Claudius Ptolemy Claudii Ptholemaei Alexandrini Liber geographiae cum tabulis et vniuersali figura et cum additione locorum quae a recentioribus reperta sunt diligenti cura emendatus et impressus, Venice: Giacomo Penzio

Ilenia Maschietto

Printed book

Claudius Ptolemy was a Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer who lived in the 2nd century AD. His research laid the theoretical foundations for the study of mathematical geography. In the first part of the volume (the first 7 books), Ptolemy illustrates cartography methods based on a grid of latitudes and longitudes, and provides the coordinates of 6,345 localities. These elements were necessary for drafting the eighth and last book, which contains maps of the entire known inhabited world (the ecumene). The westernmost location consists in the Fortunate Isles, identified today as the Canary Islands, while to the east the descriptions reach the Indochinese peninsula.
The work on display is the first Venetian edition of the Geographia, in which latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates were first used to identify the position of places; some descriptions are approximate. The volume was printed by Giacomo Penzio in 1511 and is preserved in its original sixteenth-century binding.

References and Bibliography: EDIT16 CNCE 33660; SBN BVEE017805; Essling 1699; Dennis E. Rhodes, Catalogo del fondo librario antico della Fondazione Giorgio Cini, (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2011), p. 119; Mauro Bini [et al.], Alla scoperta del mondo: l’arte della cartografia da Tolomeo a Mercatore, introduction by Francesco Sicilia, (Modena: Il bulino, 2001); La vita nei libri: edizioni illustrate a stampa del Quattro e Cinquecento dalla Fondazione Giorgio Cini, catalog edited by Marino Zorzi and Mariano del Friuli, (Edizioni della Laguna, 2003), VII/2; Tammaro De Marinis, La legatura artistica in Italia nei secoli XV e XVI, (Florence: F.lli Alinari, 1960), vol. 2, p. 102, n. 1931, plate CCCLVII.