Mad in Pursuit Notebook
Secret of the Ghost Ship in My Closet
The picture must have been hanging in Jim's study from the start. I can visualize the giant frame (30" x 20") above his desk, next to the window. A big old ship with lots of sails. I didn't give it much thought. I assumed it was, you know, a run-of-the-mill nineteenth-century litho, a Currier & Ives, whatever. Lovely decor for a man's room.
When we moved, I discovered that Jim had taped an envelope to the back. It held some faded Xeroxes in Italian and his purchase note. Not a litho, but an engraving. Not from the nineteenth century, but from 1690. I was impressed. It was something. But looking into it further would have to wait for another day.
It's been a busy summer, but on quiet days I've been organizing my stuff and selling or donating the items who are "ready to go." But some won't budge. When I start researching them, they become seductive portals pulling me through their narrow channels (a.k.a., rabbit holes). Suddenly, I find myself in a whole new world. My seed of a question ("Who are you?") blossoms into puzzles and mysteries demanding to be explored.
So it has been with this picture of a ship.
And I have to confess, it gives me a high, a buzz, a dopamine hit, a sparkle of magic to discover a new world.
The ship is the HMS Royal Charles, a 100-gun "first-rate ship of the line"—an English warship. It launched in 1683, sporting the latest and greatest seventeenth-century technology, with its iron-reinforced hull and its advanced "Rupertinoe" guns.
This folio-sized, hand-colored, copperplate engraving was published in the Atlante Veneto, a vast thirteen-volume compendium of all available knowledge in the Republic of Venice, which was printed between 1690 and 1698. It covered cosmographic systems (stars and planets) from Ptolemy to Descartes, maps of the continents and oceans, detailed charts of major rivers, and depictions of the vessels that navigated the seas. Its scope aimed to document the entire known world, including the technologies shaping it.
It came at a time when Venice was a fading superpower and England was a rising star. I gathered that they were frenemies, in a reluctant alliance against France for control of the Mediterranean.
The Atlante Veneto was a premium product of the best information and printing methods, designed to appeal to an elite clientele of rulers, diplomats, and merchants, who required the most current intelligence on world affairs. The entire atlas could be purchased or only single leaves.
See the half-blank cartouche on the top right? In Italian, it says, "Described in his Atlante Veneto by the Father Cosmographer Coronelli and Dedicated" dot, dot, dot. This blank allowed the dedication to be customized for wealthy buyers or patrons, either by hand or by another engraving run. The fact that mine is blank puts the work into the distinct category of ante litteram ("before the letter"), which means it is in its earliest "as-published" form. It makes it less likely to be an eighteenth-century reprint.
Who was the mastermind behind this atlas of the universe?
Turns out it was the Franciscan monk Vincenzo Maria Coronelli (1650-1718).
But he was no humble priest. Although he was trained to be a wood engraver, the Franciscans recognized his intellect. They sent him to Rome, where he got a doctorate in theology and mastered astronomy and geometry. He became a globemaker.
In fact, he was such a fabulous globemaker that he was summoned to the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, where he made the "Marly Globes," monumental works, each twelve feet in diameter and weighing two tons, depicting the heavens at the moment of Louis XIV's birth and the terrestrial world with it most up-to-date geography.
The project not only made him famous but also gave him access to the latest cartographic intelligence flowing into France from the New World. He also formed connections with Europe's leading scientists, placing him at the center of contemporary scientific discourse.
When he returned to Venice, he was appointed Cosmographer of the Republic. He founded the world's first geographical society, the Accademia Cosmografica degli Argonauti, which served as the home base for his visionary publishing ambitions. As my Gemini report put it:
Coronelli was, in essence, a scientific entrepreneur and an information broker. He operated as a central node in the 17th-century European network of knowledge, expertly collecting, synthesizing, and commercializing geographic and scientific information. He used his unique status as both a respected cleric and a master craftsman to navigate the intersecting worlds of science, commerce, and courtly patronage.
What a wonderful spirit to have in my home.
And how did Jim sense all this on September 15, 1984, when he visited Rose Mountain Books at the Village Gate plaza here in Rochester, where he bought the big old framed picture of a ship for a hundred bucks? How did he know?
9 Aug 2025
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