Cantino planisphere

The Cantino planisphere or Cantino world map is the earliest surviving map showing Portuguese geographic discoveries in the east and west. It is named after Alberto Cantino, an agent for the Duke of Ferrara, who successfully smuggled it from Portugal to Italy in 1502. The map is particularly notable for portraying a fragmentary record of the Brazilian coast, which the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral explored in 1500, and for depicting the African coast of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a remarkable accuracy and detail. It was valuable at the beginning of the sixteenth century because it showed detailed and up-to-date strategic information in a time when geographic knowledge of the world was growing at a fast pace. It contains unique historical information about the maritime exploration and the evolution of nautical cartography. The Cantino planisphere is the earliest extant nautical chart where places (in Africa and parts of Brazil and India) are depicted according to their astronomically observed latitudes.

In the beginning of the 16th century, Lisbon was a buzzing metropolis where people from diverse backgrounds came in search of work, glory or fortune. There were also many undercover agents looking for the secrets brought by the Portuguese voyages to remote lands. Among them was Alberto Cantino, who was sent to Portugal by Ercole I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, with the formal intention of horse trading, while secretly collecting information on Portuguese Discoveries. Cantino’s diligence is shown in two of his letters to the Duke, dated from 17 and 18 October 1501, where he describes, amongst other things, hearing Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real detailing his latest voyage to Newfoundland (Terra Nova) to King Manuel I.

A popular theory, introduced in the earliest studies of the map, suggests that the Cantino Planisphere was ordered to an official Portuguese mapmaker, who made a copy of the royal cartographic pattern, the so-called Padrão Real, kept in the Armazéns da Índia. However, there is no historical evidence that such order was ever made and the theory is weakened by the presence of numerous mistakes. One would expect a carefully made copy of an official standard, if it existed in Portugal at that time, would be accurate. A more plausible explanation is that the map was surreptitiously acquired shortly after it was made for some nobleman or official client. From a letter sent by Cantino to its patron, the Duke of Ferrara, on 19 November 1502, we know that he paid 12 golden ducats for it, which was a considerable amount for the time. An Italian inscription in the back of the map reads: Carta de navigar per le Isole nouam trovate in le parte de India: dono Alberto Cantino al S. Duca Hercole, which translates as 'Navigational chart of the islands recently [discovered]... in part of the Indies: from Alberto Cantino to Duke Hercole'.

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