Multi-spectral imaging and digitization of a 15th-century world map, drawn by Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer who worked in Florence, and documenting knowledge of cartography and the world's geography at the time.
This proposal seeks NEH funding to create and make available to scholars and the interested public world-wide multi-spectral images of one of the most important and influential maps of the fifteenth century, which was made by Henricus Martellus and resides in the Beinecke Library at Yale. This large and unique map probably influenced the geographical ideas of Christopher Columbus, but fading and scuffing of the map have rendered most of the texts on the maps illegible. Multispectral images of the map should render many of those texts legible, and thus make deep scholarly study of the map possible. The images would be made permanently and freely available to the public for use via the internet on the Beinecke Digital Library in both Jpeg2000 and TIFF formats.