Fra Mauro map (1450)

Made around 1450 by the Italian monk Fra Mauro (died 1460), it is a circular planisphere drawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame, about two metres in diameter. This map was discovered in the monastery of St. Michael in Isola, Murano, where the Camaldolese cartographer had his studio, and is now located in the final room of the Sale Monumenti in Venice, in the Museo Correr. A number of historians of cartography, starting with Giacinto Placido Zurla (1806) studied Fra Mauro's map.

As was generally the case among Medieval scholars, Fra Mauro regarded the world as a sphere. However, he used the convention of describing the continents surrounded by water within the shape of a disc, but had no certainty about the size of the Earth. The depiction of inhabited places and mountains, the map's chorography is also an important feature. Castles and cities are identified by pictorial glyphs representing turreted castles or walled towns, distinguished in order of their importance. The Fra Mauro map is one of the first Western maps to represent the islands of Japan. A part of Japan, probably Kyūshū, appears below the island of Java, with the legend "Isola de Cimpagu" (a misspelling of Cipangu).

The Fra Mauro map is unusual, but typical of Fra Mauro's portolan charts, in that its orientation is with the south at the top, one of the usual conventions of Muslim maps, in contrast with the Ptolemy map which has the north at the top. However, here is shown inverted according to the modern North-South orientation for better understanding.