PTOLEMY.
[From Reusner's Icones.]
The portolanos, however, never lost their importance. Nordenskiöld says that, from the great number of them still extant in Italy, we may deduce that they had a greater circulation during the sixteenth century than printed cartographical works. About five hundred of these sea-charts are known in Italian libraries, and the greater proportion of them are of Italian origin.
Latin text of Ptolemy.
The Donis maps.
It is a composite Latin text, brought into final shape by Jacobus Angelus not far from 1400-1410, which was the basis of the early printed editions of Ptolemy. This version was for a while circulated in manuscript, sometimes with copies of the maps of the Old World having a Latinized nomenclature; and the public libraries of Europe contain here and there specimens of these early copies, one of which it is thought was known to Pierre d'Ailly. It is a question if Angelus supplied the maps which accompanied these early manuscripts, and which got into the Bologna edition of 1462 (wrongly dated for 1472), and into the metrical version of Berlingièri. These maps, whether always the same in the early manuscripts or not, were later superseded by a new set of maps made by a German cartographer, Nicolaus Donis, which he added to a revision of Angelus's Latin text. These later maps were close copies of the original Greek maps, and were accompanied by others of a similar workmanship, which represented better knowledge than the Greeks had. In 1478 these Donis maps were first engraved on copper, and were used in the later editions of 1490, and slightly corrected in those of 1507 and 1508. The engravers were Schweinheim and Buckinck, and their work, following copies of it in the edition of 1490, has been admirably reproduced in The Facsimile Atlas of Nordenskiöld (Stockholm, 1889).
DONIS, 1482.
Greenland in maps.
Meanwhile, editions of the text of Angelus had been issued at Ulm in 1482, and giving additions in 1486, with woodcut maps, the same in both issues on a different projection, assigned to Dominus Nicolaus Germanus, who had, according to Nordenskiöld, completed the manuscript fifteen years earlier. It is significant, perhaps, of the slowness with which the bruit of Portuguese discoveries to the south had traveled that there is in the maps of Africa no extension of Ptolemy's knowledge. But if they are deficient in the south, they are remarkable in the north for showing the coming America in a delineation of Greenland, which, as we have already pointed out, was no new object in the manuscript portolanos, even as far back as the early part of the same century.