Fig. 110. Portrait of P. Vincenzo Coronelli.
More than four hundred maps were drawn, engraved, and printed by him in the Franciscan Convent located on one of the Venetian islands, and known as the Gran Casa del Frari, where he lived with other brothers of the Order. It was in this convent that Coronelli founded, in the year 1680, the first geographical society, to which he gave the name Accademia Cosmografo degli Argonauti,[90] which in its organization followed somewhat that of certain other learned societies owing their origin to the literary and scientific activities of the renaissance period. Its membership, in the course of years, included men of distinction in other cities of Italy and in the North; men famous for their achievements and for their interest in geographical science, literary men, men who held high rank in Europe’s aristocracy, cardinals, prelates, princes, and monarchs.[91] The society became one of the most active of the period, and the list of publications which issued from its press, each bearing the argonautic emblem or device—a ship on a terrestrial globe with the motto “Plus Ultra” (Fig. [111])—is a long one.[92]
Fig. 111. Emblem of the Venetian Accademia Cosmografica degli Argonauti.
So great had become the fame of Coronelli as early as the year 1685, that he was honored with the title Cosmografo della Serenissima Republica, and was granted an annual allowance of four hundred florins, and a copyright privilege protecting him in his right to print and publish any of his works for a period of twenty-five years.[93]
We have no definite information as to the circumstances attending Coronelli’s first interest in globe construction. It appears that his first work in this line, a pair of large manuscript globes, opened immediately to him a path to fame, for these had come to adorn the library of the Duke of Parma to whom the French Cardinal, d’Estrées, in the year 1680 had occasion to pay a visit and they immediately won the cardinal’s interest. A pair of such globes, thought he, for so runs the story, would be a source of great delight to His Majesty the French King, Louis XIV. Learning that the construction of still larger globes was altogether possible, but that their removal from Italy to France would be attended with great difficulty, he persuaded Coronelli to accept an invitation to take up a residence in Paris, there to direct the construction of a terrestrial and a celestial globe, sparing neither labor nor expense that they might be worthy of presentation to the Grand Monarch. If Olearius could construct a globe ten feet and more in diameter for Duke Frederick of Holstein, and Weigel one of similar dimensions for the demonstration of his theories, why, thought Coronelli, should I not undertake the preparation of those at least fifteen feet in diameter, which in all the details of globe construction should be made to surpass any that had hitherto been conceived? The author himself has given us the first though brief description of his completed work,[94] and the royal astronomer, La Hire, supplemented this description in his little volume published in the year 1704, when the globes had been placed in the Chateau Marly.[95] In the author’s own account he alludes to the globes as having been constructed at Paris under his direction, and by order of the Most Eminent Cardinal d’Estrées, for the service of His Most Christian Majesty. Great care was especially exercised in the construction of the machinery designed for the rotation of the spheres, the author being especially proud of the fact that, so delicate was this mechanism, each could be set in motion by a single finger. He further gives us to understand that each sphere was so well fashioned “one could design upon its surface all the degrees in the manner in which a turner designs any circle on a ball without having it removed from the turner’s lathe,” and that the material of which they were constructed was so solid and so well joined that each was able to sustain the weight of thirty men. Each was furnished with a door through which a considerable number of persons might enter at one time, their presence within affecting in no wise the solidity of construction. Each was covered with fine canvas so carefully laid on that none of the joints could be seen, giving a surface smooth as ivory. The meridian and horizon circles were of bronze, the whole being supported by columns which were richly ornamented. In the base, between the four columns supporting the meridian circles, large compasses were placed, being so designed as properly to indicate the needle’s declination.
On the celestial globe the greater and the lesser circles were represented in gilt bronze, and were so graduated for both latitude and longitude, ascension and declination, that it was made easy for an astronomer to pass from one co-ordinate to the other without the aid of trigonometry. On a fine background of ultramarine the several constellations with their respective figures were represented, each of the planets and fixed stars being gilded in order to give it due prominence. The author so designed his star map as to represent the appearance of the heavens at the time of the birth of the Grand Monarch,[96] as is told in the following dedication engraved on a brass tablet and attached to the surface of the sphere: “A l’Auguste Majesté de Louis le Grand l’Invincible, l’Heureux, le Sage, le Conquerant. Cesar Cardinal d’Estrées a consacré ce globe celeste, ou toutes les etoilles du firmament, et les planetes sont placées au lieu mesme, ou elles estoient a la naissance de ce Glorieux Monarque, afin de conserver a l’eternite une image fixe de cette heureuse disposition, sous laquelle la France a receu le plus grand present, que le ciel ait iamais fait a la terre. M.DC.LXXXIII.” “To His August Majesty Louis the Great, the Invincible, the Happy, the Wise, the Conquering. Cesar Cardinal d’Estrées has dedicated this celestial globe, on which all the stars of heaven and the planets are placed in the same position in which they were at the birth of the Glorious Monarch, in order to preserve throughout eternity a fixed image of that happy disposition under which France has received the most noble present which Heaven has ever made to earth.”