URBANO MONTE’S WORLD MAPS: SOURCES AND DEVELOPMENT

This articles provides a window into late sixteenth-century map production by discussing the distinctive features, the use of sources, and the changes over time in the world maps of 1587, 1590, and c. 1604 by the Milanese nobleman Urbano Monte (1544-1613). His maps were the largest non-mural maps of the sixteenth century, laid out on a north polar projection, and designed to be rotated about their centerpoint so as to facilitate viewing of the details of the maps despite their large size. Although the maps’ size might suggest that they were intended for nobles, the cartographer’s desired audience was in fact students. The maps are compilations of both images and texts from a wide variety of contemporary maps and geographical treatises, the products of library research rather than interviews with explorers. Some of the changes he made from his 1587 to his 1590 map were motivated by horror vacui, the fear of leaving blank spaces on his map. His c. 1604 printed map, which only exists in Monte’s proof copy, is an unpublishable mess, as Monte changed the projection he was using but did not alter the geography of his map accordingly.

In about 1567-68, Richard Hakluyt -the barrister who lived 1531-1591, cousin to and guardian of the famous writer about voyages of exploration who lived 1553-1619-wrote a letter to the cartographer Abraham Ortelius asking him to make a world map in a new format that he thought would be especially useful and convenient for lawyers, students, and citizens, and would sell better than any other type of map. 1 The elder Hakluyt was thus describing his conception of the ideal world map. One imagines that as far as circumstances and resources allowed, every world map was a realization of the cartographer's ideas about how such a map should be made, but we rarely find a passage where thoughts about the ideal form of a map are explicitly laid out in the early modern period. 2 Hakluyt proposed a large map that would be suitable both for display in a large hall and for consultation and study. 3 The map should be 12 feet (3.7 m) long and three or at most four feet high (91-122 cm), centered on the Prime Meridian through the Canary Islands, with 180° of longitude depicted in the six feet on either side of that center, and including the Arctic and Antarctic circles and "all the regions" in the north and south, presumably running to the poles. 4 At the left and right edges of the map would be smooth rods onto which the map could be rolled, so that it could be accommodated on a table three or four feet square. The meridians should be marked every three feet, so that one would always be visible when the map was thus displayed. Hakluyt thus found a way to make a very large world map, something that can be difficult to show in a way that all of the details can be appreciated, easy to study.
A couple of decades later the Milanese nobleman Urbano Monte (1544-1613) came up with a very different solution to the problem of how to make a large map readily viewable. Despite his noble status Monte never held public office, but instead occupied himself with scholarship, particularly history and cartography, with administering the family property, and with philanthropic endeavors. 5 In 1587 he completed a world map on sixty manuscript sheets that seems originally to have been accompanied by a geographical treatise. Those sheets were designed so that in each the map proper could be cut from its surrounding paper, and then all of the sheets assembled in rings to form a circular map on a north polar projection three meters in diameter (see illustration 1). In his geographical treatise, which survives in a manuscript from 1590, Monte explains how the map was to be mounted: Monte proceeds to give detailed instructions on how to assemble the sheets of the map, and indeed on each sheet there are notes indicating which sheet(s) should be above that sheet, and which below. The cartographer made sure that there was no way the map could be assembled incorrectly. The fact that the map was designed to be rotated means that the viewer could bring the part of the map he or she was  66-89. 6. "How the Sheets can be Arranged and Put Together to Make Them into a Complete World Map in the Shape of a Circle. First one has to order a board five braccia long and wide [2.975 m, or 9.76 feet], as will best please those who delight in this mappamundi, or a big canvas nailed over a frame made so that with a gnomon or knob one can support it and turn around (so that the mappamundi can be turned around for whoever wants to see every part of it closely), or on a board made of light planks that are flat so that the work does not fall off. In the middle of which a mark is written for the placing of a gnomon or knob to turn it around in order to indicate the pole of the mappamundi, which is where the top corner of the first triangular sheet should go, where is the part with the star that indicates the North Pole, which sheet is labeled the first... ". Biblioteca del Seminario arcivescovile de Venegono. FV.B-VII-56, f. 285r. This manuscript (from the 1590 manuscript of Monte's work) is discussed below. Regarding the dimensions, in Milan the measure of 1 braccio, in use before the adoption of the metric system, was equal to 0. interested in close for inspection, and all of the elements of the map, both the texts and the decorations, are oriented so as to be viewed looking from the outer edge of the map inward. The map is better suited to vertical display on a wall rather than horizontal: if it were displayed horizontally, there would be no good way for the viewer to see the parts of the world north of the equator, that is, in the center of the map. If the map were displayed vertically, with the viewer's eye more or less at the level of the equator, all of the map would be consultable. Monte's decision to make his huge map rotatable about its center as a way to make the details of the map -the many images and descriptive texts-accessible to the viewer is an unusual and probably original one.

The Three Manuscripts of Monte's Map
Monte's map survives in three manuscripts. The earliest is the 1587 autograph mauscript acquired by the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University in October 2017. 7 It seems that this manuscript originally contained Monte's geographical treatise Trattato universale, descrittione et sito de tutta la terra sinqui conosciuta ("Universal Treatise: Description and Site of All of the Land Thus Far Known") which was written to accompany the map. 8 In the Stanford manuscript the sheets of the map are all marked Libro terzo ("Third Book") at the top, indicating their place in the treatise, and the foliation indicates numbers of text pages missing between the sheets of the maps that exactly match the number of pages between the corresponding sheets of the map in the 1590 manuscript. The Stanford manuscript was Monte's working manuscript. It seems that Monte experimented with assembling the sheets in the rings that were to compose the wall map, presumably to make sure that they went together as he anticipated. He did this not by cutting the map sheets proper from their surrounding paper, but by folding under the right-hand edge of each map so that it would not cover the left-hand side of the adjoining sheet: those creases are still visible on the sheets. These experiments resulted in some changes: on sheet 55 of the 1587 manuscript a 7. The call number of the Rumsey Center manuscript is Stanford University. G1015 .M6 1587 F; highresolution images of all of the sheets of the map, as well as an image of the whole map with the sheets digitally assembled, are available at <https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/12184890>. centaur protrudes to the right beyond the edge of the map proper, but in the 1590 manuscript Monte moved it to the left so that it does not protrude.
Monte made other experiments with his 1587 manuscript. There are handwritten notes about things he considered adding to the map, for example on sheet 21, where he seems to have contemplated adding la narrative ("a descriptive text") and a couple of uno bussolo/un bussolo ("compass roses"). He also revised the geography in some parts of the map, and added the Great Wall of China to sheets 3 and 8. He did not add the Great Wall to the map in his 1590 manuscript, but it does appear on printed world maps that Monte made in 1603 and 1604, so it seems that he continued modifying the 1587 manuscript for many years. 9 The second surviving manuscript of Monte's map is the 1590 manuscript, also written in Monte's own hand, in the Biblioteca del Seminario arcivescovile di Venegono. 10 This manuscript includes Monte's Trattato universale, and seems to have been Monte's fair copy of his work. The map sheets in the Venegono manuscript are very similar to those in the 1587 manuscript, but Monte did make some changes. One of those changes is that he added decorative elements, particularly sea monsters and ships, to some of the maps, for example to sheets 21 and 36. He added these elements in order to reduce the amount of empty space in the oceans; that is to say, out of horror vacui. 11 The gratuitous nature of the added decorative elements is clear in comparing sheet 21 of the 1587 manuscript and the corresponding sheet of the 1590 manuscript (see illustrations 2 and 3). Indeed, Monte is quite candid that he added some decorative elements to his map just to fill space. For example, in his commentary on sheet 12 of the map he writes: 12. "Then, in order to fill with something this space in the sea on this map, I placed some galleys and ships, imagining there the armada of the King of Spain, the Fleet of the Indies, in whose midst I have In fact Monte's sensitivity to horror vacui developed over time: in making the 1590 version of his map he occasionally added sea monster or ships to areas he had come to decide were too sparsely decorated, for example in sheets 21 and 36.
The third surviving manuscript of Monte's work is in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and is dated 1590, but includes material as late as 1604. 13 The manuscript contains the hand-written text of Monte's Trattato universale, but printed sheets of his maps, so the great expense of engraving the plates to print his map was paid, but it seems that the map was never published. The reasons for the lack of an edition are not far to seek. Monte decided to change the projection of his map so that the geography south of the equator is organized into four lobes, and the map has 64 sheets instead of 60. 14 This entailed drastic changes to the plates and also extensive revisions of the text of the Trattato, so the manuscript is a mess. Not only are the revisions to the plates often visible, but Monte changed the projection without altering the map's geography; he moved meridians without moving the landmasses and islands with them. For example, in making his four lobes, the cartographer did not compress the eight islands that surround the South Pole into those lobes, but simply moved the meridians and cut away the parts of the islands and the oceans that were outside the lobes. These same desperate adjustments, and lacks of adjustments, are visible in Monte's single-sheet version of the map (see illustration 4). Monte was evidently eager to publish his work so that it could reach a broad audience, but given the bizarre, half-revised state in which he left his map plates, it is hard to imagine how there could be any path forward to that goal. On the backs of several of the map sheets in this manuscript there is offset -impressions of inked pages-from the same sheet of the map, which proves that more than one exemplar was printed of many of the sheets, 15 but we do not know what became of these other sheets.

Distinctive Characteristics of the Map
Monte's map, particularly when the sheets are digitally assembled into the whole as has been done by the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford, speaks to Monte's personality through the distinctive choices he made as a cartographer. The map's also placed a wheel of the winds.. large size sets it apart from contemporary works. The assembled map would not be as large as the late thirteenth-century Ebstorf mappamundi, which measured 358 x 356 cm (close to twelve feet by twelve feet), 16 and would not have been as large as the world maps in some of the Italian mural map programs of the sixteenth century, for example the mural map of the world by Giovanni Antonio Vanosino in the Sala del Mappamondo, Villa Farnese, Caprarola, completed in 1574. 17 But the map would have been larger than any of the printed wall maps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 18 Indeed, Monte was very conscious and proud of his map's special character: he ends his sonnet to the reader on sheet 42 of the map with the lines E in dubio stò se in opera d'inchiostro / unqua si Trovi un Tal nel secol nostro ("And I doubt whether among printed works / You will ever find such a map in our century").
The north polar projection is an unusual choice; not unprecedented, but it was used in a very small percentage of sixteenth-century maps. 19 The projection was first  Another distinctive feature of Monte's map that is connected with its northern polar projection, and perhaps to some extent with its rotatibility, is its southern continent. Many earlier sixteenth-century maps show a large southern continent that was a hypothetical construct, not based on any "pre-discovery" of Antarctica or Australia. 34 The configuration of Monte's continent is unusual: rather than being a continental landmass occupying the South Pole and the surrounding region, it is a ring of eight islands around the South Pole (see illustration 1). Similar rings of land or islands appear on earlier maps and globes, for example Johann Schöner's terrestrial globe of 1515, an anonymous world map of about 1530 added to a fifteenth-century manuscript of Ptolemy's Geography, and a world map in two hemispheres printed by Michele 32. Lorenzetti's rotating mappamundi is mentioned as a predecessor to Monte's in the Bonhams' catalog: 33. "And though one commonly sees world maps that are two, or three, or even four arms long or wide [4 braccia is 2.38 m or 7.8 feet]... Therefore which very lazy person (not a studious one) would be so dainty with regard to his eyes, and to his hands, that he would consider it a great inconvenience to lightly turn his eye, and to turn the globe very easily with the hand, in order to see it all, even if it was so big that ten men could not encircle it with their arms? Even if he were [so dainty], he would agree that in order to have it flat he would make a world map so long that if he wanted to see the whole thing, he would have to move not only his eye, but also his feet, his legs, and his whole body". Ptolemy Tramezzino in Venice in 1554. 35 Monte's ring of eight islands is different from what appears on other maps, and his north polar projection results in extreme exaggerations in the size of these islands that ring the South Pole, that is, near the outer edge of the map. Given the great visual emphasis that these choices place on these southern islands, we might expect that Monte would devote considerable space to them in the geographical treatise he wrote to accompany the map, but such is not the case.
Instead of a discourse on the evidence for the existence of these islands, on their imagined inhabitants, the climate there, and the resources -and on the map there are many depictions of people and animals in the islands-there are just a few brief passages in his geographical treatise where Monte offers vague descriptions of the inhabitants of some of these southern islands as being barbarous idolaters. 36 And there are just two brief passages in which he offers any reason for believing that the islands existed. In his commentary on sheet 36, which shows part of the 40. There is also a brief text on the map that mentions the discovery of parts of the islands on sheet 27: Terra de vista discoperta da Portughesi per fortuna ma non si fermorno ("Terra de Vista discovered by the There is a very revealing passage in Monte's commentary on sheet 32. 41 He is talking about Nova Guinea, which is one of his eight circumpolar islands, and his phrasing makes it clear that he was using d'Anania as a source. 42 D'Anania says that fu ritrovato questo paese, che gli è lungo di costa piu di due mille miglia , da Viglia Lopes Spagnuolo; essendo mandato l'anno quarantacinque dalla nuova Spagna à scoprire le Malucche, but Monte does not include this information in his text about the island. 43 This omission reveals that Monte had little interest in establishing a sound basis for believing that this ring of southern islands existed. As visually prominent as these southern islands are on the map, his interest lay elsewhere. Indeed, of the thirty-six triangularlyframed descriptive texts around the edge of the map -which are located very close to the southern islands-not one describes those islands; they instead describe lands and peoples closer to the center of the map.

A Cartouche and Monte's Iconographical Sources
As proud as he was of his map, and as keen as he was to make it visually impressive, Monte's artistic skills were rudimentary, and he was aware of this. In his commentary on sheet 29, he writes: ... dove non lasciaro di dire, che vi siano anche alcuni mostri marini di giovenile età, detti Tritoni e sirene de quali meglio ne pareria, se la mano del scrittore havesse nel dissegno in qualche minima parte fatto professione. 44 It was perhaps for this reason that of the many cartouches on the map that contain descriptive text, only one has an artistically elaborate border, and that is the one on sheet 42, which contains Monte's brief address to the viewer of the map (see illustration 5). 45 Cartographers often copied the designs of elaborate cartouches from Portuguese by chance, but they did not land there").  1558 (see illustration 6). 46 This map was one that appeared in atlases that in earlier literature were referred to as "Lafreri atlases" (after Antonio Lafreri, a publisher thought to be important in their production) and "Italian-Assembledto-Order" atlases. 47 It is not at all surprising that a cartographer working in Italy in the late sixteenth century would make use of maps from an Italian composite atlas, but Monte's use of one map from this cartographic milieu renders it more likely that he would have had access to others. In particular, Antonio Floriano's world map on a north polar projection -which appears in Italian composite atlases-becomes a particularly likely influence in Monte's choice of that projection; and Tramezzino's world map in two hemispheres -also present in some of those atlases-becomes a very likely source of Monte's ring of islands around the South Pole. 48 Another various texts from Gastaldi's map; for example, on Monte's sheet 27 there is a brief text about the alleged discovery of one his southern islands, Terra de vista discoperta da Portughesi per fortuna ma non si fermorno, and it is borrowed almost verbatim from Gastaldi; on both maps this text is directly south of Africa.

Some of Monte's Textual Sources
Monte created his map by bringing together information from a variety of sources, going through contemporary geographical texts and maps to find the sentences and texts that he felt would help him create a rich and detailed image of the world. 51 This process can be seen in the thirty-six triangular text blocks that Monte placed around the circular outer edge of the map proper. These texts describe peoples and places in the more central and densely inhabited parts of the map, and are located as far as possible beneath (i.e. south of) the region to which they apply.
In his Geography Ptolemy, Claudius placed the Prime Meridian through the Canary Islands just west of Africa and included in his world map 180° of longitude east of that line. Monte uses the same Prime Meridian in his map, and for the regions in the 180 degrees east of that line, he uses an edition of Ptolemy's Geography as the source of his descriptive texts -that is, he uses the an edition of the Geography for the eighteen descriptive texts at the edge of the map in its eastern hemisphere. Given that Ptolemy addressed the 180 degrees east of his Prime Meridian in his Geography, there is a logic in Monte's choice to use an edition of the Geography for his descriptive texts in that part of the map. At the same time, Monte was aware that Ptolemy's information was out of date, and rather than taking his descriptions from Ptolemy's text, he took them from modern supplementary texts that appear in Girolamo Ruscelli's translation and edition of the Geography, first published in 1561. 52 This edition contains the twenty-seven traditional Ptolemaic maps and thirty-seven modern maps; each of the maps, both ancient and modern, is accompanied by Ruscelli's supplementary descriptive text -and it is from these modern descriptive texts that Monte draws, sometimes bringing together sentences from different parts of one of the texts, and occasionally adding sentences of his own.
For example, Monte's text on his India, which text appears on sheet 50, runs as follows: For the texts at the outer edge of the map in the western hemisphere Monte switched to a different source, an ethnographic compendium written by Johannes Boemus that was first published in 1520 with the title Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus. 55 Monte was using an Italian edition that included Girolamo Giglio's description of the New World, and the earliest such edition was Gli costumi, le leggi, et l'usanze di tutte le genti: raccolte qui insieme da molti illustri scrittori (Venice: P. G. Giglio, e compagni, 1558). Boemus's book was the source of all of the edgeof-the-map descriptive texts in the western hemisphere except for four, namely those about Japan (on sheet 53), Xalisco (sheet 54), Mexico (sheet 54), and the Gulf of California (sheet 55). Monte had a particular interest in Japan -he wrote an account of a visit of Japanese ambassadors to Europe in 1584-86, and also published a separate map of Japan- 56 and the text at the edge of his map is condensed from the long text at the bottom of his printed map of Japan. 57 Monte's text about Xalisco comes from Francisco López de Gómara's Historia delle nuove Indie Occidentali, trans. Agostino di Cravaliz (Venice: Camillo Franceschini, 1576), ff. 289r-289v. 58 His texts about Mexico and the Gulf of California come from another work by López de Gómara, his Historia di don Ferdinando Cortes, trans. Agostino di Craualiz (Venice: Camillo Franceschini, 1576), ff. 110r-110v and 287v-288r respectively.
In a number of cases Monte could have chosen his descriptive text from a few of the works he was consulting. For example, there is information about the island of Hispaniola in Boemus, Ruscelli, and López de Gómara. 59 He chose Boemus as his source, and when he had such a choice he consistently selected Boemus as the source for the edge-of-the-map texts in the western hemisphere of his map.
Examining Monte's use of his iconographical and textual sources is revealing in terms of his methods for making his map: the map is a compilation, the product of library research rather than of interviews with explorers. The cartographer searched contemporary maps and geographical texts and borrowed from them the images and sentences that would help him create a new image of the world in a distinctive format that emphasized the features and details that he felt were most important.

Audience
It has been claimed that "Monte had envisioned his opus as gracing the walls of a Ducal Palace in Milan," 60 and indeed the large size of the assembled map seems to suggest that it was intended for a large wall, and thus a noble household. Another author has suggested that the map was made for Philip II of Spain, based on Monte's representation of Philip II on his throne in the Atlantic. 61 However, neither Milanese nobility nor Philip II was Monte's intended audience. One piece of evidence that Monte did not intend his map for a noble audience may be found in the central part of the map near the Prime Meridian where Monte places his address to the viewer of the map. On a manuscript map of this era cartographers would often paint the coat of arms of the person commissioning the map, and on a printed map would either have the symbol of their patron, or else would leave an area blank where the purchaser could have his symbol painted. Monte does no such thing: on sheet 25 he paints the Monte family coat of arms, with his own name in banners on either side of the blazon, and he affixed his own portrait below the cartouche on the adjacent sheet 42 that contains his address to the viewer (see illustration 7). 62 A noble would not be interested in a map that bore the coat of arms of another noble, and Monte certainly knew this.
Moreover, the title of Monte's geographical treatise clearly indicates that his intended audience was students. The treatise was removed from the 1587 manuscript at Stanford, and as a result there is no title page, but in long title of the 1590 manuscript in Venegono, Monte explains that he included the treatise with the map per magior intelligenza, et satisfatione de'studenti ("for the better understanding and satisfaction of students"). He includes the same phrase in the long title of his manuscript at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which also bears a date of 1590, but contains material as late as 1604, and numerous revisions, including on the title page -so if Monte had wanted to change this part of the title in the years after 1590, he would have. 63 The scholarly nature of Monte's work is also emphasized in some of the poems that Monte's colleagues wrote for the treatise. 64 Bernadino Baldini, a physician and mathematician whose publications included both poetry and a treatise on navigation, 65 writes: Qui Ptolemaeas sectatur, et expetit artes, / Hoc omni studio nobile verset opus ("He who eagerly follows and desires the Ptolemaic arts should peruse this noble work with great attention"). 66 And Bernadino Usper 67 titled his poem In Rudimenta Geografica urbani Montii, Dialogus Bernardini usper, ad Lectores ("A dialogue on the Elements of Geography of Urbano Monte by Bernardino Usper, for the readers"). The title that Usper ascribes to Monte's work, Elements of Geography, clearly indicates that he understood that the work had an educational function.

Conclusions
Monte's map brims with personality and is wonderfully engaging, but his project came to a sad end. He was unable to stop revising the work, and as a result, left the plates of the printed version of his map in a bizarre, half-revised state that was unpublishable. But he never stopped believing in the importance of his project, or indeed in his own importance. As mentioned above, Monte included his own coat of arms and a portrait of himself in that 1587 and 1590 manuscripts of his map, an unusual choice in an era when the patron's symbols were those usually added to maps. In his printed map in the Ambrosiana he also includes a portrait of himself, but in this case he places himself between images of the explorer Alvise Cadamosto and Homer, and his portrait is much larger and more elaborately framed than theirs (see illustration 8). It is difficult to know whether this excess of ego might be connected in some way with the difficulties his map project encountered in its later years. 68 illustration 1. digital composite of urbano monte's world map from the 1587 stanford manuscript (david rumsey map center, g1015. m6 1587 f). courtesy of the david rumsey map collection, david rumsey map center, stanford libraries.
illustration 2. sheet 21 of urbano monte's world map from the 1587 stanford manuscript; note the substantial blank area in the sea in the upper right. courtesy of the david rumsey map collection, david rumsey map center, stanford libraries.