Colored as its Creators intended: Painted maps in the 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’

Abstract

The article examines all of the extant hand-colored exemplars of the 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, whose maps were made by Martin Waldseemüller, in an effort to identify the coloring scheme intended by the creators of the edition. Almost half of the existing exemplars were found to have essentially the same coloring scheme. Further, some remarks made by Waldseemüller about the coloring of maps, as well as some experiments with color printing of maps in the 1513 edition of Ptolemy, allow the identification of this scheme as the workshop scheme. The results shed light not only on Waldseemüller’s workshop practices and early modern handcoloring techniques, but also on the cartographic and aesthetic philosophy behind the coloring of these maps.

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