Iunan, Queicheu, e Quangsi

Mapmaker:

Vincenzo Coronelli (1650-1718)

Coronelli was a Franciscan friar, cosmographer and cartographer of
atlases and globes, born, probably in Venice, August 16, 1650, the fifth
child of a Venetian tailor named Maffio Coronelli. At ten, young
Vincenzo was sent to the city of Ravenna and was apprenticed to a
xylographer.  At the age of sixteen he published the first of his one
hundred forty separate works. In 1671 he entered the Convent of Saint
Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, and in 1672 was sent by the order to
the College of Saint Bonaventura and Saints Apostoli in Rome where he
earned his doctor’s degree in theology in 1674. He excelled in the study
of both astronomy and Euclid. A little before 1678, Coronelli began
working as a geographer and was commissioned to make a set of
terrestrial and celestial globes for Ranuccio II Farnese, Duke of Parma.
Each finely crafted globe was five feet in diameter (c. 175 cm) and so
impressed the Duke that he made Coronelli his theologian. Coronelli’s
renown as a theologian grew and in 1699 he was appointed Father General
of the Franciscan order.