Celestial globe.
Published in Venice, 1698, by Vincenzo Coronelli.
Vincenzo Coronelli (1650 – 1718) was an Italian Franciscan friar, cosmographer, cartographer, publisher, and encyclopaedist known in particular for his atlases and globes.
Apprenticed to a woodcut artist in Ravenna at the age of 10, Coronelli entered into the Franciscan order in 1665 at the age of 15. He lived most of his life in Venice, at the monastery of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where he founded the Accademia degli Argonauti, considered to be one of the oldest geographical societies in the world.
Excelling in the study of both cosmography, mathematics and geography, in 1678 he was commissioned to make a set of terrestrial and celestial globes 5ft in diameter for the Duke of Parma. Cardinal César d'Estrées, French ambassador to Rome, saw the Duke of Parma’s globes and invited Coronelli to Paris in 1681 to construct a pair of globes for Louis XIV. These globes, measuring 15 ft in diameter and weighing approximately 2 tons each brought him fame throughout Europe as a globe maker. (They are now displayed in the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterrand in Paris).
In 1684 he obtained official support to set himself up as a publisher of maps and globes at S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and within ten years had established himself as the leading atlas and globe-maker of Europe.
Coronelli died at the age of 68 in Venice, having created hundreds of maps in his lifetime.
Note: The Greek astronomer Hipparchus (161 -121 bc) established the principle that celestial globes are designed so that the viewer must imagine the earth is at the center of the sphere, and they are beyond the heavens looking down on the universe.