description Pietro Vesconte Overview
Pietro Vesconte was a Genoese cartographer active during the late 13th and early 14th centuries, specifically documented between 1310 and 1330. Working primarily in Venice and Genoa, he is recognized as one of the earliest known professional mapmakers to produce signed and dated works. His surviving output includes highly accurate portolan charts of the Mediterranean Sea and some of the earliest known nautical atlases.
help Pietro Vesconte FAQ
What makes Pietro Vesconte's charts identifiable?
His surviving portolan charts combine carefully drawn Mediterranean and Black Sea coastlines with dense place-names and networks of directional lines. Several works are signed or dated, including a chart bearing his name and the year 1311.
What is a portolan chart?
A portolan is a nautical chart centered on coastlines, ports, islands, and compass directions useful to Mediterranean navigation. Unlike many medieval world maps, it gives practical coastal geometry much greater priority than biblical or symbolic geography.
Did Vesconte work in Genoa or Venice?
Evidence places him in Genoa early in his career and later in Venice. A French national-library record describes him as documented in Genoa from 1311 to 1313 and in Venice from 1318 into the 1320s.
Why did Vesconte make maps for Marino Sanudo?
Vesconte supplied maps for Sanudo's Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis, a work advocating renewed crusading strategy. Those illustrations extended his coastal chartmaking into regional maps and a broader mappa mundi.
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