Vincenzo Coronelli was born, probably in Venice, on 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. In 1663 he was accepted into the Conventual Franciscans, becoming a novice in 1665. At age 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 Coronelli was sent by the order to the College of Saint Bonaventura and Saints ApostoliinRome 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.[1][2][3][4] Coronelli's renown as a theologian grew and in 1699 he was appointed Father General of the Franciscan order.[5]
Coronelli worked in various European countries in the following years, before permanently returning to Venice in 1705. Here he started his own cosmographical project and published the volumes of Atlante Veneto. In his home city he founded the very first geographical society, the Accademia Cosmografica degli Argonauti [pl] in 1684. He also held the position of Cosmographer of the Republic of Venice.[6] Later six volumes of the Biblioteca Universale Sacro-Profana were published by Coronelli. This was a kind of encyclopedia, its compiled entries ordered alphabetically.
Coronelli died at the age of 68 in Venice, having created hundreds of maps in his lifetime.
The terrestrial globe Coronelli made for Louis XIV.The celestial globe Coronelli made for Louis XIV.
Cardinal César d'Estrées, friend and adviser to Louis XIV and ambassador to Rome, saw the Duke of Parma’s globes and invited Coronelli to Paris in 1681 to construct a pair of globes for the Most Christian King. Coronelli moved to the French capital in 1681, where he lived for two years. Each globe was composed of spindles of bent timber about ten feet long and four inches broad at the equator. This wood was then coated with a layer of plaster about an inch thick and covered in a layer of strong unfinished fabric. This was then wrapped in a quarter-inch layer of two very fine fabrics which provided backing for the painted information of the globes.[7] These globes, measuring 384 cm in diameter[8] and weighing approximately 2 tons, are displayed in the Bibliothèque nationale François Mitterrand in Paris.[9] The globes depicted the latest information of French explorations in North America, particularly the expeditions of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.[10]
Having been restored and completed, another 1688 terrestrial globe is displayed at the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library of Texas Tech UniversityinLubbock, Texas.
The Ransom Center at The University of Texas in Austin has a pair of Coronelli globes both the 1688 Terrestrial and the Celestial (n.d.).
America Settentrionale Colle Nuove Scoperte fin all' Anno 1688, from Atlante VenetoThe siege of Coron in Greece by the Venetians during the Morean War"Abissinia, doue sono le Fonti del Nilo descritta secondo le relationi de P.P. Mendez, Almeida, Pais, Lobo, e Lodulfo del P. M. Coronelli M.C. Cosmografo della Seren. Rep. di Venetia"--Vincenzo Coronelli (1690)
^“Le Hall des Globes: Exposition permanente des Globes de Coronelli à la BnF,” press release, (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2006), 6-7.
^Coronelli, Vincenzo (1693). Libro dei Globi. Venice. pp. v.
^James Lawrence Fuchs, “Vincenzo Coronelli and the Organization of Knowledge: The Twilight of Seventeenth-Century Encyclopedism” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1983), 4-7.
^Ermano Armao, Vincenzo Coronelli, Cenni Sull’uomo e la Sua Vita (Firenze: Bibliopolis, 1944), 1-16ff.
^Anastasia Stouraiti, "Propaganda figurata: geometrie di dominio e ideologie veneziane nelle carte di Vincenzo Coronelli", Studi veneziani 44 (2002), 129-155
^Monique Pelletier, “Les Globes de Louis XIV: les Sources françaises de l’oeuvre de Coronelli,” Imago Mundi 34 (1982): 78.
^The diameter is of 487 cm with meridians and horizon circles.
^Monique Pelletier, “Les Globes de Louis XIV: les Sources françaises de l’oeuvre de Coronelli,” Imago Mundi 34 (1982): 78.
