Pair of celestial and terrestrial table globes, wooden globe covered with engraved and enhanced paper spindles. Bronze mounts with two rings featuring a horizon table engraved with a zodiac scale and a calendar scale, and a twisted column base.
Spindles: Italy, Venice, Vincenzo Coronelli, 1697
Provenance: Former Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours (1870-1954) collection, purchased in 1920 in London according to family tradition. Former Belin collection at Evermay Estate, Washington DC District.
Inscriptions: Auctore / P. / Cosmographo / Coronelli / Venetijs / 1697 in a cartouche below Australia and Illustris: / D. D. / Ant de V. Comitib, / G. P. / N Comi in a shield next to the Eridan.
An identical pair is preserved in the Musée du Louvre collections and comes from the Nicolas Landau collection (inv n° OA 10683 A and B). The spindles are taken from the Libro dei globi (an atlas published by Coronelli in 1697), but mounted on the globes at a later date.
A second identical pair, signed Willem Jansz Blaue and dated 1616, is in the collections of The Hispanic Society of America in New York.
Vincenzo Coronelli, a Franciscan Friar Minor from the convent of San Niccolo della Lattuca, was born in Venice in 1650 and died in 1718. A doctor of theology but also a scientist, he taught at the Collège Saint-Bonaventure in Rome, and at the same time pursued a career as a geographer, publishing over 400 geographical maps, updated thanks to the information he collected from navigators and missionaries. He perfected the manufacture of terrestrial globes, from the most modest to the largest. After creating two 1.75 m-diameter globes for the Duke of Parma in 1678, it was the turn of Cardinal d'Estrées, Louis XIV's ambassador to the Court of Rome, to ask him to make two even larger globes for the King of France. Unable to transport such works, Coronelli produced them in Paris, where he stayed for two years (1681-1683), entrusting the painted illustration to Jean-Baptiste Corneille. These globes are held by the Bibliothèque nationale (inv n° Ge A 499 500). From 1696 onwards, he spent two years in Germany, Holland and England, where he was admitted to Oxford University in 1697.
Condition report: minor accidents and tears, posterior mounting.
- Reference :
- 3489
- Width :
- 13 (cm)
- Height :
- 14 (cm)
- Depth :
- 13 (cm)
- Period:
- 17th century
- Style:
- Venetian work
- Materials:
- Wood, paper, gilt bronze
