1769270083Code 8236a Terrestrial GlobeTabletop terrestrial globe, crafted according to the knowledge of Giovanni Maria Cassini (Venice 1745 – Rome 1824), a cleric regular of the Somaschi Fathers, an order proposed in Venice in 1525 and founded in Somasca, Lombardy, in 1532.
The globe was updated and reprinted according to the latest discoveries in 1843 by Calcografia Camerale, the papal publishing house, at a time when numerous colonial borders were being redrawn, new explorations in Oceania and Africa were taking place, and new geographical names were beginning to appear. This makes the globe even more interesting as a historical document, as it demonstrates the evolution of cartography in the first half of the 19th century.
Composed of twelve spindles and two polar caps, copper-engraved on paper and applied to a plaster and papier-mâché support, hand-colored, and placed on an octagonal wooden pedestal.
Good condition, showing signs of use.
Measurements 50x50 cm – 19.7x19.7 inches.
Giovanni Maria Cassini, a geographer, cartographer, and astronomer, as well as an engraver and architectural designer, was one of the best disciples of the famous architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He began his career as a cartographer in 1787. He produced the engraved copper plates for his masterpiece, the "New Universal Geographical Atlas," between 1788 and 1791. Unlike all cartographers and geographers, who jealously guarded their plates to prevent them from being copied, Cassini, starting in 1792, began selling the spindles for the terrestrial and celestial globes within his Atlas, which the buyer could then customize by mounting them on bases of his choosing.
He was one of the last Italian spherographs of the eighteenth century, and his globes were a great success.
A member of the Somaschi Fathers, Cassini worked in Rome at the Calcografia Camerale, the large institution responsible for printing maps, globes, and scientific materials for the Papal States. His works are now considered among the most important Italian cartographic achievements of the time.
Humans have always desired to understand the world they live in and have used every means at their disposal to measure the space around them, continually expanding their knowledge. The conditions that allowed humans to develop models of the world and space likely arose only after thought had developed to the point of understanding that natural processes could be represented through models. Already in ancient Greece, naturalists had come to understand the Earth's sphericity and its suspended position in space.
The first recorded globe is the one attributed by Strabo, historian and geographer, to the Greek Crates of Mallo (c. 150 BC).
The first globes, constructed in the early 16th century under the impetus of great geographical explorations, immediately began to be used for educational purposes in princely courts, monasteries, and colleges. The globe later began to conquer universities and high schools.
In the 18th century, Didier Robert de Vaugondy, the official geographer of King Louis XV of France, thanks to his experience in globe construction, expanded the article “Globe” of the Encyclopédie by illustrating in detail the distinction between a celestial globe (which represents the concave surface of the sky with its constellations) and a terrestrial globe (which instead represents the surface of the Earth with its seas, islands, rivers, cities, etc.) and the techniques for making them: two papier-mâché hemispheres pressed and modeled on or inside a hemispherical mold, dried and strengthened on the inside with a wooden board, then glued and covered with a thin layer of plaster on which the globe’s meridians of areas between two meridians, generally twelve, were glued, made of paper previously printed by engraving on a copper plate and colored, each of which covered 30 degrees of longitude.
It was with the nineteenth century, marked by widespread trade, circulation, and the introduction of compulsory education, that the desire to explore distant lands increased, making the old method of globe construction inadequate. Printed globes from engraved plates were no longer sufficient, and the only real resource became lithography, which made it possible to print and promptly update maps that, with the growth of geographical discoveries in various countries, became increasingly obsolete.
