Visconte Maggiolo

Visconte Maggiolo (1478 – after 1549), also spelled Maiollo and Maiolo, was a Genoese cartographer.

He was born in Genoa and maybe he was a fellow sailor of explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano. In 1511 he moved to Naples, where he produced three extant nautical atlases.^[2] Some historians say that he died of malaria in 1530; but archival documents show that he was still alive, in Genoa, at least in 1549, although he certainly was already dead in 1561.^[3]

In 1527, he created a map depicting Verrazzano's travels. This map had a major error (the eponymous "Verrazzano Sea" and "Verrazzano Isthmus", which depicted a large sea, believed to be the Pacific Ocean, across a narrow isthmus on the eastern coast of North America) as Verrazzano did not accurately describe the North American continent.^[4] This error continued to show up in maps for over a century. A copy of this 1527 map was destroyed during World War II.^[5]

There are numerous portolan charts, atlases and at least two other world maps made by Vesconte Maggiolo: one dated Genoa, 1531;^[6] another kept at a public library in Treviso (in Italian), is dated Genoa, 1549.

Although he specialized in the mapping of the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea, Maggiolo was the first to report in his atlas of 1548 the toponym of the South American river Rio de Amaxones,^[7] or the evidence of the pre-columbian Newport Tower in his 1516 atlas.^[8]

• 
  Italy, western Sicily and the Adriatic coast
• 
  North Africa, Europe and part of Asia
• 
  Africa, Asia, Europe and part of the New World
• 
  Atlantic coast of Africa and Europe, the British Isles, and Iceland
• 
  Cosmographical planisphere, with Africa, Asia, and Europe in the center
• 
  Dedication leaf and map of Corsica
• 
  Greek Islands and the Aegean Sea
• 
  West coast of Africa, including Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé, Príncipe, and Annobón
• 
  Western Mediterranean
• 
  Western hemisphere

• Egerton 2803 maps, portolan atlas attributed to Maggiolo

Notes

Bibliography

• Navigazione e carte nautiche nei secoli XIII-XVI, Genova, SAGEP, 1983.
• Corradino Astengo, Der genuesische Kartograph V. M. und sein Werk, in ‘’Cartographica Helvetica’’, 1996, n. 13, pp. 9-17.
• Corradino Astengo, La cartografia nautica mediterranea dei secoli XVI e XVII, Genova 2000, pp. 80-88 e 149-192.
• Corradino Astengo, "The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean", in The History of Cartography, Volume Three (Part 1): Cartography in the European Renaissance, Edited by David Woodward, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 174-262.
• Corradino Astengo, "Vesconte Maggiolo (alias Vesconte de Maiolo, Vesconte de Maiollo", in Cartografi in Liguria (secoli XIV-XIX) a cura di Massimo Quaini, Genova, Brigati, 2007, pp. 72–75.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Vesconte Maggiolo.

• Map of the World by Viconte di Maiollo, 1527, 1905 facsimile from the Old Maps Collection.
• Portolan Chart, 1516 at The Huntington Library
• Portolan atlas/Vesconte de Maiolo ciuis Janue conposuy, 1511 at the John Carter Brown Library.