new+portulan+charts

=New portulan charts=

This small codex consists of five 295 x 392 mm parchment folios, stacked and glued at the spine to form a book that measures closed 300 x 205 mm, bound in dark brown leather, embossed with ornamental motifs that seem of the time. Its state of conservation is perfect and only the silver of some adornments is somewhat oxidized. Each leaf is framed by an oxblood colour box of about four millimetres in width. The first leaf contains a world map, the second displays the African Atlantic coast mainly, from Espartel to Green Cape; the other three are the quartering of the known as "portulano normal “, that includes the river basins of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, as well as the European Atlantic coast from Gibraltar to Jutlandia. Except for the first leaf, the other four display the same structure: the centre of each directive circumference of sixteen windroses of 282 millimetres of diameter. In each of those knots there are up to thirty and two winds or courses, although the crown lacks some tangent winds, being reduced to thirty. The first leaf includes a world map, where each hemisphere is represented by a 170 mm of diameter circle, in which they appear the parallels and meridians of 15º in 15º, besides the tropics and polar circles. The parallels are equidistant from the Equator straight lines and the meridians are circumference arcs that divide the Equator in equal parts. This projection was very used throughout the sixteenth century and still later, being one of the first using it. The meridian which is origin of the longitudes and that limits both hemispheres seems to be the one of Lanzarote. The map is <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">surrounded by eight illuminated wind-blowers. It is great merit of Joan Martines including in his maps, of <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">1562, the Straits of Anian to separate America from Asia when the best cartographers of the time continued <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">representing the New World as an Asian appendix.

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