Pietro Vesconte


Pietro Vesconte was an Italian cartographer and geographer from the Republic of Genoa. A pioneer of the field of the portolan chart, he influenced Italian and Catalan mapmaking throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He appears to have been the first professional mapmaker to sign and date his works regularly.

Life

Although Vesconte was born in Genoa, he produced much of his work in Venice. He was active between 1310 and 1330, producing numerous maps. His nautical charts are among the earliest to map the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions accurately. He also produced progressively more accurate depictions of the coastlines of northern Europe, in particular that of Britain and, to a lesser extent, Ireland.
Pietro Vesconte's 1311 portolan chart of the east Mediterranean is the oldest signed and dated nautical chart that survives from the medieval period. He is also the author of at least four signed multi-sheet atlases, where the various sheets can be combined into a single nautical chart. There is also an atlas and a solitary portolan chart signed by "Perrino Vesconte", assumed to be either Pietro himself or possibly a younger relative member of his family using a diminutive form of 'Pietro'. The image of a mapmaker at work, which appears in a Vesconte atlas of 1318, may depict the chartmaker himself.
Pietro Vesconte brought his experience as a maker of portolans to bear on the mappa mundi he produced, which introduced a previously unheard of accuracy to the genre. He provided a world map, nautical atlas, a map of the Holy Land and plan of Acre and Jerusalem for inclusion in Marino Sanuto's Liber secretorum fidelium crucis, a work which aimed to encourage a new crusade. There are three known copies of Sanuto's Liber that include Vesconte's maps, only the first of which is signed; the latter two are confidently assumed to have been done by him, or at least under his direction.

Works by or attributed to Vesconte

The following works have been signed or attributed to Pietro Vesconte.