Mappæ Mundi
The Fra Mauro Map
A monk's crowdsourced world, on the eve of discovery.
- Map
- Fra Mauro Mappa Mundi
- Mapmaker
- Fra Mauro, Camaldolese monk
- Date
- c. 1450
- Held by
- Biblioteca Marciana, Venice
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
From his monastery on a Venetian lagoon, Fra Mauro made the last great medieval map and the first modern one. He interviewed every sailor and merchant who passed through the world's busiest port, filling his enormous gold-ringed disc with some three thousand notes — and daring to show, decades before anyone rounded it, that Africa could be sailed around. A circular, south-up world poised exactly on the hinge between the age of faith and the age of discovery. Geography learning to listen to travelers instead of scripture.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain map held by Biblioteca Marciana, Venice — the work is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on archival cotton-rag or textured laid stock, pigment inks rated 100+ years.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed and linen-backed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our maps cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans in existence, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the sea monsters, the tiny place-names, the burin lines — on stock made to outlive its owner.
