project “Remaking the Heavens“.
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