Dalla Galleria delle Carte Geografiche all’Italia di Giovanni Antonio Magini: Persistence, recurrence and reworking of Flavio Biondo's model in the cartographic and textual production between the papacy of Gregory XIII to the one of Clement VIII

Valentina Balzarotti, Ph.D.

The research project aims to investigate the persistence and discontinuity of Flavio Biondo's model, which, through Leandro Alberti's Descrittione dell'Italia, saw new fortune between the last decades of the 16th century and the early 17th century.
The study deals with the evolution of historical space in texts and maps between the production of the Gregorian period and that of Giovanni Antonio Magini. The aim of the research is to assess how the knowledge and construction of space change, first in the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche and then in Magini's work, in which cartography accompanied by the textual medium is the place to gather information on the different contexts. The study aims to investigate the influence of the ancient and antiquarian models of Biondo and Alberti in these representations of the space of the Italian peninsula, probing, on the one hand, how in the textual and visual descriptions of the 16th and 17th century these models are re-evaluated and reused by politics and, on the other, identifying the most marked cultural differences between the historical representations, reflecting different contexts and interpretations of the common models.