Chet Van Duzer’s “New Light on Henricus Martellus’s World Map (c. 1491) at Yale: Multispectral Imaging and Early Renaissance Cartography”

Chet gives an account of a recent project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to make multispectral images of a world map made by Henricus Martellus in about 1491, held by the Beinecke Library at Yale.

This large map, one of the most important of the 15th century, was thought to have influenced Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507, but the many texts on the map were illegible due to fading and damage, and thus its exact place in Renaissance cartography was impossible to determine. The new multispectral images have rendered most of the previously illegible texts on the map legible. Chet  explains why the Martellus map was an excellent candidate for multispectral imaging, describes the process of making the images, and shows the results, and gives an account of the place of the Martellus map in late 15th- and early 16th-century cartography.”