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M-12645: (Image: 17 3/4 x 23 3/4'')  ''MARE DEL NORD...''  Venice: Vincenzo Maria Coronelli, c. 1691.  Engraved chart with later hand-coloring.  Ref:  Burden # 679; Shirley (2004) T. Coro-7a #20.

This beautiful chart extends from North America (including the entire East Coast and Florida) to Northern South America, as well as the western edges of Europe and Africa.  Coronelli gives credit to Antonio Zeno for the discovery of Labrador. Main trading routes between Europe, the Caribbean, North America and West Africa are shown.  Also of note the mouth of the Mississippi River is depicted too far west along the Gulf of Mexico.

The Zeno brothers, Nicolo (1326 to 1402) and Antonio, (d. 1403) were noted Italian navigators from Venice, who flourished in the second half of the 14th century. The first modern description of the Zeno family travels in the new world appeared in a 1558 travel book describing a pre-Columbian voyage to the New World in 1380 by Venetians  Nicolo and Antonio Zeno, accompanied by a map.  Many historians regard the map and accompanying narrative as a hoax, perpetrated by the younger Zeno to make a retroactive claim for Venice as having discovered the New World before Christopher Columbus.

Coronelli, a Franciscan priest, was a highly respected mathematician, cartographer & globe maker. His maps & globes were highly accurate for the time.  �Perhaps largely through his religious connections, Coronelli had access to geographical information from the explorers then moving throughout the southwestern regions of North America ''His beautiful cartographic productions represented the state of art of printing. As Royal Geographer to the Republic of Venice, his maps were favorably received by the highest political and scientific circles in Paris and London'' (Martin & Martin, Maps of Texas and the Southwest, p. 87).