ABSTRACT
A brief look at the reception of the Portuguese voyages in the light of Ptolemy’s printed editions will give a more complete picture of Renaissance cosmography. Early attempts to update Ptolemy’s world-view, already undertaken during the manuscript period, continued with a growing emphasis on the printed editions of his geographical treatise. Between the second and third Rome editions of Ptolemy’s geographical work, issued respectively in 1490 and 1507, seventeen years passed without a single edition of the Alexandrian’s text. In most extant copies of the 1507 Rome edition of Ptolemy, the first to be issued after the printing gap, information from the Portuguese voyages was not embodied either. The voyage of Vasco da Gama, largely acknowledged in Europe since the first decade of the sixteenth century, had demonstrated Ptolemy to be wrong with regard to the idea of a land-locked Indian Ocean. Ptolemy’s picture of the world, in particular, was in this manner definitively dropped by Renaissance cartographers.
