Francesco Rosselli
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Francesco Rosselli was an Italian painter of the Florentine school, an engraver and a cartographer (b. 1445, Firenze, d. before 1513, Firenze). He created many important maps, including one of the first maps of the world to accurately depict the New World after Christopher Columbus' discoveries. Historian James Williamson says this map should be dated 1506, but some give it the date 1507 or 1508.
Francesco painted a number of paintings, including "View of Naples Depicting the Aragonese Fleet Re-Entering the Port after the Battle of Ischia". In the 1470's, Francesco Rosselli produced a series of fifteen engravings called Scenes from the Life of the Virgin and Christ.
In the 1480s, Rosselli left his wife and children with his brother Cosimo and left Florence for Hungary, where he made maps for the Hungarian king. Upon returning to Florence, he started a shop to sell his engravings. His most popular engravings included engraved copies of many of Botticelli's paintings. Rosselli may have been the engraver for some of the 'new' maps in editions of Ptolemy's Geographia published in Florence in 1480-82.
His shop also sold maps, and was the first known shop to market maps commercially. His two most famous maps date from 1506 and 1508. The 1506 Contarini-Rosselli map was the first printed map showing the New World. Rosselli's 1508 world map was the first map drawn on an oval projection. This map may have been sold in his shop. His 1508 map also depicted Antarctic continent, similar to the Piri Reis map of 1513. However, the continent was not discovered until the early 1800s. Yet classical traditions dictated that some large landmass had to exist in the southern hemisphere to balance the land in the northern hemisphere.
Francesco's half-brother Cosimo Rosselli was also an artist. With Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Signorelli, Cosimo was comissioned by Pope Sixtus IV to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, just a few years before Michelangelo's painting of the chapel ceiling.
