Beautiful terrestrial globe from 1515

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The beautiful terrestrial globe from 1515 in the Historical Museum in Frankfurt am Main is one of the two oldest surviving globes on which the southern half of the New World is depicted and named " America ". The globe was identified in the Frankfurt City Library in 1891 as a work by the pastor, mathematician, astronomer, cartographer and cosmographer Johannes Schöner . The city library handed it over to the Historical Museum, which included it in its holdings on August 8, 1891 under inventory number X14610 and which today counts it among its most important exhibits in terms of cultural history. The second copy is in the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar under inventory number EI 125 .

history

Emergence

Johannes Schöner, engraving from the 17th century

Johann Schöner, who made earth and celestial globes in Bamberg, was a student of the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller . Already in 1507 he had made a world map and a globe on which the name "America" ​​was recorded for the first time. Schöne owned the copy of the world map that is on display today in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC . On this basis, Schöner made the earth globes from 1515. To do this, he used the printing workshop he had set up in Bamberg. The printing of globe segment maps allowed relatively inexpensive series production. In contrast to Waldseemüller's globes, which only exist in the form of such segment maps, those of Schöners have survived to this day.

Possible acquisition by Frankfurt

It is not known who bought one of the Schöner earth globes for Frankfurt and why. The city council comes into consideration as a buyer if one takes into account a similar purchase act in Nuremberg . The local council commissioned a globe from Martin Behaim in 1492 , which he paid for in 1494 with 24 guilders . It is documented from 1510 that this globe was set up in a representation room of the town hall. It could have been the same in Frankfurt. It may have played a role here that many councilors were merchants who carried out long-distance trade and were interested in the geographical knowledge of their time.

The globe was probably acquired at the Frankfurt trade fair soon after 1515 , because it was usually the place in the empire where merchants first offered new products of this type. This was also the case, for example, with the Gutenberg Bible documented there in 1455 . The price for the globe is likely to have been comparatively low, as it was the first time that it was a series product of this type produced by printing technology - unlike the beautiful earth globe from 1520 in Nuremberg , which is a hand-painted unique specimen. The globe from 1515 reached the Frankfurt City Library sometime before 1747. This is the oldest collection institution in the city and was created in 1529 by merging the council library and the library of the closed Barefoot Monastery .

Publications

Probably the first mention of the globe can be found in the “Description of the current state of the city of Frankfurt am Mayn” written by Johann Bernhard Müller in 1747 . On page 184, in the representation of the city library, it says: “This large library is incomparably well divided and set up in a covered hall; The cupboards in which the books stand are well made, and provided with doors with brass dots, above you can see various paintings with inscriptions that are directed to the genre of the books. The founders and admirers of them, as well as other scholars, are seen painted in bust portraits, and at the entrance, inside which the portrait of the famous Zum Junge is painted in life-size, one notices two beautiful globos, and various other remarkable things. ” With one of the two globes mentioned could have been that of 1515.

The first scientific description of the Frankfurt globe was made in 1854 by Edmé François Jomard , Napoleon's engineer-geographer and editor of the "Description de l´Egypte". In his “Monuments de la geographie, ou recueil d ´anciennes cartes Européennes et Orientales, accompagnées des spheres terrestres et célestres depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu`à l`époque d´Ortélius et de Gérard Mercator” , published at 21 Maps on 50 plates in eight parts, Paris 1842–1862, under no. 15/16 a facsimile map . Jomard noted on the globe: “Globe terrestre de la 1re moitié du XVI. siècle, conservé à Francfort sur le Mein. "(After Wieser 1881, p. 22)

The geographer Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld , who was the first to cross the Northeast Passage in 1878/79 , took over the images of Jomard in his large “Facsimile Atlas” (Nordenskjöld 77-79 and Fig. 46 / Northern Hemisphere and Fig. 47 / Southern Hemisphere) in 1889. The Frankfurt geographer Ernst Vatter dedicated a major treatise to the globe in 1937.

More recently, the American cartography historian Chet Van Duzer has compiled a complete transcription and commentary of all the toponyms and legends of the Beautiful Earth Globe from 1515. In this context, he examined its philological, cartographic, pictorial and graphic models and presented the relationships between Schoener's work contemporary maps, globes and books.

Identification as Schöner's work

The assignment of the two globes for Frankfurt and Weimar to Johannes Schöner and their dating to the year 1515 is the achievement of the Austrian geographer Franz Ritter von Wieser . For the publication of his globe, Schöner had an accompanying document printed under the title “Luculentissima quaedam terrae totius descriptio, cum multus utilissimis Cosmographiae iniciis etc.”, which appeared in Nuremberg in 1515. Schöne speaks of globus noster cosmographicus several times. Wieser determined that they belonged to the terrestrial globe and concluded: “This globe (Schöners) from 1515 was previously considered lost. I am in the pleasant position of being able to name two copies of the same, both of which were known for a long time, but not recognized. One copy is in Frankfurt aM. The second copy is kept in the military library in Weimar. ” (Wieser 1881, p. 21f.) In Figure II, Wieser draws a drawing of the western hemisphere, ie from 180 to 360 degrees Beautiful globe from 1515 onwards. A simplified representation of this map appeared in Kretschmer's 1892 anniversary atlas for the discovery of America. (Kretschmer 1892, Plate XI, No. 4).

exhibition

The Historical Museum Frankfurt presented the globe in 1997 in the exhibition "Earth, Sun, Moon & Stars" curated by Reinhard Glasemann. Since August 2012, Johannes Scher's terrestrial globe has been on display again in the permanent exhibition of the Frankfurt Historical Museum. Today it is located on level 2 of the new exhibition building that opened in 2017. The successor product, the beautiful earth globe from 1520 , is exhibited in the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg next to the Behaim globe from 1492.

description

The twelve colored woodcut segments of the globe are glued onto a sphere 27 cm in diameter. The prime meridian runs vertically through the Cape Verde Islands . The 180 degree meridian is drawn in broadly and bears the number of degrees, as does the southern polar circle . The tropics consist of double lines filled with red. Longitudes from zero to 360 degrees are 15 degrees apart. The longitude with the latitude label runs as a thick, light double line between Japan and North America between 270 and 285 degrees. The latitudes are marked and labeled every 10 degrees. The vertical line of the degree fields runs next to it. The counting of the longitudes is in intervals of 15 degrees on the southern polar circle. The equator also consists of degree fields, of which 15 are colored alternately in black and white and 15 in black and red. The tropics and the arctic circles are shown as striking double lines with a light reddish interior.

The Frankfurt beautiful earth globe from 1515 stands on a three-legged red painted wooden frame with curved feet. The frame carries a horizontal circle that goes up to half the diameter. On this there are small remains of printed woodcuts depicting the cardinal points and winds. On the knob of the frame there is a perpendicular, inclined brass axis. It is a rotatable meridian circle of brass secured with graduation, on which the ball rests.

Overall, the surface is very well preserved and easy to read. A long, repaired damaged area begins in Norway , runs over Germany through the Mediterranean Sea to eastern Morocco, crosses West Africa , goes southwest over the South Atlantic to the area of Rio de Janeiro and makes an arc to the east. The basic color of the globe is gray-green. Clear black outlines separate the sea from the land, with the mainland appearing lighter. Mountains are shown in red, rivers and lakes in blue. The sea and larger lakes have wavy lines.

literature

  • Edme Francois Jomard, Monuments de la geographie ou recueil d´anciennes cartes , Paris 1842–1862.
  • Franz von Wieser , Magalhaes-Strasse and Austral-Continent on the globes of Johannes Schöner , Innsbruck 1881.
  • Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, Facsimile-Atlas to the early History of Cartography , Stockholm 1889, Figs. 46 and 47.
  • Ernst Vatter, The globe of Johannes Schöner from 1515 from the property of the Frankfurt City Library . In: Frankfurter Geographische Hefte 11, 1937, pp. 160–179.
  • Konrad Kretschmer, The historical maps for the discovery of America , Berlin 1892, revised reprint Frankfurt 1991.
  • AMERICA. The early image of the new world . Exhibition catalog Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München 1992, pp. 145–149.
  • Norbert Holst, Mundus - Mirabilia - Mentality. Worldview and sources of the cartographer Johannes Schöner . A search for clues . Frankfurt / Oder and Bamberg 1999.
  • Reinhard Glasemann, Earth, Sun, Moon & Stars. Sundials and astronomical instruments . Exhibition catalog Historisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt 1999
  • Chet Van Duzer, The Cartography, Geography, and Hydrography of the Southern Ring Continent, 1515-1763 . In: Orbis Terrarum 8, 2002, 115-158.
  • Chet Van Duzer, Johann Schoener's Globe of 1515. Transcription and Study , Philadelphia 2010.