Angelo Ruggeri - Fior d virtù - 1774-1474

Amerigo Vespucci
Third son of Nastagio Vespucci, a Florentine notary, and of the noblewoman Elisabetta Mini, he was born in Florence on March 9, 1454. In 1489, on behalf of the banker Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, he moved to Seville where he met Christopher Columbus. During a voyage in the service of Portugal in 1501, he noticed that the extent of the areas discovered extended to the 50th degree south latitude, realizing that he was in the presence of a continent hitherto unknown, also thanks to the humanistic culture in which his uncle Giorgio Antonio, a renowned scholar, had educated him from boyhood, who joined the mercantile experience typical of his family, a great added value. A navigator and a deeply studying of the seas, during his travels he explored much of the eastern coasts of South America. His figure is highly controversial, due to his letters whose authenticity has often been questioned, in which he speaks of Mundus Novus, the New World. Their rapid diffusion prompted the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to use the feminine gender (America) of the Latinized name Americus to designate the new continent in a world map drawn in 1507, contained in the Cosmographiae Introductio. Waldseemüller's idea was that the appellation referred to present-day South America, i.e., the lands touched by Vespucci. In 1508 Amerigo Vespucci was appointed by King Ferdinand II of Aragon as "Piloto Mayor de Castilla", becoming responsible for organizing expeditions and training pilots and cartographers, teaching them the use of the quadrant and the astrolabe. He died in 1512 in Seville.
The Fior di Virtù and La Sfera – code 1774 of the Riccardiana Library of Florence
In a precious codex lies a fundamental clue about the culture of the man who gave the world its name and one understands why he, a cultured merchant, and not others, however great navigators, had awareness of the greatest discovery of the modern age. A masterpiece of Florentine quattrocento miniature, a precious codex written by hand by the famous Amerigo Vespucci, the one who gave the name to the New World. It is one of the most illustrated texts, especially in the 15th century: a collection of stories with a moralizing meaning that feature animals as protagonists, to whom, in relation to their behavioral characteristics, life lessons are linked. This system, codified by classical culture, of contrasting vices and virtues and, through the literary device of the allegory, of disseminating it even to the least educated social strata, holds up to the fantastical world of Walt Disney and beyond. The illustrative apparatus of the Riccardiano manuscript 1774 preserved in the Riccardiana Library of Florence owes its existence to the hand of Mariano del Buono, a great miniaturist active in Florence in the second half of the 15th century, who creates splendid images even in reduced sizes, in a format imposed by the page structure and quite typical for this type of texts. The codex is divided into two parts: the first is dedicated to Fior di Virtù, while the second to La Sfera, a poem of mythological and geographical subject, made important also by the presence of precious maps attributed to Goro Dati, a politician and silk merchant, who at the time enjoyed wide notoriety and diffusion. It is truly evocative to imagine that Amerigo, little more than a teenager, copied this text, almost a premonition of his future as a merchant navigator, cultured and astute.