You might have a globe in your office, or remember one from a school classroom. If this has reminded you that you’d like to have a globe, they’re easily available and not particular expensive, since they’re mass produced, small enough to easily ship, and relatively popular. You can even get an inflatable one.
None of that was true of globes back in the 1600s in Europe; globes existed, but they were handmade, rare, and would have been extremely expensive if they were sold at all. Vincenzo Coronelli was born August 16, 1650 in Venice (well probably in Venice), and became a mapmaker and constructor of celebrated globes. You can still see some of them in museums; some of them weigh more than 2 tons, and were made for people like King Louis XIV and the Duke of Parma. In those days, you had to really be somebody to have a globe. And don’t forget, Europeans in the 1600s still didn’t know much about large areas of the world, so even if you had a globe you couldn’t (or at least you shouldn’t) rely on it to tell you everything about the geography of the world.
Coronelli was the fifth son born to a tailor, and when he was ten was sent to another city, Ravenna, to be an apprentice to a “xylographer.” That’s a print maker who uses woodcut reliefs as originals. Nobody knows what his experience was like with the print maker, but just three years later he joined a monastery to become a novice Franciscan monk. One of the advantages of being a Franciscan monk was education, and Coronelli was an exceptional student. He began publishing his own treatises by 16, and eventually published at least 140 of them. At 22 his order sent him to Rome to study theology, where he earned a doctoral degree. He also studied astronomy and geometry, and within a few years — possibly remembering some of his xylographic training — he started working as a geographer. His first globe was five feet in diameter and built for the Duke of Parma in 1678. The Duke liked the first one so much that he commissioned a second one, a “celestial globe” that showed the constellations.
The Duke then appointed Coronelli to be his personal theologian, a job that suited Coronelli so well that thanks to his publishing (and probably whatever else a personal theologian does), he was appointed the “Father General” of the whole Franciscan order in 1699. He returned to Venice in 1705 and became a publisher, printing atlases and maps, as well as the Biblioteca Universale Sacro-Profana, which was an early encyclopedia. Somewhat unusually for the time, its entries were alphabetized.
Coronelli founded Europe’s first geographical society, and was named the “Cosmographer of the Republic of Venice.” He seems to have had a knack for getting jobs that nowadays seem slightly puzzling; it’s no more clear why Venice needed a cosmographer than why the Duke of Parma needed his own theologian.
Some of Coronelli’s globes can be viewed in museums in various European countries, and there are a couple in museums in Texas as well. He also created hundreds of maps, and many of those also survive. So do some of the books he wrote, although you have to be able to read Latin to get anything out of them. There’s even an international society devoted to the study of globes, and it’s called the International Coronelli Society. Coronelli’s globes are still works of art, but you’d better not use them for navigation — any area of the world that wasn’t yet fully explored contains lovely paintings, often including a portrait of the nobleman who commissioned the globe. But now that we have satellite imagery, we’re pretty sure there isn’t a thousand-mile-wide picture of Louis XIV in the southern ocean.
