Alfredo Valenzuela I Seville, (EFE).- From the egg of Columbus to the egg of Leonardo. At the London cartography fair in 2012, the researcher Stefaan Missinne acquired a globe engraved on an ostrich egg that he dated to Florence in 1504 and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and thus explains the significance of his finding to an audience of experts in the Archive of the Indies in Seville.
It is the first terrestrial globe that indicates the New World. Although it thus designates only South and Central America, next to which the islands of Cuba and the current Dominican Republic -“Isabel” and “Spagnola”, respectively- are neighbors to, a little further west, Japan -“Zipancri” -. Since North America was not yet known – Florida was discovered in 1513 -.
It is also the first balloon that reads “Brazil” and, as professor Missinne, a Belgian born in 1960 and living in Vienna, has assured EFE with a certain degree of pride, “all the balloons that decorate the bedrooms of schoolchildren around the world They are his sons.”
The “Leonardo’s Globe”, as Missinne revealed it in her book published in English in 2018 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing after six years of uninterrupted research, is made up of two joined halves of ostrich eggs.
The “Atlantic Codex”
In Leonardo’s time there was an ostrich farm in Pavia. And the artist himself drew several ostriches and their eggs on the pages of the so-called “Atlantic Codex”. While Pietro de la Francesca’s painting also shows an ostrich egg symbolizing “The birth of a son”.
It is also the first globe to record the current Germany as “Germania” and the profiles of Arabia – “Arabia Felix” -. And, among the many curiosities that it contains, it includes an island in the north, “Neufundlandia”. That it is not such but the easternmost part of present-day Canada, the only area of North America that was known then.
The globe is unique due to the many details that Missinne explained to a forum of historians and cartographers. Like the drawings of the mountains with which the ranges are indicated, which in the maps of the time are all the same, in Leonardo’s cartography they are “individual”. In other words, there is no one equal to another.
In the cartography of the Renaissance, real elements coexist with imaginary ones. And this is also the case in Leonardo’s Globe, where the southern tip of America -still unknown at the time- advances towards the East, entering the South Atlantic. While the Pacific coast -also still unknown- is an almost smooth line. Of which the geographical features of the Atlantic or known part are absent.
Also included on the globe is a drawing of a ship that Missinne has been able to document as being copied from another drawing of a ship contained in one of Leonardo’s personal library manuscripts. And another drawing of a sea monster that is the sum of several creatures, although the tail is unmistakably that of a whale.
The “mile” in Italian times
Leonardo’s Globe has a diameter of 11.2 centimeters and the engraving is dark. With its engraved lines painted black and a very dark blue, with a tint composed of magnesium and iron.
At a time when each Italian city understood a different measure for the concept “mile”, Missine has had to review Leonardo’s writings. And other maps of his until determining that his “mile” is equivalent to 1,280 meters.
In this way, the researcher has concluded that if the diameter of the planet is 7,000 miles -as Leonardo writes twice in his texts-, the scale of Leonardo’s Globe -with its 11.2 centimeters in diameter- is one for eighty million.
With what its measurement error with the real dimensions of the Earth is only 0.35 percent. Which leads Missinne to a conclusion certified by History: “Leonardo was a genius.”
Missinne has come to Seville with a plastic replica of Leonardo’s Globe. Because the original is kept in a bank vault. And she, when asked about the commercial value that this unique piece could achieve at auction, she makes one of those disgusted pouts that journalists reap when they raise questions that are not entirely pertinent and exclaims.
“That’s the least important thing!” EFE