Maps in History: Renaissance door maps in Florence

Dominating the Piazza della Signoria in the heart of Florence stands the massive fourteenth-century cubical town hall with a thin but 94-m tall clocktower. Here Dominican friar Ignazio Danti (1536–1586, Figure 1), a leading scholar-cum-artist of painted cartography, transformed a room into a treasure trove of Renaissance painted cartography. The sixteenth century was the city’s golden age but a turbulent period. In 1527, the Florentines for a second time drove out the ruling Medici family and re-established the republic, but already in 1532, the Pope and the Emperor helped to return the Medici as now hereditary Dukes of Tuscany. As a signal that his family’s reign was consolidated, Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–1573, reigned since 1537) in 1540 set up his official seat in the former town hall. When in the 1550s he moved into Palazzo Pitti on the other side of River Arno, his former residence continued to be used by his administration and became known as Palazzo Vecchio or ‘old palace’, a name that stuck. After moving across the river, Duke Cosimo I. in 1563 commissioned the artist, art historian and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), to remodel some of the second floors of the town hall. As part of this reconstruction, Vasari created a stately study chamber or ‘cabinet of curiosities’. These became popular features during the Renaissance to store and display in a semi-public court setting precious artifacts and thereby signal the learnedness of the owner. Upon Vasari’s advice, the Duke decided to store his collection of marvels from across the world in finely carved walnut cabinets reaching high up the walls. The objects were organized by region in huge square cupboards, the doors of which showing maps of the area of origin of the contained curios (Figure 2). In 1562, young friar Ignazio Danti, accomplished as an artist and cosmographer, joined a monastery in Florence. Already in the next year, he was commissioned to cartographically decorate Vasari’s cabinets in the new chamber for Cosimo’s collection of curiosities, which simultaneously was to serve the duke as a wardrobe. Until 1575, Danti constructed and painted in oil on wooden door panels the first 31 (of 57) regional or chorographic maps. These were based on prints by acclaimed mapmakers like Gastaldi, Mercator and Ortelius, who for the Old World regions often used contemporary updates to projections in Ptolemy’s second century AD Geographia. The last two dozen map panels were painted by Olivetan monk Stefano Bonsignori in 1575–1586. In addition to the map panels, Danti in 1564–1571 created a pair of a celestial and a terrestrial globe, both with a diameter of 210 cm, with a special turning mechanism that allowed the spheres to rotate effortlessly just by the tip of a finger. While Danti’s later and more famous murals at the Vatican (see the previous column) can be described as a