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Mapping a Holy QuasiIsland: Mount Athos in Early

Renaissance Isolarii
Veronica Della Dora

Available online: 04 Jun 2008

To cite this article: Veronica Della Dora (2008): Mapping a Holy QuasiIsland: Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii ,
Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, 60:2, 139-165

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 Mapping a Holy Quasi-Island:
Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii

VERONICA DELLA DORA

ABSTRACT: Mount Athos, the third finger of the Chalkidike peninsula in northern Greece and a self-
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governing monastic enclave for more than a thousand years, is a striking feature in Renaissance island books.
In early isolarii it usually appeared in a round insular shape featuring four main monasteriesa
representation that bears no resemblance to reality. Scholars have tended to dismiss these representations
of Mount Athos as rudimentary and inaccurate. This article offers a re-evaluation of the maps in their
context, interrogating them in their cultural specificity and as complex visual artefacts. As part of a long
manuscript tradition, these maps were liable to change over time and according to the geographical contexts
in which they were copied. This approach leads to the suggestion that rather than being representations of
reality, isolarii maps of Athos were intended mainly as mnemonic and moral devices for self-edification.

KEYWORDS: Mount Athos, Mons Sanctus, Chalkidike peninsula, isolarii, island books, Cristoforo
Buondelmonti, Henricus Martellus, Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti, sacred cartography, mnemonics, emblems.

One of the most characteristic features on con-
temporary maps of the Aegean are the three fingers
of the Chalkidike peninsula (Fig. 1). These trident-
like protrusions are connected to the mainland by
thin isthmuses. The two outer fingers (in the
southwest Kassandra, and in the northeast Mount
Athos) are slightly curved towards the middle
peninsula (Sithona) and seem to be almost mirror
reflections of one another. This familiar configura-
tion, however, has not always been shown on
maps. Only relatively recently has Mount Athos,
the easternmost of the three, approached the other
two fingers in size and shape.
Over the years, the third finger of the Chalkidike
has undergone a series of dramatic transformations
on Western maps, and it has taken cartographers
nearly six centuries to re-scale Athos and to reduce
what we can recognize as an exaggeratedly large
size to its geodetically proper proportions.1 As late
as 1819 the French naval captain Pierre Henri
Guattier, an experienced surveyor, was still insist-
ing on portraying the mountain-peninsula as twice
the size of the whole finger of Kassandra.2 In the
following year, Jean-Denis Barbie du Bocage, one
of the Enlightenments most convinced purveyors
of cartographic truth, also maintained that Mount
Athos was considerably larger than either of the
two other fingers of the Chalkidike.3
Athoss outline and centrality on maps of
the Aegean bear witness to its uninterrupted

c Dr Veronica della Dora is a lecturer in human geography, University of Bristol. Correspondence to: V. della
Dora, University of Bristol, School of Geographical Sciences, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS, UK. Tel: 44 (0)117
928 9113. Fax: 44 (0)117 928 7878. E-mail: veronica.delladora@bristol.ac.uk.

Imago Mundi Vol. 60, Part 2: 139165

# 2008 Imago Mundi Ltd ISSN 0308-5694 print/1479-7801 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085690802159129
 140 V. della Dora
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Fig. 1. Map of the northern Aegean Sea. Mount Athos, the third, easternmost, finger of the Chalkidike peninsula, is one of
the most characteristic features of any modern map of the region.
prominence in Western geographical imagination
not only as an autonomous republic of monks
dating back to the tenth century, but also as one of
the most frequently and copiously described of the
localities and holy mountains of classical anti-
quity.4 The distinctiveness of the mountainous
peninsula, which culminates in a 2,033-metre peak
at its southeastern extremity, is portrayed on the
earliest Ptolemaic maps, but the singular treatment
in Renaissance isolarii, or island books, is particu-
larly arresting and that is the focus of attention
here.5 The isolarii were in effect cosmographical
encyclopaedias, or visual catalogues, of the major
islands or groups of islands in the Mediterranean
composed of maps and text. Typically, each
island is depicted on one page and accompanied,
either on the same page or separately, by notes
of historical, geographical and anthropological
character, as well as by legends and other
curiosities (Fig. 2).6 The genre emerged in
fifteenth-century Italy from navigational practices
in the Mediterranean, and especially in the
Aegean, among whose islands Venetian and
Genoese sailors had established extensive commer-
cial networks. Paralleling other cartographic tradi-
tions, such as that of portolan charts and Ptolemaic
chorographic tables, island books endured until the
early eighteenth century.
Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
Mount Athos made its first appearance on
Western isolarii as a monadic unit portrayed in a
round insular shape only precariously connected to
the mainland through a thin neck of land as if to
suggest its separateness from the rest of the world
(hence the qualification quasi-island). The map
was usually placed in the books after Thasos
(which lies to the northeast) and before Lemnos
(which is to the southeast). The quasi-island is
generally portrayed as if much larger than either of
them. Instead of towns and cities, it is full of
monasteries, also exaggerated in size so that they
loom, as it were, over most of the buildings on the
other islands featured in the book. The consistency
of these graphic characteristics from isolario to
isolario raises the question: why was Mount Athos
represented in this way?
Through the analysis of representations of Athos
in Cristoforo Buondelmontis Liber Insularum
Archipelagi, the first Renaissance island book, and
in other isolarii derived from it, an attempt is made
here to answer the question from multiple per-
spectives. First, challenging Brian Harleys claim
that the visual predominance of certain carto-
graphic features is a manifestation of political
or social power, I suggest that Athoss graphic
distinctiveness is to be linked, rather, to its
peculiarity and to its ability to excite wonder and
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008 Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 141
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Fig. 2. Two pages from an isolario, or island book. Henricus Martellus, Insularium Illustratum, compiled in Florence c.1480-
1490. 34 6 24 cm (folio). Thasos is shown on the left, Mount Athos on the right. Brief written accounts accompany the
maps of the islands. For a transcript of the description of Mons Sanctus (Mount Athos), see Appendix 2. London, the
British Library, Add. MS 15760, fols. 41r42r. (Reproduced with permission from the British Library, London.)

spiritual admiration, even in a non-Orthodox
(indeed often anti-Orthodox) context, such as
Catholic Italy.7 Second, following Giorgio
Manganis discussion of the compositional rhetoric
of pre-modern maps, I see Mount Athos as one of
the elements of a larger encyclopaedic mnemonic
system, one that allows for a moral antiquarian
cartography.8 Third, I suggest that Athoss insular
shape might also have had an emblematic function
extending far beyond the mountain-peninsula and
the work of Buondelmonti.9
I start by providing a context for Mount Athos in
Buondelmontis Liber and its manuscript tradition.
I go on to compare the way Athos is shown on
maps in different manuscripts of the Liber, in
Martelluss Insularium, and in a less well-known
isolario, BNF franc. 2794. The portrayal of Athos in
Buondelmontis and Martelluss isolarii has already
been an object of study, both with regard to the
text and the image.10 In most cases, however,
discussion has been limited to a few versions and
aspects of the maps and has not taken into serious
account the continuities and discontinuities within
the relevant manuscript traditions (especially those
of the Liber), and here I seek to take the analysis
further. Finally, I speculate on the possible reasons
for Athoss quasi-insular representation in the
isolarii: its nature as a sacred place, its history as a
locus memoriae and its function as an emblem. I
conclude with the idea that the image of Athos in
the isolarii was an iconotext, a device able to travel
across space and time to serve as a source of
moral inspiration not only for pious clerics like
Buondelmonti, but also for authors of other isolarii,
such as the Venetian sailor Bartolomeo dalli
Sonetti.
Mount Athos in Buondelmontis Liber
There was a time, we are told by Herodotus, when
Mount Athos was an island. In 480 BC, the Persian
king Xerxes cut a canal across its isthmus, so that
his fleet could sail through it and avoid the stormy
waters near the point, which had swallowed his
brother-in-laws fleet about a decade earlier.11
Apparently, the canal collapsed soon after its
excavation, leaving no visible trace and returning
 142 V. della Dora
Athos to its original peninsular status. The memory
of Athoss short insular life, however, endured.
From the first decades of the fifteenth century to
the end of the seventeenth, Mount Athos, or Mons
Sanctus, as it was commonly called in Western
Europe, remained a standard feature in island
books. Of course, it was not the only non-island
to be included in isolarii. Famous capes and
peninsulas often figured side by side with islands.
This phenomenon can be partly explained philo-
logically, for the ancient Greek word nesos was used
for both types of geographical features.12 Other
non-islands commonly portrayed in Aegean isolarii
included Constantinople and the straits of the
Dardanelles. Like Athos, both were famous sites
that compilers felt obliged to incorporate in their
narrative.
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Athoss insularity, however, transcended its
mere presence in island books. The thinness of
the isthmus and the imaginary roundness of the
peninsula became a familiar image in fifteenth-
century isolarii. We first encounter this anomalous
quasi-island in Cristoforo Buondelmontis Liber
Insularum Archipelagi, the first island book in
Renaissance Europe and the prototype of the
genre.13 Born into a powerful Florentine family,
Buondelmonti became a priest and a passionate
antiquarian. His date of birth is commonly located
in the early 1380s; the date of his death remains
uncertain.14 When he was in his mid-thirties, the
Florentine presbyter left his native city for an
adventurous life of antiquarian peregrinations in
the Aegean. From his base in Rhodes, he spent
sixteen years travelling extensively throughout the
Archipelago, as he stated in a 1430 version of his
Liber.15 We know that he visited Crete on several
occasions and Constantinople at least twice.16 I
shall return later to the nature of his travels in the
Aegean. For now, I shall focus on the Liber and on
representations of Mount Athos in the different
manuscript traditions of the work.
The Liber Insularum Archipelagi is thought to have
been completed sometime after 1418. A copy of the
manuscript was sent to the humanist and biblio-
phile Cardinal Giordano Orsini in Rome around
1420, with a note saying that it was for Orsini to
have the pleasure of letting your thoughts wander
when you are tired.17 While Buondelmontis
abilities as a writer and a cartographer may be
debatable and his classical scholarship is considered
rather mediocre, the Florentine priest merits praise
for being the first to gather original information
about islands systematically and to accompany his
narrative with individual maps.18 Buondelmontis
Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
blend of maritime practical knowledge (tradition-
ally confined to portolan charts) and antiquarian
erudition marks him out as the initiator of a new
cartographic practice.
The success of the Liber probably exceeded
Buondelmontis expectations. In a matter of few
years, copies of it were disseminated all over
Europe as prototypes of a Baedeker or a Murray
guide for antiquarian travellers to the Aegean, and
also (perhaps more significantly) as the equivalent
of the modern coffee-table book designed for the
much larger number of armchair travellers.19 In
the course of the fifteenth century the Liber was
translated into Greek and at least four different
vulgata versions, and in the late sixteenth century it
was partly translated into English.20 We also know
that after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the
Latin version made its way beyond Europe for the
benefit of an Ottoman audience, as suggested by
one of the Paris manuscripts (BNF nouvelle
acquisition lat. 2383), with its Ottoman names for
the islands and cardinal directions superimposed
on the maps in red.
Buondelmontis Liber was never printed, but no
fewer than 64 manuscripts ranging in date from
c.1422 to 1642 have survived.21 Their geographical
origins stretch from Rhodes (Vat. Chig. F.IV.74,
c.14221430) and Chios (Holkham Hall ms. 475,
1428, and Vat. Urb. lat. 459, 1465) to Vienna
(Dusseldorf, Universitats und Landesbibliothek ms.
g.13, c.1480), northern Italy (Paris, BNF lat. 4825,
c.1466, and lat. 4824, late fifteenth century),
southern France (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum
W.309, c.1475), Flanders (British Library, Arundel
ms. 93 art. 7, 1485), and England (Cambridge,
Corpus Christi 210, 1470) (Appendix 1). If such
popularity made the Liber one of the most
influential geographical works of the early
Renaissance, that popularity has created one of
the most problematic and controversial texts for
modern scholars. The abundance of copies, as
has been noted, distorted the information and
[departed] further and further from the original, so
that it has become almost impossible for anyone to
trace the copies back to the original.22
The manuscripts can be divided into three
textual traditions. The first and longer Latin version
(A) comprises only two manuscripts (Ravenna,
Classense lat. 308, fifteenth century, and Milan,
Ambrosiana a219 inf., early fifteenth century) and
has been regarded since Roberto Almagias day
as the most authoritative.23 The second group
(version B), deemed to be an abbreviation of
version A but with a standard text, contains 58
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
manuscripts, most of which were produced in the
last part of the fifteenth century.24 Finally, a third,
even shorter, Latin version (C) had been identified
in only two codices until about twenty years ago
(Venice, Marciana lat. X.215, c.1430, and Vat. Chig.
F.IV.74, c.14221430) and has been generally
dismissed as a further abbreviation of the two
longer accounts on the grounds that they appear to
have been mutilated.25
In the late 1980s, however, Hilary Turner
identified another copy of the C version, this time
intact, in a manuscript preserved in a private
collection in Baden. On the basis of this discovery,
she argued that Buondelmontis original compila-
tion should be identified as that of group C, and not
A as scholars had generally assumed, and that A
and B should be seen as extended and elaborated
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versions, compiled by scribes possibly after
Buondelmontis death.26 Giuseppe Ragone has
dismissed this theory as too simplistic. In his
opinion, Buondelmonti sent Cardinal Orsini two
copies of his work: a succinta notitia insularum
Cycladum (which Ragone identifies as version C)
sometime before 1420, and, in 1420, a true
descriptio of the Archipelago upon which the
Milan and Ravenna manuscripts (version A) are
based. Version B should thus be considered a
reduced version that might not have been com-
piled by Buondelmonti, although it includes his
original material.27
While the genealogy of the Liber remains
problematic and no agreement has yet been
reached, scholars are no longer looking at the later
manuscripts as mere distortions of an original.
Instead, they are seeing them as valuable visual
artefacts to be appreciated in their cultural speci-
ficity. Buondelmontis original draft (or drafts) can
be and has been envisaged as a sort of canvas that
has travelled across space and through time and
has been liable to continual modification and re-
inscription, with new data and in different styles,
according to the specific contexts through which it
moved. In this way, instead of talking dismissively
about plagiarism, the ignorance of the compilers
and the progressive distancing of the copies from
the prototype, the graphic and stylistic variations
(textual as well as artistic), omissions and additions
observed in the extant manuscripts can be appre-
ciated as pointers to different lines of development
and as opening up a whole new geography of
reception.28
Ian Manners has employed this approach in his
comparative analysis of the representation of
Constantinople in thirteen manuscripts of the
Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 143
Liber.29 Even so, the few studies of representations
of Mount Athos (a subject obviously less promi-
nent than the capital of the Byzantine Empire)
have so far not strayed far from Almagias
chronology and assumptions. Agostino Pertusi
can be credited with being the first to have
published the description of Athos in the extended
version (A), but he failed to ask about the function
of the maps in relation to the text, and his
treatment of the maps is on the whole dismissive
and superficial.30 According to Pertusi, the
Ravenna manuscript is the prototype and the other
codices are to greater or lesser extent infelicitous
copies, ranging in his assessment from fair to
rudimentary, extremely rudimentary, worthless
and totally imaginary.31 Although George Tolias
and Evangelos Livieratos offer a more sophisticated
interpretation of these maps in their comprehen-
sive survey of Athos (they cover island books from
Buondelmonti to Coronelli), they continue to rely
on Almagia and Pertusi and to restrict their analysis
to only a few manuscripts.32
My analysis here considers exemplars of maps
accompanying texts representative of the three
textual traditions (A, B and C) in copies made in
geographic locations as disparate as Chios and
France. The time span involved, from 1428 to the
sixteenth century, and the extended geographical
area make it possible to trace the development of
the concept of Mount Athos as a holy quasi-island
in the geographical imagination of the Western
Renaissance. Unlike Buondelmonti, most scribes
engaged in copying the manuscripts would have
had no first-hand experience of the place they
were drawing, and they filled the gaps in their
empirical knowledge with features transposed from
their own everyday life or with further mytholo-
gical references. Thus, from the actuality of a
mountainous peninsula in the Aegean, Athos
turned into a floating island of the mind, to
borrow the phrase from John R. Gillis.33 As a
mental construct Athos went through a series of
transformations not only of the features it con-
tained but also of its coastline. As we shall see,
Buondelmonti himself was probably less interested
in portraying Athos as it actually was, as a real
place, than as an object for self-edification and a
locus memoriae.
Athos as a Mutable Travelling Canvas
As Godfrey Baldacchino has recently observed, if
we ask anyone to draw an island as seen from the
air, what we are most likely to get is (uncannily)
 144 V. della Dora
the approximation of a circle. Perhaps, the author
explains,
the answer lies in an obsession to control, to embrace
an island as something that is finite, that may be
encapsulated by human strategy, design or desire. . . .
Being geographically defined and circular, an island is
easier to hold, to own, to manage or to manipulate, to
embrace and to caress. Is this not part of the reason
why so many islands are self-contained jurisdictions,
perhaps precursors of the modern territorial, nation
state? . . . Circular forms make the exercise easier, as
well as somehow more perfect.34
As an ideal republic and, indeed, the oldest
democracy in the world, with its own internal
jurisdiction and parliament of monks, Mount
Athos could certainly inspire the notion of circular,
perfected, enclosure. In Buondelmontis Liber, the
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ideal was varied. Were we to trust Turners
chronology and consider version C as the first
draft, Buondelmonti would have portrayed Athos
as a true island surrounded by the sea (Fig. 3).
Such a fully insular representation is to be found
in only one manuscript, however, that in the
Marciana library (lat. X.215, c.1430) and possibly
also in the Baden manuscript (which I have not
been able to see, but which Turner claims to be
extremely close to the Venetian).35
In all the other manuscripts that I have
inspected, Athos continues to be called insula and
to be represented as an island except for the narrow
neck of land that connects it to the mainland. In
reality, the finger runs northwestsoutheast, in
Fig. 3. Map of Mount Athos from the one of the Venice
manuscripts of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum
Archipelagi (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. X.215)
dating from c.1430. This codex is one of only three extant
exemplars in the shorter (C) Latin manuscript tradition,
regarded by Hilary Turner as the oldest. The map is
unique in portraying the peninsula of Mount Athos as a
complete island, surrounded by the sea. (Reproduced
with permission from the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.)
Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
common with the other two fingers of the
Chalkidike headland (see Fig. 1), and the boundary
between Mount Athos and the rest of the
Chalkidike lies on the northern side of Athos close
to the isthmus. On all the isolarii maps, however,
Mount Athos is laid out across the page (conform-
ing to Ptolemys eastwest alignment) with the
isthmus on the left; that is on the side identified as
the west by the cardinal directions that are given
on perhaps half the maps. This erroneous orienta-
tion means that what is shown on the maps as the
north side of Mount Athosfacing the top of the
pageis actually its eastern shore. In the following
discussion, however, real direction is used except
where the context makes it obvious that the
reference is to the maps directions.
In addition to the round form of Marciana lat.
X.215, three basic island shapes can be identified
on the other Buondelmonti maps. One is almost
square, as in the Baltimore manuscript (Fig. 4).
This version could have been derived from the
Holkham Hall exemplar, which is the oldest dated
manuscript and which bears a note in Latin to the
effect that it was transcribed in the port of Chios by
Nicholas Scanavinus de Monte Rube on 17 August
1428. The second shape is a scalloped drop,
pointing northeast. This form is found in both
manuscripts featuring the extended text (A):
Milan, Ambrosiana a.219 inf., and Ravenna,
Classense lat. 308 (Fig. 5). It is also found in many
of the standard (B) manuscripts (Fig. 6).
A third shape has a scalloped outline, marked by
a deep gulf that varies in length, and that is
found in every manuscript from the middle of the
fifteenth century onwards. This embayed form is
present in standard copies from a wide temporal
and geographical spectrum, including Athens,
Gennadeion 71 AGL (Fig. 7); Venice, Marciana
lat. XIV.45 (Fig. 8) and Marciana lat. X.124 (an
incomplete sketch probably derived from Marciana
lat. XIV.45); Vienna, rec. 2098;36 Vatican, Chig.
F.V.110 (Fig. 9), Urb. lat. 458 and 459; Ross. 704
and 705; Paris, BNF lat. 4823, 4824, 4825, and
nouvelle acquisition lat. 2383; and Padua CM 289
(Fig. 10). On the Dusseldorf ms. g.13 map the
island has a slightly different shape and the bay is
less accentuated (Fig. 11). All the manuscripts date
from the second half of the fifteenth century.
While connections between the genealogy of the
textual traditions and that of the images are
difficult to make, we can nevertheless persuade
ourselves that the gulf was a later introduction.37
Not only does the shape of Mount Athos vary
from manuscript to manuscript, but so also does
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008 Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 145
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Fig. 4. Map of Mount Athos from the Baltimore manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmontis Liber Insularum Archipelagi
(Walters Art Museum W.309, fol. 37v) of c.1475. In this copy, which was made in southern France, the island is correctly
attached to the mainland but has been given a distinctive square shape. Although nineteen Byzantine monasteries were on
Athos during the fifteenth century, in many codices of the Liber only four are represented, as here. Their cruciform
disposition and disproportionate size are a common aspect of the Buondelmonti maps and may suggest a mnemonic
function for the map. (Reproduced with permission from the Walters Art Museum.)

Fig. 5. Map of Mount Athos from the Ravenna manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmontis Liber Insularum Archipelagi
(Biblioteca Classense lat. 308, fol. 61). Fifteenth century. This codex is traditionally considered the most authoritative. It is
one of only two containing an extended version of the text (A), which is distinguished from the short (C) and the standard
(B) versions by extra references to ancient mythology and classical topography. The map of Mount Athos thus features a
note (next to the isthmus) reminding the reader of the mythical existence of a canal that had been cut across the isthmus
in 480 BC by the Persian king Xerxes, making Athos into an island. Six monasteries are shown. (Reproduced with
permission from the Biblioteca Classense.)
 146 V. della Dora Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
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Fig. 6. Map of Mount Athos from another Venice manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi
(Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. X.123, fol. 24), copied in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and probably
based on the map in the Ravenna codex (see Fig. 5). The same six monasteries are featured, but the vignettes have been
scaled down and drawn in a more realistic style through the use of linear perspective and shading. (Reproduced with
permission from the Biblioteca Marciana.)

the number of monasteries shown on it. Ten
monasteries are marked on the map in Padua CM
289 and nine on the one in Marciana lat. X.215,
but only four are on the maps in the Walters,
Holkham Hall, Vienna, Gennadeion, and most of
the Vatican and Paris manuscripts. These four
monasteries are always disposed to form a cross.
In some cases (as on the Ravenna and Dusseldorf
manuscripts), two monasteries are identified
Lavra (the most ancient) and Vatopedi (the second
largest on the peninsula)and their names are
accompanied by demographic information.38 The
other monasteries remain unidentified in all but
one of the manuscripts.
While the positioning of the monasteries is
generally much the same, their cartographical
distribution bears no resemblance to reality.
Lavra, for example, is usually depicted on the
western coast of the peninsula (for example, in
both the Vat. Urb. manuscripts, in Marciana lat.
XIV.45, in the Gennadeion and in the Dusseldorf),
whereas it is actually sited on the eastern coast. In
the Ravenna manuscript, this monastery is situated
in proximity of the isthmus, whereas its actual
location is near the point, at the foot of the
mountain peak. On the Dusseldorf manuscript,
Vatopedi is placed in the interior of the peninsula,
whereas in reality it is located on the eastern coast.
The names of the two monasteries (which feature
in Buondelmontis text but not on the oldest maps)
were probably added by scribes unfamiliar with
either the toponyms or the exact location of these
monasteries.
Other textual information and graphic features
also vary from manuscript to manuscript. Trees, for
example, are present on BNF lat. 4823, 4824 and
4825, on Vat. Ross. 704 and Urb. lat. 459, as well as
on the Vienna and Gennadeion maps, but not on
the others. On the map in the Gennadeion library
and on another of the Paris copies (BNF, nouvelle
acquisition lat. 2383), Mount Athos is depicted as a
high mountain adjacent to the isthmus instead of
at the extremity of the peninsula, as in reality,
while the Ravenna map (see Fig. 5) shows the
entire peninsula as mountainous. The Ravenna
map also has a note, close to the isthmus, referring
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008 Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 147
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Fig. 7. Map of Mount Athos in the Gennadeion manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi in
Athens (Gennadeion 71 AGL). Fifteenth century. The quasi-island is labelled Mons Sanctus. The usual four monasteries
are featured; the mountain peak is incorrectly located next to the isthmus and a bay or gulf penetrates deeply into the east
coast. The bay is found in a number of the standard (B) codices and was probably a later insertion. (Reproduced with
permission from the Gennadeion Library.)

to Xerxes canal, and another with the mysterious

Fig. 8. Map of Mount Athos in a fifteenth-century copy of
Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi in
Venice (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. XIV.45, fol.
131). This elaborate representation is a variant of the map
in the Gennadeion manuscript (see Fig. 7). The dimen-
sions of the Holy Island are given, and two of the
monasteries are identified, Vatopedi (upper left) and
Lavra (lower right), and the number of monks (caloyeri)
given. (Reproduced with permission from the Biblioteca
Nazionale Marciana.)
command hoc pinge caloyeros [here depict the
caloyers].39 Pertusi has interpreted the latter as
either an encouragement to the reader to visualize
the monks in his mind or an instruction to other
artists to portray monks on that specific spota
suggestion apparently taken up by the scribe of the
Dusseldorf manuscript who has indeed sketched a
monk with his talanto (the wooden board used
instead of a bell to summon the Fathers to
prayer) at Vatopedi to match the description in
Buondelmontis text (see Fig. 11).
Unlike the views of Constantinople, where a
copyist would feel obliged to make a faithful
rendition of at least the main monuments, Mount
Athos presented a literally blank canvas on to
which he could unfold his architectonic fantasy.40
The appearance of built features (monasteries,
churches and towers) was just as imaginary as
their topographical disposition. A copyist accord-
ingly filled the outline of the quasi-island of Mount
Athos as he would, drawing on whatever archi-
tectural models he had to hand or using ideas from
other sources. For example, on the Vienna manu-
script (Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensis rec
2098) the large domes of the monasteries of
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Fig. 9. Map of Mount Athos in the Vatican Librarys manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi
(Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chig. F.V.110, fol. 46). Undated. A variant of the Gennadeion map (see Fig. 7). Almost the
entire surface of the quasi-island is occupied by the four monasteries. Their distinctive architecture evokes an eclectic
mixture of styles. There are Italian church loggias (top left and bottom right), Renaissance towers together with Venetian
gothic windows (bottom left), and walls decorated in a fashion similar to the marble bas-reliefs on the iconostasis of ancient
basilicas (top right). (Reproduced with permission from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.)

Athos resemble those of Hagia Sophia, which a
copyist might have seen represented elsewhere and
which best represented his own idea of the
Byzantine style (Fig. 12).
In other cases, the copyist made sense of an
unfamiliar subject by means of the familiar, turn-
ing his representation of Athos into a poetic space,
as on the Dusseldorf and Vatican Ross. 702 maps,
where the monasteries have become Italian-style
churches complete with loggias and campanili (see
Fig. 11).41 As the transmission of the manuscript
moved farther west, the Greek peninsula was
transformedas in the case of BL Arundel ms. 93,
a sumptuous Franco-Flemish exemplar emended
and copied by the abbot of Mercatel in 1485into
a green landscape scattered with blue-roofed
buildings similar to those in contemporary French
Books of Hours (Plate 1).42 Only the Muslim
minarets of one of the monasteries betray the
southeastern European origin of the prototype.
Athos in Martellus and BNF franc. 2794
Further stylistic variations in the representation
of Mount Athos are to be found in two isolarii
that derived directly from Buondelmontis Liber:
Henricus Germanus Martelluss spectacular
Insularium Illustratum, compiled between 1480
and 1490, and an anonymous isolario now in
Paris (BNF franc. 2794) dating from the sixteenth
century and probably based on Martellus. Unlike
Buondelmonti, little is known about Martellus
other than that he was a German miniaturist
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008 Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 149
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Fig. 10. Map of Mount Athos in the Padua manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi (Biblioteca
Civica CM 289, fol. 21v). Second half of the fifteenth century. This map, copied in Italy, is the only one that features the
promontory as a mountain chain (at the bottom) and the mountain peak, which is depicted correctly at the eastern
extremity of the peninsula (shown here with a pronounced bay), opposite, not adjacent to, the isthmus. The quasi-island is
connected to the mainland through the broad isthmus, but at the same time (unlike other Buondelmonti maps) it is also
separated from it by an irregular line and different colouring (as on early Ptolemaic maps of the region). The mountains are
coloured sky blue and the monasteries bright pink. The castle labelled hic est civitas eno presumably refers to the harbour in
Thrace (along the coast of the mainland to the east) and is either a scribal error or, more likely, a later addition.
(Reproduced with permission from the Biblioteca Civica.)

active in Florence in the last decades of the
fifteenth century and that he became famous
as the compiler of two codices of Ptolemys
Geography and, especially, for his map of the
world that is thought to represent Christopher
Columbuss conception of the globe.43 The world
map is found in the Insularium, which Tolias has
defined as a true island world atlas.44 Drawn on
parchment, embellished with gold and lapis lazuli,
the intent behind Martelluss Insularium was
clearly not only to inform but also to delight a
demanding audience of princely collectors.45 Four
copies of this manuscript exist. Unlike those of
Buondelmontis Liber, all known manuscripts of
Martelluss Insularium are in the same style and
equally lavishly embellished.
Martelluss Insularium and the Paris isolario BNF
franc. 2794 (the so-called French Portolan) have
been regarded by some scholars as plagiarized
versions of Buondelmontis Liber; the same islands
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Fig. 11. Map of Mount Athos in the Dusseldorf manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi
(Universitats und Landesbibliothek, ms. g.13, fol. 56) of c.1480. The manuscript was copied in Vienna, but the artist was
apparently familiar with Italian architecture and has represented the four main monasteries (Vatopedi and Lavra are
named) as Italian-style churches complete with loggias and campanili. An Orthodox monk calling his brethren to prayer
with his talanto (board) is shown by the entrance into the monastery of Vatopedi. The gulf is less accentuated than on other
maps. (Reproduced with permission from the Universitats und Landesbibliothek.)

are represented in a similar fashion (allowance
being made for the personal styles of the different
artists) and, generally speaking, in the same
order.46 At the same time, the Insularium and the
Paris isolario can be envisaged as natural continua-
tions of the Liber. Unlike the Liber, these codices
moved beyond the Aegean to include other islands
in the Mediterranean, even, in the case of
Martelluss Insularium, other seas (such as the
Black Sea), large peninsulas (such as Italy and the
Balkans), other countries and notable places that
Martellus re-used from his Ptolemaic compilations
(such as France, Germany, the Holy Land), as well
as his famous world map.47 However much
Martelluss Insularium and the Paris isolario may
have been based on Buondelmontis Liber, it is
clear that the texts and maps that relate to the
Aegean islands in the new works are neither
faithful reproductions nor mere summaries, but
elaborations of their prototypes.48
Mount Athos features in the Insularium in a
distinctive fashion as a golden-brown island with a
deep gulf on the eastern coast, connected to
the mainland through a long, thin strip of land
(Fig. 13). The emphasis on the places quasi-
islandness is seen on the individual maps of
Mount Athos found in all manuscripts and also
on a Ptolemaic-style map of the Balkans added to a
few copies of the Insularium.49 By colouring Athos
golden brown (in stark contrast to the white of the
rest of the Chalkidike and the region behind), we
may assume that Martellus intended to indicate
the mountainous character of the peninsula. The
colouring adds emphasis to the peninsulas dis-
tinctive bold shape and enhances the way it
appears to be floating in the lapis lazuli of the
Aegean. It also sets Athos apart as special island, a
place in its own right.
Martellus calls Athos, both in the text and on the
map, Mons Sanctus (Appendix 2). His map appears
to be an elaboration of the Gennadeions version of
Buondelmontis Liber (see Fig. 7), but the poetic
uniqueness of Athos has been accentuated by
Martellus. The rectangular frame that encloses
the area emphasizes its insularity and sets the
quasi-island apart from the rest of the world.50 A
marginal note informs us that Mons Sanctus covers
no less than 100 millia passi, which would make it
more than twice the size of Thasos, the next island
in Martelluss book.
Sixteen monastic foundations and churches are
shown, and three of the usual four monasteries
feature in a much larger size and are named (the
fourth is not identified in any text or map):
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
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Fig. 12. Detail of the map of Mount Athos in the Vienna
manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum
Archipelagi (Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensis rec.
2098). First half of the fifteenth century. Another variant
of the Gennadeion map, with two of the four large
monasteries placed north and south of the gulf (see Fig. 7).
Here, however, the monasteries are characterized by large
domes reminiscent of Hagia Sophia, probably the artists
ideal of Byzantium. (Reproduced with permission from
the Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensis, Vienna.)
Vatopedi of Saint Chrysostom is correctly placed on
the eastern shore of the peninsula; Lavra of Saint
Nazarenus is incorrectly placed in the southwest
(as in several of Buondelmontis maps); and Saint
Basil is (also incorrectly) sited to the west and in
proximity of the isthmus. Roofs and towers, which
were perhaps iconographically more familiar to
Martellus than the architecture of Orthodox
churches, have been substituted for the
Byzantine domes (as on the Gennadeion,
Marciana lat. XIV.45 and Marciana lat. X.124).
The three main monasteries are depicted as
miniature walled cities, small microcosms enclosed
within high walls and made visible only through
Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 151
the cartographers birds-eye view. An ordered
multitude of green trees and streams (not present
on the maps of Buondelmontis Liber) makes Athos
a true Garden of Eden, a blessed island enclosing
other blessed islands, those of the monasteries.
As with the maps in the various manuscripts of
the Liber, the topography of the peninsula bears
little resemblance to reality. The stylized coastline
has become a conceptual container to be filled with
features mentioned in the text: the multitude of
holy monasteries in which the monks conduct
their frugal solitary life in contemplation and
prayer; the most pleasant vales full of olive trees
and fig trees; the proximity of the city of
Thessaloniki (marked on the map but outside the
frame and on the edge of the page), situated just
across the isthmus; and finally Athoss highest
peak, which the author has located next to the
isthmus (so shown on the Gennadeion manuscript,
as noted above).51 On the top of the mountain
Martellus portrays what he calls in the text oppidi
vetustissimi vestigia . . . in quo quidem homines
diutius vivere quam in ceteris locis tradunt [the
vestiges of a most ancient fortified city . . . whose
inhabitants, they say, live longer than in other
places]. This mythical city is mentioned in Pliny the
Elders Natural History. On Martelluss map it
features as if it existed. It is a Renaissance
classicists echo of the Garden of Eden (which
medieval theologians believed to be similarly
located on a high mountain), inaccessible to
mankind, that is presented here.52
As Martelluss Insularium was transmitted west-
wards, an anonymous compiler in sixteenth-
century France was inspired to create the isolario
now in Paris as BNF franc. 2794. Nothing at all is
known of the origin of this island book. The codex
contains the same islands as Buondelmontis
Liber, with the addition of other Mediterranean
islands (the Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily,
Malta, Lampedusa, Pantelleria and Djerba). Like
Martelluss Insularium, the Paris isolario is a lavish
folio volume displaying one or at most two maps
on a page, each accompanied by a textual descrip-
tion (in French). The use of lapis lazuli for the seas
and the frames around the maps is clearly derived
from Martellus. A richer palette and more elabo-
rate iconographies in the interior of the islands,
however, have been introduced.
In the Paris isolario, Athos is called both Athos
and Mons Sanctus. While the text is similar to
Martelluss, the map of Athos in the Paris manu-
script is rendered in a much bolder, more confident
style (Plate 2). The coastline is broadly similar but
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Fig. 13. Map of Mount Athos in the London manuscript of Henricus Martellus, Insularium Illustratum (British Library, Add.
MS 15760, fol. 42, c.14801490). 18 6 24 cm. Although probably derived from the Gennadeion map (see Fig. 7), Martellus
has accentuated the character of Athos as a Holy Island (Mons Sanctus) emphasizing its separateness from the mainland not
only by narrowing the isthmus but also by setting the quasi-island into a rectangular frame. The landscape is Edenic,
covered in trees and well watered. Adjacent to the isthmus is the peak, on whose summit lies the mythical fortified city
described by Pliny the Elder. Placing the mountain by the isthmus may have been intended to give it a defensive function,
to protect the island from intruders. (Reproduced with permission from the British Library.)

has been smoothed out. Martelluss already eye-
catching rectangular frame is here even more
pronounced. Thessaloniki has been omitted, and
the peninsula has a thicker neck. The French artist
has gone even further, transforming Martelluss
fortified monasteries into unwalled gothic
churches and fantastic castles and the surrounding
landscape into a verdant countryside defined by
white cliffs strongly reminiscent of those of
Normandy. In the hands of this unknown copyist,
Martelluss landscape has become one that his
readers would have recognized from what they
saw around them and from their Books of Hours.53
Athos had become a French Garden of Eden.
Athos as Locus Sanctus and Locus Amoenus
What struck Buondelmonti most, and was
emphasized by Martellus and the anonymous
author of the Paris isolario as well, was the sacred
aspect of the place. After all, as Buondelmonti
noted, Mount Athos was called Holy Mountain
principally because of the holy men who live
there.54 Unlike later cosmographers, such as
Andre Thevet, Buondelmonti had not been content
to gaze at the peninsula from his ship.55 He visited
some of its monasteries and observed the way
of life of its pious inhabitants, the caloyers.56
He calculated that there were around thirty
monasteries on the peninsula, in some of
which he counted one hundred monks, in others,
five hundred. Their life was one of work and
prayer. All, Buondelmonti wrote, followed the
same rule.
They rise up silently at night to the sound of a bell
made by wood, according to the Greek custom, and go
to church to sing the divine morning office. . . . When
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
the sun rises, everyone, with devoted lips and a heart
full of joy, recites briefly again the offices of the day to
the praise of God.57
Seated in their cells, they
weave garb, stitch shoes, make nets, carve wood,
weave baskets with twigs, make vessels for wine and
sew caps, which they call kamelavkia. Finally, at stated
hours, all the monks hasten to praise God in order to
find the eternal peace which reigns among them.58
Unlike the descriptions of most of the islands in
the Liber, the account of Athos is not limited to the
purely informative. A sense of deep emotion is
communicated that goes beyond the authors
simple desire to investigate the conditions of the
islands.59 After all, Buondelmonti was himself a
cleric. Besides his interest in achieving Life Eternal,
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Buondelmonti, as it has been suggested, cannot
have been without some interest in the ideas for
the union between the Greek Orthodox and
Roman Catholic Church.60 In his description of
Athos, the Florentine priest abandoned himself to a
sense of enchantment and profound admiration for
the monks and their unique holy quasi-island,
which he defined as a palace of angels. As Rene
Gothoni has suggested, the metaphor may derive
from Buondelmontis perception of the fortress-
like Byzantine monasteries: sacred buildings that
generations of scribes tried to render on their
maps in the most marvellous fashion they could
imagine.61
For Buondelmonti, however, the beauty of
Athos lay less in the Byzantine domes and
splendidly decorated churches than in the soul of
its angelic inhabitants, the coenobitic monks and
the humble hermits. He described these aswith
their eyes set towards heaven and sighing with
all their soul at the thought of Paradise, the Eternal
Motherland, from where they were banished due
to the transgression of their first father, and with a
contrite and humble heart,they move their
lips to chant a hymn, and went on to note that
contemplative in his heart of hearts, the monk
trains himself not to fear solitude because God is
with him, but always to delight in looking at the
sky without any worries about money. Standing on
the earth makes him praise and give thanks to God,
unceasingly and continuously.62
In Buondelmontis hands, the Holy Mountain
thus became a peaceful island of virtue in a
turbulent world of greedy desires and passions.
For him, Athos represented a safe refuge in his
adventurous peregrinations through the Aegean,
now with pirates, now with merchants, and now
Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 153
on local small wooden boats.63 For Cardinal Orsini
and other pious armchair travellers, Athos similarly
represented a stop where they could rest their souls
while journeying through the Liber. For all these
people, Athos was a locus amoenus, a delightful
place somewhat analogous to the garden of
Alkinoos, where Homers Ulysses found comfort
after being shipwrecked, or to the Vale of Tempe
that Abraham Ortelius, a century and a half later,
incorporated into his Parergon to offer his wearied
readers some place of rest, where to re-create
themselves.64
Athos had already appeared as a locus amoenus in
late Byzantine ekphraseis. Ekphrasis, the rhetorical
art of vivid description, usually focused on gardens
or objects of art with the aim of bringing to life not
an actual picture, but the spiritual reality behind it.
Like sacred icons, written descriptions of real and
imagined loci amoeni served as tools for inner eleva-
tion and as useful fictions for self-edification.65 In
the opening of his Antirrhetika, the Byzantine
intellectual Nikephoros GregorasAndronicus
Palaeologus IIs famous chroniclerdescribed
Mount Athos as a self-sufficient agricultural insti-
tution modelled on Platos ideal polis.66 Gregoras
turned the Holy Mountain into a perfumed garden
island covered by a delicate vegetable mantle,
traversed by little streams, and blessed like the
gardens of Alkinoos and Eden with eternal spring.
He described Athos as an ideal place reflecting the
botanical completeness of Eden; a place where
monastic virtue fused in a harmony of colours,
scents and sounds and offered many occasions for
inner quietness to those who desire to live a
celestial life on earth, for its insularity naturally
protected the monks from the evils of the outer
world.67
Similarly, Buondelmonti, who could well have
been familiar with Gregorass writings, informs the
reader that the monks of Athos lead a way of life
just like those who are content with little and who
have no desire for what the vast majority considers
to be wealth. . . . Their life is truly peaceful and
joyful, their nights are pleasant, their days busy,
their meals quiet.68 As in Gregorass ekphrasis, the
Athos narrated by Buondelmonti is a sweet-
scented garden-island containing fig trees, olive
trees and numerous beehives.69 This, an idealized
image of the Edenic locus amoenus, is surely what
the copyists were attempting to reproduce in their
generally flat and quasi-insular cartographic repre-
sentations of Athos.
For early Renaissance man, islands conveyed
deep mystical meanings. An island was more than
 154 V. della Dora
a geographical object. It was, in the words of the
humanist Domenico Silvestri (13351411),
terra undique mari circumsepta, et secundum veros
theologos significat animam constantem virtutibus que
crebris vexatur tentationibus sed firma in constantia
non volvitur
[a land surrounded by sea on all sides and, according
to true theologians, it stands for the soul that
perseveres in the virtues and, though afflicted by
frequent temptations, stays firm in constancy, without
turning aside].70
On early isolarii maps, the insular imagery so
predominates that it often seems to obliterate the
other characteristic geographical features of Athos.
For example, Pertusi is puzzled by the total absence
of Athoss 2,033-metre summit from the maps in
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nearly all the manuscripts of Buondelmontis Liber,
a peak that, he observes, even the most distracted
sketcher could not have missed.71 The reason for
omission becomes clear, however, if we take the
Renaissance view: such a dramatic peak would not
have fitted into the Edenic landscaped garden.
There was no place in the peaceful island of human
virtues for such a peak. It would have distracted
the viewer. Its graphic presence on the map had to
be marginal, as in the Gennadeion manuscript and
on Martelluss map.
Mount Athos as Locus Memoriae
For Buondelmonti, Mount Athos was not just a
palace of angels. Like most of the Aegean islands he
visited, it was also a site with a mythical pre-
Christian past. The blend of modern and classical
topographies was probably the Libers most
attractive aspect for European humanists.
Buondelmontis project was in fact primarily
antiquarian, since the goal of his extensive
journeys through the Aegean and prolonged stays
in Crete and Rhodes was historical. In Florence,
Buondelmonti had received a traditional
Renaissance education. He may have been a
member of the circle of the famous humanist and
copyist Niccolo Niccoli, to whom he dedicated a
copy of his Descriptio Insulae Cretae (1417).72 In
Crete and especially in Rhodes, then a minor
centre for Greek studies, the Florentine priest had
the opportunity to deepen his experience of
classical culture and perhaps learn most of his
Greek.73
Besides gathering geographical and historical
information for his works as he travelled about
the Aegean, Buondelmonti purchased ancient
manuscripts on, it has been suggested, Niccolis
Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
commission.74 Thus it is conceivable that his
sojourn on Athos had also been dictated by the
peninsulas fame as one of the largest repositories
of Byzantine manuscripts.75 It was widely known
that the monasteries on Athos were treasure troves
of invaluable relics and precious manuscripts, both
ecclesiastical and classical. Ciriaco dAncona, who
travelled to Athos a few decades after the
Florentine priest (possibly, as Jos van der Vin and
others suggest, with a copy of the Liber to hand),
has left us a detailed description of some of these
treasures.76
Buondelmonti does not say in his account of
Athos whether he tried to acquire any manuscripts
on the Holy Mountain, nor does he mention the
libraries. He does, however, refer to Athoss most
famous topographical myths. As Mangani has
noted, Buondelmonti was by no means a sort of
pre-Baconian sailor after empirical information.77
He was an antiquarian seeking the loci of tradition.
In other words, he was not looking for places so
much as for the famous place-events of antiquity.
He knew that Athos was the peninsula Xerxes had
transformed into an island; he knew that it was the
site that had hosted the ancient fortified city
described by Pliny the Elder, whose inhabitants
lived longer than anyone else; and, of course, he
knew (and could personally confirm) that its peak,
one of the most frequently described or referred to
by classical authors, was exceedingly high.78
The ancient history of the peninsula is presented
quite differently in the three textual traditions.
Versions A and C differ from version B mainly in
the extra classical allusions and mythological
references.79 For example, the extended version
(A) gives the historical context of Xerxes canal,
which is missing from the standard version (B).80
In the former group, the Ambrosiana map
(Ambrosiana a219 inf.) is complemented with
marginal notes about the ancient cities of Athos
mentioned by Herodotus and Strabo.81
Furthermore, while version B simply informs us
that Athoss peak is so high that one can see it for
120 sea miles, versions A and C both reiterate
Pomponius Melas belief that the mountains
summit reached the highest layer of the atmos-
phere.82 At the top of the mountain the air is so
pure that no clouds, or rains are generated: winds
do not blow, birds do not fly over there, neither
does snow or hail freeze, and signs inscribed in the
ashes of the altars remain unaltered.83 Also in
versions A and C, Athoss peak is located on the
same geographical parallel as Olympus and is
deemed to be so high that its shadow reaches the
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
island of Lemnos, as was related by Apollonius
Rhodius in the late third century BC.84
Instead of relying solely on Mela and Apollonius,
Buondelmonti seems to have consulted a number
of secondary sources, such as Sir John Mandevilles
Travels (1356), a guide for pilgrims bound for
Jerusalem that brought together and further
elaborated these and other topographical myths.
Besides being a bestseller in the later Middle Ages,
Mandevilles book included one of the few modern
Western descriptions of Athos readily available to
Buondelmonti.85
Of course, Mount Athos was not the only
classical locus in the Liber. Antiquarian references
permeate the entire narrative of the island book
and some of the maps of islands visited by
Buondelmonti include representations of the
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ancient ruins mentioned in the text.86 Yet among
the maps of Athos, only the Ravenna manuscript
explains Xerxes canal in a note on the map.
Perhaps this is a reflection of the importance
accorded to it in the extended version of the text.
Plinys fortified mountain-top city is graphically
present on Martelluss map.
Whether represented on the maps or referred to
only in the text, the different layers of the physical,
the ancient, the mythical and the sacred find
coherence in the self-enclosed insular narrative
unit: hence another possible reason for turning
Athos into a quasi-island. In Renaissance isolarii,
islands were the equivalent of small cabinets
of curiosities, narrative containers whose self-
contained spatiality allowed the compiler to blend
fact and legend, personal observation and hearsay,
past and present. If the island represented the basic
cognitive form, Aegean islands offered the perfect
chorographic scale, which emphasized the qualita-
tive characteristics of the locus.87
Islands stirred geographical imagination and
curiosity, as well as a sense of wonder that was
the true impulse for knowledge making in the
Renaissance.88 The map of each island in the
isolario opened a small window on a new, different
microcosm to be explored and described. As we are
taught by phenomenology, the minuscule, a
narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details
of a thing can be a sign of a new world, which, like
all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness.89
In this sense the island book was a source of
continuous excitement. As the reader leafed
through, each page revealed a new marvel. On
maps of Athos such as those in the manuscripts in
the Gennadeion, Marciana and Vatican libraries,90
and especially in Martelluss Insularium, the sense
Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 155
of surprise was enhanced by the depiction of the
monasteries as enclosed microscopic worlds, each
within its compartment, which in turn were
contained within Athoss quasi-insular microcosm.
In these representations, Athos was like a Chinese
box: a surprise without end, where the eye is
invited to make continuous discoveries.
But islands also served as highly effective
mnemonic tools. According to Aristotle, Plato and
other ancient authors, memory was predominantly
visual and depended on the spatial arrangement
of images or objects. The Roman rhetorician
Quintillian (c. AD 35100) devised a spatial model
in which information to be memorized (for
example, parts of a speech) was associated with
variously ornamented rooms of an imaginary
building.91 The belief that recollection could be
stimulated best by visual means (be the images
mental or actual) endured throughout the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance.92 Naturally delimited by
their coastlines, islands are easy objects for the eye
to grasp and imprint on memory. Islands were
natural rooms within the isolarios memory palace.
They were loci memoriae, containing in turn icons
and symbols indicating the mirabilia, memoranda,
singularities and other spatially located object-
events that were to be memorized.93 Islands were
basic narrative units strung together like precious
stones through the compilers island-hopping
journey, a journey imaginatively reiterated by the
reader as he leafed through the pages of the island
book. Islands were equivalents of the miniature
landscapes that illuminated thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century Books of Hours. Like these
other illustrations, islands summarized and condi-
tioned the reading of the text; they helped the
reader to form mental images for inner meditation
and memorization.94
As Mangani has suggested, island books were
closer in concept to medieval bestiaries (books of
beasts) than to modern surveys. Their character
was markedly encyclopaedic. The precursors of
Buondelmontis Liber could have been thematic
geographical collections, such as Giovanni
Boccaccios De Montibus et silvis and its continuation
by Domenico Silvestri (De insulis et earum propriet-
atibus) and Domenico Bandinis De populis, de
aedificis, de provincis, de civitatibus, de insulis, and
also books of miracles, costumes, battles, famous
men and the like, rather than portolan charts.95
Significantly, Domenico dArezzo, one of
Buondelmontis tutors in Florence, was himself
the author of a massive compendium of knowledge
that included a section on islands. It could be said
 156 V. della Dora
that Buondelmonti was continuing the philological
project of these encyclopaedic works when he
complemented his text with visual mnemonic aids,
the maps. 96 His perception of geographical knowl-
edge was as a system of laudes of places connected
to the cult of memorabilia and great men who made
them famous through their exempla.97 His anti-
quarian mapping embodied memorability. Thanks
to the descriptive power of place, Athos, in its
cultural, historical and geographical exceptionality
and as one of the main loci memoriae in the Aegean,
was represented by Buondelmonti as one of the
most prominent nodes within the Libers encyclo-
paedic mnemonic system.
Mount Athos as an Emblem
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The mnemonic character of island books has roots
in the ancient world. Dionysius Periegetes, a
contemporary of Ptolemy, devoted an entire sec-
tion of his geographical poem Oikoumenes Periegesis
(AD 124) to islands. First translated into Latin
in the fourth century and commented on in
the twelfth century by Eustathius, bishop of
Thessaloniki, the poem remained a standard text
throughout the Middle Ages and was often learnt
by heart.98
Similarly, the text of Bartolomeo dalli Sonettis
Isolario (1485), the first printed island book, was
composed in easily memorized rhyming couplets.
While explicitly conceived for navigational pur-
poses, Bartolomeos Isolario was derived from
Buondelmontis Liber and retained, through its
poetic format and philological objective, the
humanistic interest in the sites and landscapes of
Greek antiquity.99 Bartolomeos text contains
forty-nine woodcut maps that show only the
outlines of the islands in black ink on white paper,
usually without topographical detail. The plainness
of the image invited readers (or the scribes or artists
working for them) to intervene and fill the empty
spaces as they wouldwith colours, with topo-
graphical names and features and with corrections
based on their personal experience of the places
concerned and, for armchair travellers, their deep
knowledge of the classics.
Memorization was thus no longer a purely visual
process, but a performative practice expressed
through the physical acts of drawing, colouring,
inscribing. Particularly interesting in this respect is
the incunabulum of Bartolomeos Isolario that is
now in Modena (Estense Alfa E.5.15), whose maps
are packed with all sorts of practical and erudite
annotations added by its original owner, Giovanni
Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
di Domenico Bembo, the Venetian rector of the
islands of Skiathos and Skopelos. On the map of
Mount Athos, for example, the patrician classicist
has followed the text and drawn, as an adjacent
note indicates, the ditch that Xerxes had dug and
through which his armada sailed.100 Another
example of a readers graphic intervention is to
be found on the map in the Marcianas copy of
Bartolemeos Isolario (Venice, Marciana incunabula
733), where again Xerxes work attracted the
attention of the reader, or the artist working for
him, who has dramatically rendered the canal as a
deep and rugged crevasse (Fig. 14).
The order of the maps in Bartolomeos Isolario
usually follows Buondelmontis and the shapes of
the islands are also similar to those in the Liber. In
Bartolomeos Isolario, however, Mount Athoss
coastline has undergone a significant transforma-
tion. The quasi-island is no longer depicted in
isolation but has become part of the Chalkidike
peninsula, with all three fingers indicated. As on
Buondelmontis and Martelluss maps, they are
aligned left to right on the page. A compass rose,
instead of the usual marginal words, provides
(correct) orientation. The effect of Bartolomeos
outlines is to make Athos resemble the head of a
monk bent in prayer and holding a komboschoini or
prayer rope (the peninsulas of Sithona and
Kassandra being his arms, and Thasos and the
other nearby islands and reefs the rope). The
sanctity of the peninsula and the piety of
the monks are reiterated in the related verses, in
Italian, situated on the facing page, probably
inspired by Buondelmontis description of Athos.
Da Stalimene in fin a Monte Sancto
E circha mia sesanta inuer ponente
Che Atos gia gli fu dito antiquamente
Altissimo e divoto tuto quanto
Per tuto e monasteri in ogni canto
De chaloieri pieni che sovente
Fano suo oration giemente
Pregando Idio chi cuopri col suo manto.
[It is about sixty miles west / [the distance] from [the
island of] Stalimene to the Holy Mountain / anciently
called Athos: / loftiest, wholly most pious / scattered
with monasteries in every corner / full of monks who
often pray God with sighs that He cover them with His
mantle.]101
By fusing his poetry with practical information,
Bartolomeo alerted the sailor to shallow waters
and dangerous reefs. Off the coasts of Sithonia, the
crosses marking the reefs on the map pick out
the line of the monks prayer rope. Unlike his
predecessors, Bartolomeo included a compass rose
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008 Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 157
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Fig. 14. Map of Mount Athos in the first printed island book, Bartolomeo dalli Sonettis Isolario (Venice, 1485). The
example reproduced here comes from the Marciana library in Venice (incun. 733). A characteristic of the maps in
Bartolomeos Isolario as first printed is their plainness. The islands are shown only in outline, with a compass rose but few
topographical features. It was up to the readers (or their artists) to colour and fill them in as they liked with place-names
and drawings. In this case, Mount Athos has been made very different from the rest of the Chalkidike peninsula (whose
shape resembles that of a monk in prayer). The reader has also drawn Xerxes canal as a deep crevasse. (Reproduced with
permission from the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.)

on all his maps, a feature that was to become
characteristic of what Tolias has categorized as
maritime isolarii.102 On the map of Athos the
circle of the rose is positioned in such a way that it
surrounds the head of the praying monk like a
halo. That Bartolomeo was deliberately using
the image of map and text simultaneously to
conceal and to reveal moral messages and erudite
references behind practical information is con-
firmed by the dedication of the book. This is
addressed to his compatriot, Doge G. Mocenigo,
and contains a numeric cryptogram of his name in
the first verses of the text:
Al Divo Cinquecento cinque e diece
Tre cinque a do Mil nulla tre e do un cento
nulla, questa opra dar piu chaltri lecce.103
 158 V. della Dora
[To the divine five-hundred five and ten / three five to
two miles zero and two one hundred / zero, I dedicate
this work which he reads more than any others.]
The map and the rhyming verses form a single
unit, what Denis Cosgrove has called an icono-
text.104 As such, it might be considered to be a
precursor of a neo-Stoic Renaissance practice that
became popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In that tradition, maps acted not only as
mnemonic devices but also as moral emblems,
images representing a visible thing at the same
time as indicating something different. Long
familiar examples of emblems in cartographic guise
include Peter Apians and Oronce Fines heart-
shaped projections of 1530 and 1534/36 respec-
tively, the anonymous so-called Fools Cap map of
1590, and Ambrosius Holbeins two maps of the
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island of Utopia (1516 and 1518), which some
scholars claim may have been inspired by
Martelluss map of Athos.105 Moral emblems were
objects of contemplation through the assistance
of which the individual could rise above the
mundane in order to observe the theatre of the
world and reflect on the futility of human affairs
and terrestrial life itself.106 Cosgrove has shown
that sixteenth-century cosmographic projects, such
as Abraham Orteliuss Theatrum orbis terrarum
(1570), sought to represent the worlds unity
in diversity and that they promoted a quest
for global tolerance at a time of religious and
political division.107 Buondelmontis, Martelluss
and Bartolomeos moral appraisal of Mount Athos,
a republic of monks belonging to a Church deemed
schismatic by the Vatican, can be seen as a small-
scale anticipation of these ideals; as a glimpse of
inter-religious tolerance within the context of
humanistic universalism.
The representation of Mount Athos on early
Renaissance isolarii served multiple functions that
went beyond the purely informative or descriptive.
For this reason, I argue, to assess these maps in
terms of faithfulness to reality or to search for
detailed topographic information on them, as has
been done in the past, is to miss the point. To
separate the image from the text or from the
context of the island-book genre is equally mis-
leading, for the maps were used as visual aids for
the memorization of the information conveyed by
the text. Mount Athos was not just a blessed stop
in the Aegean for the armchair pilgrim, it was a
node within a complex net of loci memoriae. It was a
site whose different temporal and cultural layers
could be contained and appropriated only through
Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
its quasi-insular self-enclosure. It was not only an
emblem conveying deep moral meanings, but also
a locus amoenus presented to the reader for personal
moral edification.
Like Constantinople and other prominent loci in
early island books, Athos can be also envisaged as a
circulating reference that was continually re-
inscribed and poeticized by copyists who in most
cases had no experience of the place they were
depicting except through previous textual and
graphic representations. To Buondelmontis origi-
nal sketch of Athos, each scribe added something of
his own cultural background and his clients
demands. When isolarii started (with Bartolomeo
dalli Sonetti) to be printed, interpretation and
re-inscription were left to the erudite reader
himself.
In the remaining two centuries of the isolariis
life, the image of the Athos peninsula underwent
further transformations but never lost its promi-
nent position in the books and its moralizing
function. Running counter to every narrative of
cartographic progress, Athos appears on Coronellis
1699 map in the shape of a huge cross chasing the
infidel Turk from the Aegean. After the demise of
the island book as a genre in the eighteenth
century, Athos continued to occupy a central
position on maps of the northern Aegean.108
Even today, re-scaled to fit modern measure-
ment, Athos still features on topographic maps as a
space qualitatively different from its surroundings.
It stands out as a finger of land with no towns,
camp sites, marinas or asphalted roads. Instead, it is
crowded with tiny crosses marking a multitude of
monasteries. Sacredness is conveyed in a way that
is perhaps different from, but no less effective than,
Buondelmontis and Martelluss Edenic quasi-
island, or with Bartolomeos iconotext. As on
the early isolarii, the peninsula remains a locus
memoriae: the uncanny non-presence of Xerxes
canal haunts even contemporary scientific topo-
graphic maps. Mount Athos thus challenges tradi-
tional evolutionary narratives that like to posit
a progression from a pictorial/subjective to a
scientific/objective cartography. It also challenges
Harleian readings limited to power-knowledge. It
calls for a re-evaluation of maps as complex
cultural artefacts, as carriers of not only social but
also moral values as links between interior and
exterior worlds.109
Acknowledgements: I am most grateful to the two
anonymous referees and to George Tolias for their
invaluable comments, and to Robert Markus for
checking my Latin translations.
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
Manuscript submitted October 2007. Revised text received March
2008.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. As shown by Evaggelos [Evangelos] Livieratos, Atho
perimetrou metamorfoseis, in Orous Atho ges thalasses
perimetron kharton metamorfoseis, ed. Evaggelos Livieratos
(Thessaloniki, Ethnike Khartotheke, 2002), 17144.
2. See, for example, British Library (hereafter BL) Maps
SEC.5 (216).
3. On Barbie du Bocage, see Matthew Edney,
Reconsidering Enlightenment geography and map mak-
ing: reconnaissance, mapping, archive, in Geography and
Enlightenment, ed. Charles W. J. Withers and David
Livingstone (Chicago and London, University of Chicago
Press, 1999), 18890. For Athos on 18th and 19th century
maps, see ibid.
4. Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise
(New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2002).
5. See, for example, the Vatopedian codex of Ptolemys
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Geography, Mount Athos, Vatopedinos 655 (13th14th
century). For the analysis of Mount Athos on Ptolemaic
maps, see Livieratos, Atho perimetrou metamorfoseis
(note 1); and Nane Ploutoglou, Tridaktulou Athos
Ptolemaikos, in Orous Atho ges kai thalasses perimetron
kharton metamorfoseis (note 1), 20516.
6. George Tolias, Isolarii, fifteenth to seventeenth
century, in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography
in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007), 3:1, 263
284, esp. 264; Frank Lestringant, Iles, in Geographie du
monde au Moyen Age et a la Renaissance, ed. Monique
Pelletier (Paris, CTHS, 1989), 166.
7. Brian Harley, Maps, knowledge and power, in The
Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen
Daniels (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988),
277312.
8. Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale (Modena, Cosimo
Panini, 2006).
9. Denis Cosgrove, Globalism and tolerance in early
modern geography, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 93 (2003): 85270.
10. Rene Gothoni, Tales and Truth: Pilgrimage on Mount
Athos Past and Present (Helsinki, Helsinki University Press,
1994), 1125; Agostino Pertusi, Monasteri e monaci
italiani allAthos nellalto Medioevo, in Le Millenaire du
Mont Athos, 9631963 (Namur, Etudes et Melanges,
Editions de Chevetogne, 1963), 21751; Evaggelos
Livieratos and Georgios [George] Tolias, O Athos ton
neson, in Orous Atho ges thalasses perimetron kharton
metamorfoseis (see note 1), 21740.
11. Herodotus, The Histories, VII, 2224.
12. Georgios Tolias, Ta nesologia: e monaxia kai e suntrofia
ton nesion (Athens, Olkos, 2002), 227.
13. The title can be translated as Island Book of the
[Aegean] Archipelago.
14. The frequent suggestion that Buondelmonti died in
the early 1430s remains purely hypothetical, based
wholly on the lack of any known work from after
that date. See Giuseppe Ragone, Il Liber Insularum
Archipelagi di Cristoforo dei Buondelmonti: filologia del
testo, filologia dellimmagine, in Humanisme et culture
geographique a lepoque du concile de Constance, ed. Didier
Marcotte (Turnhout, Brepols, 2002), 19293.
15. Deliberai nel mio animo volere vedere le isole dello
Archipelago, et per fare questo ho consumati anni sedici,
et cos ho visto et trovate multe cose che scripte non ho
Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 159
vedute ma io hora qua con i pirrhati hora con mercanti
et hora con grippi et barchecti et altri ligni delle isole, et
hora innanzi et hora in dietro, hora in qua et hora in la,
secondo che la comodita del navigare che ad me era
apparecchiato, perche lo fine del mio navigare solo era per
posser investigare la condizione et effecto delle isole
(Vatican (hereafter Vat.), Ross. 704, fol. 1rv), quoted in
Ragone, Il Liber Insularum Archipelagi (see note 14),
187.
16. Hilary Louise Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti:
adventurer, explorer and cartographer, in Pelletier,
Geographie du monde au Moyen Age et a la Renaissance (see
note 6), 207; Ian Manners, Constructing the image of a
city: the representation of Constantinople in Christopher
Buondelmontis Liber Insularum Archipelagi, Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997): 73.
17. Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16),
207; Buondelmonti quoted in Tolias, Isolarii, fifteenth to
seventeenth century (see note 6), 266. The manuscript
believed to have been sent to Cardinal Orsini is
considered lost. It probably perished when his library
was dispersed following the sack of Rome in 1527: see
Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (note 16), 215.
18. Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (see note 14), 186;
Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16), 209.
19. Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (see note 14), 187;
Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16), 209.
20. In Greek: published by Emile Legrand, Christoforo
Buondelmonti: Description des isles de lArchipel. Version
greque par un anonyme (Paris, Ecole des Langues Or.
Vivantes, 1897). In Italian: Vat. Ross. 704; Marciana ital.
Vi.19 (without maps); Vienna, rec. 2098. In Venetian:
Ambrosiana Y.72 sup. (without maps). In English: BL,
Cod. Titus B VIII, fols. 245r48v. See Roberto Weiss, Un
umanista antiquario: Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Lettere
Italiane 16 (1964): 108.
21. Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16),
207. Ragone has counted 75 manuscripts, including some
cited by other scholars but deemed lost. He also includes
the four manuscripts of Martelluss Insularium Illustratum,
the isolario in the Bibliotheque nationale de France
(hereafter BNF), and other works he considers plagiariza-
tions of the Liber. See Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (note
14), 2034.
22. Thomas Thomov, New information about
Cristoforo Buondelmontis drawings of Constantinople,
Byzantion 66 (1996): 434.
23. Roberto Almagia, Planisferi, carte nautiche e affini
esistenti nella Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican City,
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944), 10517.
24. Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16),
215. Version B was first published by G. R. L. von Sinner,
Christoph. Buondelmonti Florentini Librum insularum archi-
pelagi e codicibus Parisinis regiis nunc primum totum edidit
(Leipzig and Berlin, 1824), and then in 1897 by Legrand,
Christoforo Buondelmonti (see note 20). Only fragments of
version A have been published, and in so far as I know
version C not at all.
25. Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16),
215.
26. Ibid.
27. Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (see note 14), 200.
28. David Livingstone, Science, text and space:
thoughts on the geography of reading, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 391401.
29. Manners, Constructing the image of a city (see
note 16).
30. Pertusi, Monasteri e monaci italiani (see note 10).
 160 V. della Dora
31. Ibid., 245, n.88.
32. Livieratos and Tolias, O Athos ton neson (see
note 10).
33. John R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human
Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York, Palgrave
MacMillan, 2004).
34. Godfrey Baldacchino, Editorial: islandsobjects of
representation, Geografiska Annaler B, 87 (2006): 247.
35. The only other extant C version (Vat. Chig. F.IV.74)
has been truncated and does not contain a map of Mount
Athos.
36. On the Vienna manuscript (rec. 2098), see Hermann
Julius Hermann, Die Handschriften und Inkunabeln der
italienischen Renaissance (Leipzig, Verlag von Karl
Hiersemann, 1932), 3: 69.
37. Ragone argues that the genealogy of the text almost
never coincides with the genealogy of the maps. He
thinks that the maps may not be in the same hand as any
of those responsible for the text. See Ragone, Il Liber
Insularum (note 14), 95. In any case, there is no reason
to assume that drawings were as faithfully copied from an
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exemplar as the text.
38. The notes in the Ravenna manuscript indicate that
Lavra had 800 or 1000 monks and Vatopedi 500; in
Marciana lat. XIV.45, the figures are 800 and 500
respectively; and in the Dusseldorf manuscript, 800 and
400. See also Pertusi, Monasteri e monaci italiani (note
10), 250, n.160.
39. Caloyer is the latinization of the Greek word
kalogeros (monk). Buondelmonti in his description of the
islet of Kaloyeros between Chios and Andros, gives a
philological explanation of the word (kalos 5 bonus,
geros 5 senex); see Sidney Allen, Kaloyeros: an Atlantis
in microcosm? Imago Mundi 29 (1977): 55.
40. Arne Effenberger, Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber
Insularum Archipelagi (Dusseldorf, Universitats und
Landesbiblioithek, 2005), 66. In the Milan manuscript
(Ambrosiana a219 inf., fol. 76r), the map of Mount Athos
(erroneously labelled Lemnos) appears as a blank space;
only the coast is outlined and the surrounding sea is
painted in green.
41. The concept of poetics of space is taken from
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, Beacon
Press, 1969). First published in French as La poetique de
lespace (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958).
42. See Weiss, Un umanista antiquario (note 20), 109.
Compare, for example, the iconography of the highest
tower on the Athos map in BL, Arundel ms.93, with the
tower on the left in the Annunciation of the Shepherds
in the Master of Jean Rolin IIs Book of Hours executed in
Paris in 1460 (BL, Add. MS 35216, fol. 51v).
43. Almagia, Planisferi (see note 23), 307; Tolias, Ta
nesologia (see note 12), 33. Martelluss origins are
suggested by his self-characterization as Germanus.
Several misspellings and errors in the transcription of
place-names from older portolan charts show that his
knowledge of Italian was far from perfect. See Florio
Banfi, Two Italian maps of the Balkan peninsula, Imago
Mundi 11 (1954): 30.
44. Tolias, Ta nesologia (see note 12), 32.
45. Tolias, Isolarii (see note 6), 267, 283.
46. The term French Portolan is used by, for example,
Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (see note 14), 204, no. 85.
47. Martellus characterized the Mediterranean as our
sea, echoing the ancient Romans mare nostrum: Almagia,
Planisferi (see note 23), 292; Tolias, Isolarii (see note 6),
280. The expansion from an island book for the Aegean to
one covering the Mediterranean and, finally, different
Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
parts of the world can be observed by comparing the four
existing (complete) copies of the Insularium (Leiden,
Cod. Vossianus Lat. 111; BL, Add. MS 15760; Chantilly,
Library of the Musee Conde, MS 483; Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota, Bell Library, B1475) to the
codex at Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, XXIX.25, a
draft of the Insularium including Buondelmontis islands
and the B version of his text, in which sketches of the
countries are left unfinished.
48. Roberto Almagia, I mappamondi di Enrico Martello
e alcuni concetti geografici di Cristoforo Colombo, La
Bibliofilia 42 (1940): 302.
49. One manuscript with the Balkans map is Chantilly,
Conde Museum ms 483, fol. 103, 54.5 6 32.5 cm, on
which the finger of Athos is portrayed as virtually a
round island characterized by the gulf. The round quasi-
insular shape can be traced to earlier versions of the
Geography: see, for example, Venice, Marciana gr. 338
(1449). For a reproduction, see Tolias, Ta nesologia
(note 12), 48-49.
50. BL, Add. MS 15760, fol. 42r.
51. Ibid., fols. 41r42v.
52. Pliny, Natural History, 7.35. Two such theologians
were Alexander de Hales, the first Franciscan professor at
the University of Paris in the 1220s, and later (1312)
Durandus of Saint Pourcain, Auvergne, France. See
Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise. A History of Heaven on
Earth (London, British Library, 2006), 17475 and 192.
53. Numerous examples of similar landscapes and
landscape features in French Books of Hours can be
found in Janet Backhouse, Illuminations from Books of
Hours (London, British Library, 2004), especially 36, 43,
54, 102, 103.
54. Buondelmonti, in Gothoni, Tales and Truth (see note
10), 11 (translation based on Legrand, Christoforo
Buondelmonti (see note 20)).
55. Thevet only glanced at Athoss summit from the
Hellespont, but reproduced it in his Cosmographie
Universelle (1575) and associated it with a saying from
Erasmuss Adagia (a book of proverbs): Ahvz kaluptei
pleura Lgmnaz booz. Athos overshadows the flanks of the
Lemnian cow [traditionally, something or someone that
gets in the way or casts a shadow on anothers
reputation]. They say that in Lemnos there was an
immense statue of a cow made of white marble; and
Mount Athos was so high and so huge that, in spite of the
great mass of Thrace, it casts a shadow three hundred
stades long (Adagia, III, ii, 90). See also Martin Martin,
Some western images of Athos in early modern times,
c.15541678, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 22
(1998): 51.
56. Which monasteries he visited during his stay on
Athos, Buondelmonti does not tell us, but it is likely that,
sailing from Thasos, he first disembarked at Vatopedi,
proceeded along the coast to the Great Lavra and the
monastic village of Saint Anne. He might have then
visited other foundations on the west coast, before
leaving the peninsula. As Gothoni has observed, Lavra
and Vatopedi were the only two idiorrhythmic mona-
steries at that time, which would correspond to his
description (Gothoni, Tales and Truth (see note 10), 24).
57. Gothoni, Tales and Truth (see note 10), 11.
58. Ibid., 12.
59. Vat. Ross. 704, fol. 1v.
60. Hilary Louise Turner, The expanding horizons of
Christopher Buondelmonti, History Today 40 (1990): 41.
As Ragone has shown, Buondelmonti became directly
involved in diplomatic operations at the time when Vitold
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008
of Lithuania was attempting to create a Lithuania
Constantinople axis (Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (see
note 14), 216).
61. A detailed account of the interiors of the churches of
some of the monasteries and their treasures is given by
Ciriaco dAncona, who visited the peninsula in 1444.
Unlike Buondelmonti, Ciriaco was a merchant and
antiquarian rather than a cleric and was more interested
in aesthetic detail than in the spiritual life of the
Athonites; see Edward Bodnar, Cyriac of Ancona: Later
Travels (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,
2003).
62. Gothoni, Tales and Truth (see note 10), 11.
63. Ma io hora qua con pirrathi hora con mercanti et
hora con grippi et barchecti et altri ligni delle isole, et hora
in la, secondo che la comodita del navigare che ad me era
apparecchiato, perche lo fine del mio navigare era per
poster investigare la condizione delle isole (Vat. Ross.
704, fol. 1v, quoted in Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (see
note 14), 187).
64. Quoted in Cosgrove, Globalism and tolerance (see
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note 9), 857.
65. Liz James and Ruth Webb, To understand ultimate
things and enter secret places: ekphrasis and art in
Byzantium, Art History 14 (1991): 117.
66. The same ekphrasis was also re-proposed with slight
changes in Nikephoros Gregorass Romaike Istora (1359).
See Nikephoros Gregoras, Romasche Geschichte, transl. Jan
Louis van Dieten, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, Anton Hiersemann,
1973).
67. Nikephoros Gregoras, in Zacharia Papantonios,
Agion Oros (Athens, n.p., 1934), 183. I would like to
thank Father Amphilochios and Father Theoktistos
(Docheiariou Monastery, Mount Athos) for their assis-
tance with translations from Byzantine Greek.
68. Gothoni, Tales and Truth (see note 10), 1112.
69. Ibid.
70. Quoted in Mangani, Cartografia morale (see note 8),
160.
71. Pertusi, Monasteri e monaci italiani allAthos (see
note 10), 251 n.162.
72. On Buondelmontis classical education, see Weiss,
Un umanista antiquario (note 20).
73. Ragone, Il Liber Insularum (see note 14), 186.
74. Weiss, Un umanista antiquario (see note 20), 110.
75. Today the libraries of Mount Athos contain no fewer
than 16,000 Byzantine and modern Greek manuscripts,
together with a considerable number of chrysobulls,
patriarchal letters and other valuable documents. See
Evaggelos Litsas, Palaeographical researches in the Lavra
of Mount Athos, Ellenika 50 (2000): 21821.
76. Jos P. A. van der Vin, Travellers to Greece and
Constantinople: Ancient Monuments and Old Traditions in
Medieval Travellers Tales (Leiden, Nederlands Historisch-
Archaeologisch Institut Istanbul, 1980), 138. See also
Bodnar, Cyriac of Ancona (see note 61), 12135.
77. Mangani, Cartografia morale (see note 8), 160.
78. Pliny, Natural History, 7.35.
79. Turner Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16),
215.
80. Invenimus post has iam peractas insulas olim Athos
dictum: et quamvis nunc continens sit, tunc, tempore
Xerxis, Regis Persarum, qi contra sapientissimum popul-
um Athenarum cum octingentis milibus hominum usque
Termophilas venerat et devictus a paucis ad patriam sine
honore remeavit, a continenti mons iste erat divisus
[Having visited these islands, we finally arrive at the
mount formerly called Athos: and even though now it is
Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 161
mainland, this mountain was separated from the con-
tinent in the time of Xerxes, king of the Persians, who
advanced to Thermopilae with eight hundred thousand
men against the Athenians, wisest of nations, and having
been defeated by the few, returned to his country without
honour]. Latin from Pertusi, Monasteri e monaci italiani
(see note 10), 246; my translation.
81. Herodotus, The Histories, VII, 22; Strabo, Geography,
66 (Macedonia).
82. This would be the equivalent of 178 kilometres,
which is close to modern geodetic calculations; see
Livieratos and Tolias, O Athos ton neson (note 10), 231.
83. Pomponius Mela, Description of the World, 2.31. On
the Ravenna manuscript (Classense lat. 308, fol. 61),
Pomponius Melas original quotation was noted on the
margin by some erudite reader.
84. Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautics, 1.60106. Rather
than a real phenomenon, Athoss shade probably reached
Apollonius (and after him Plutarch, who admittedly had
never been to Athos or to Lemnos) as a topographic
legend mentioned in an iambic verse by Sophocles (495
406 BC); see Miltiades Konstantinou, Athos skiazei nota
Lemnias boos, in Agion Oros kai prochristianike archaioteta,
ed. Soteres Athanasiades (Thessaloniki, KEDAK, 2006),
25.
85. There is also another hill which men call Athos; and
that is so high that its shadow stretches to Lemnos, which
is distant from it nearly seventy-eight miles. Upon these
hills the air is so clear and so pure that no wind can be felt
there; and so no animal can be seen there; and so no
animal nor bird can live there, the air is so dry. And men
say in those countries that once wise men went up on the
hills and held to their noses sponges soaked with water to
catch the air, for the air was so dry. And also up on those
hills they wrote letters in the dust with their fingers, and
at the end of a year they went up again and found the
same letters that they had written the day before as fresh
as they were on the first day, without any defect.
And therefore it certainly appears that these hills
pass beyond the clouds to the pure air (Mandeville, The
Voiage and Travayle of Sir John Maudeville Knight which
Treateth of the Way toward Hierusalem and of Marvayles of
Inde and Other Islands and Countreys (1356), quoted in
Jay Levenson, Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration
(New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1991),
225).
86. Weiss, Un umanista antiquario (see note 20), 113.
87. Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The
Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994);
Denis Cosgrove, Apollos Eye (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001), 93.
88. Patricia Platt, Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early
Modern Culture (Newark, University of Delaware Press,
1999).
89. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (see note 41), 155. See
also Tolias, Isolarii (note 6), 280.
90. Marciana lat. XIV.45; Vat. Chig. F.V.110.
91. Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 1966), 3.
92. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17.
93. Mangani, Cartografia morale (see note 8), 69.
94. Ibid., 161.
95. Marica Milanesi, De insulis et earum proprietate di
Domenico Silvestri (13851406), Geografia Antiqua 2
(1993): 13346. As Tolias has noted, the fact that a copy
of Domenico Bandinis De populis is included in Marciana
 162 V. della Dora Imago Mundi 60:2 2008

lat. X.124 as an introduction to Buondelmontis Liber
seems to confirm that these two works were considered
by contemporary readers as two of a kind (Tolias, Isolarii
(see note 6), 265).
96. Turner, Christopher Buondelmonti (see note 16),
207.
97. Mangani, Cartografia morale (see note 8), 160.
98. Tolias, Isolarii (see note 6), 264.
99. Massimo Donattini, Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti, il suo
Isolario e un viaggio di Giovanni Bembo, 15251530,
Geografia Antiqua 34 (19941995): 230; Cosgrove,
Apollos Eye (see note 87), 93. A copy of Bartolomeo dalli
Sonettis Isolario used to be bound together with the
Venetian translation of Buondelmontis Liber in Milan,
Ambrosiana Y.72 supplement.
100. Donattini, Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti (see note 99),
235, 238.
101. Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti, Isolario (Venice, 1485),
n.p. The translation is mine.
102. Tolias, Ta nesologia (see note 12).
103. Donattini, Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti (see note 99),
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Icaromenippus seu Hypernephelus, published in Paris in
1506, ten years before the publication of Utopia. See also
Craig Ringwalt Thompson, The Translations of Lucian by
Erasmus and St. Thomas More (Ithaca, NY, Cornell
University, 1940). On the possible relationship between
Holbeins maps of Utopia and Martelluss map of Athos,
see Evaggelos Livieratos and Maria Parzale, Ou topos e
topos Orous? in Orous Atho ges thalasses perimetron kharton
metamorfoseis (note 1), 246). Holbeins original map
illustrated the first edition of Thomas Mores Utopia
(1516), but a different version of the map appeared in
the second edition (1518). It has been suggested that
Erasmus of Rotterdam, who oversaw the first edition of
Mores Utopia and who had also worked with Holbein,
ordered the artist to rework the original map for the
second edition of Mores book, so that it would give the
hint of a human skull, after recognizing its emblematic
potential as a memento mori, or remembrance of death
(Malcolm Bishop, Ambrosius Holbeins memento mori
map for Sir Thomas Mores Utopia: the meanings of a
masterpiece of early sixteenth-century graphic art, British

212, 217. The translation is mine. With his cryptogram,
Bartolomeo was again following Buondelmonti, who had
inscribed his dedication to Orsini using the initial letters
of his islands descriptions.
104. Cosgrove, Apollos Eye (see note 87).
105. Thomas More was familiar with Athos and the
story of Xerxes canal (which he adapted for his account
of Utopia) from his and Erasmus of Rotterdams
translation of the complete works of Lucian, Luciani
Dental Journal 199 (2005): 10712).
106. Cosgrove, Globalism and tolerance (see note 9),
866. See also Cosgrove, Apollos Eye (see note 87), 14950.
107. Cosgrove, Globalism and tolerance (see note 9).
108. See Livieratos, Atho perimetrou metamorfoseis
(note 1).
109. Denis Cosgrove, Introduction: mapping meaning,
in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London, Reaktion
Books, 1999), 321.

Appendix 1. List of Manuscripts Consulted

Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi.

The folio number for the Mount Athos map is given wherever possible, as is the date and place of copying. In addition
the letters A, B and C indicate which of the three versions of the text the manuscript represents.

Manuscripts with maps:

1. Athens, Gennadeion 71 AGL. 15th century. B
2. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum W.309, fol. 37v. Southern France, c.1475. B
3. Dusseldorf, Universitats und Landesbibliothek ms. g.13, fol. 56. Vienna, c.1480. B
4. Holkham Hall, Norfolk, Library of the Earl of Leicester ms. 475. Chios, 1428. B
5. London, British Library Arundel ms. 93 art. 7, fol. 157r. Flanders, 1485. B
6. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana a219 inf., fol. 76. Early 15th century. A
7. Padua, Biblioteca Civica CM 289, fol. 21v. Italy, second half 15th century. B
8. Paris, BNF lat. 4823, fol. 35v. Italy or France, 1516th century. B
9. Paris, BNF lat. 4824, fol. 47v. North Italy, late 15th century. B
10. Paris, BNF lat. 4825, fol. 39v. North Italy, c.1466. B
11. Paris, BNF nouvelle acquisition lat. 2383, fol. 37. Italy, second half 15th century. B
12. Ravenna, Biblioteca Classense lat. 308, fol. 61. 15th century. A
13. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Barb. lat. 270, fol. 47. B
14. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Chig. F.V.110, fol. 46. B
15. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Ross. 702, fol. 34v. B
16. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Ross. 704, fol. 65. First half 15th century. B
17. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Ross. 705, fol. 52v. B
18. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Urb. lat. 458, fol. 44. 16th century? B
19. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Urb. lat. 459, fol. 36. Chios, 1456. B
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008 Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 163

20. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. X.123 5 3784, fol. 24. Late 15early 16th century. B
21. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. X.124 5 3177. 15th century. B
22. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. X.215 5 3773, fol. 48. c.1430. C
23. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana lat. XIV.45 5 4595, fol. 131. 15th century. B
24. Vienna, Bibliotheca Palatina Vindobonensis 5 rec. 2098, fol. 45. Italy, first half 15th century. B
Manuscripts without maps:
1. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana ital. VI.19, fol. 34v. Venice, 1471. B
2. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana Y.72 sup. Venice, 1485? B
Henricus Martellus, Insularium Illustratum
London, British Library Add. MS 15760, fol. 42. Florence, c.14801490.
The Paris isolario
Paris, BNF franc. 2794, fol. 83v. France, 16th century.
Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti, Isolario
Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana incun. 733, fol. 48. Venice, 1485.
Paris, BNF Cartes et plans, Res. Ge DD1989, fol. 48. Venice, 1485
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Appendix 2. Transcripts of the Description of Mount Athos

Crisoforo Buondelmonti, Liber Insularum Archipelagi.

Originally compiled either as Buondelmonti travelled through the Aegean or later when he was in Rhodes sometime
after 1418. The transcript is based on the Milan (Ambrosiana a219 inf) and Ravenna (Classense lat. 308) codices. The
words in bold are those present in the A text but missing from the B (vulgate) version. Version A is based on the
transcript by Agostino Pertusi, Monasteri e monaci italiani all Athos (see note 10), 24647.

Invenimus post has iam peractas insulas montem olim Athos dictum; et quamvis nunc continens sit, tunc
tempore Xerxis, Regis Persarum, qui contra sapientissimum populum Athenarum cum octingentis
milibus hominum usque Termophilas venerat et devictus a paucis ad patriam sine honorem
remeavit, a continenti mons iste erat divisus; nunc igitur tale tenue vadum propter ignorantiam vel
pusilanmitatem et ignaviam colentium reclusum terra habetur; et accedentes in eum turba
innumerabiliorum caloerorum. Mons Sanctus usque in hodiernum nuncupator ab istis. Qui in Tracia
prope Macedoniam in tertio Europe sinu et in mari Egeo situs, in altitudine Olimpi, habertur et
adeo mons iste sublimatur ut eius vertex in loco tam sublime, tam puro aere constitutus est,
quod neque imbres in eo nec pluvie generantur: non spirant venti, non aves advolant nec nives
aut grandines congelantur. Annua enim sacra ibi facere soliti cinerem characteribus quibusdam
signabant, quem anno altero redeuntes uti liquerant signatum inveniebant lineamentis
characterum in nullo mutatis. Huius umbra propre Lepnon accedit, quamvis multi dicant
Lemnon usque insulam dictam. In summitate igitur, ut dicitur, Acrohathon oppidum olim erat, in quo ad
dimidium longior quam in aliis terris etas habitantium extendebatur. Circuit et enim ad plus mons iste
magnus centum viginti duo milaria.
Quo in loco tot et tanta sunt monasteria virorum Dei sive caloerorum sancti Blaxii, Chrysostomi atque
Gregorii Nazanzeni et aliorum sanctorum preteritorum, quod hoc nullo modo enumerari posset. Surgunt
igitur in tempestate noctis silentio, postquam primum signum lignea campana dederat rauca voce secundum
consuetudinem plurium orientalium grecorum, et ad ecclesiam accedentes, postquam de sua exeunt
cellula, matutinale divinum cantant officium, semper omnibus in pedibus astantibus suis. Cumque sic
peragerent et orationes factas ad laudem Omnipotentis finirent, ad suas redeunt casas, et quicquid a suo
mittitur priore cum pace comedunt et devotione. Sunt et enim aliqua horum monasteria que ad communem
caloerorum trahunt ritum, aliqua antea (ad alium) asperiorem modum vivendi vita ordinavere, quia in
sabato de monte atque solitudine omnes in cellulis redeuntes et in officio divino die dominico usque
meridiem fere orantes ad refectorium accedunt, et completo prandio maior ipsorum pars leguminibusque
pane in heremum revertitur et inde suspiciens celum ac stellas et illic habitantem divinum Deum secum tota
 164 V. della Dora Imago Mundi 60:2 2008

nocte suspirans et patriam cogitans eternam de exilii sui loco protinus ad orationem humilem os secum
convertitur supplicaturum, atque ita verbis pastus amenissimis multa in pace animi venture lucis
initium prestulatur; et ubi iubare iam solis exorto, in diurnas Dei laudes pio letus ore prerumpit. Iste vero
hesterno sobrius vegetusque somnio modesto sub lare, mundum mensam nulla re magisque sua
presentia exornat; pro tumultu requiem, pro strepitu silentium habet, ipse sibi comes, ipse sibi
fabulatur, nec metuit solus esse dum secum est. Celum spectare, non aurum, terram amat calcare, et
benedictio cum gratiarum actione sepe est in ore suo ; scit vite hominum pauca sufficere et summas verasque
divitias nil optare, summumque imperium nil timere ; letum agit atque tranquillum evum, placidas noctes,
otiosos dies et secura convivia ; it liber, sedet intrepidus, nulla struit aut cavet insidias; angelorum aula
conviciis odor colorque optimus, iudex morum testisque modestie; mensaque pacifica, luxus ac tumultus
nescia, gule domitrix ; et voluptas feda exulat et regina sobrietas regnat; cubile castum et quietum,
conscientia paradisus est preparatus. Multi itaque, Ursine mi venerande, in huiusmodi monte sponte talem
eligere vitam, que tantum trahit eos ad contemplationem perfectam, quod, si maceris lapidum contra rueret
eos, nullo modo talem sentirentque viderent strepitum atque caput vel oculos contorquerent ad videndum.
Aliqui etiam in monasterio cum silentio tribus ebdomada diebus cibum ad sustentationem nature capere sunt
assueti. In quibus quidam monasteriis pro quolibet centum enumerabis, et in aliquibus quingentique plures
ab uno capiunt gubernantium. Igitur monasteria de decem caloeris usque plusquam mille superasse
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videntur, qui ex suo labore monasterio serviunt et devote; et omnes in dicto cenobio communiter
vivant sine aliqua custodia atque orta zizania. Hic autem apes, ficus, oliva in amenissimis vallibus valde
virescunt, quorum fructus pro servitio ecclesiarum in anno reponunt. Aliqui in eodem monasterio
pannos texunt, aliqui sotulares suunt, et aliqui retia pro piscibus religare fatigant; ille fusum lana revolvit,
iste canistrum viminibus conectit in manu, et omnes alternatim, horis stabilitis, Deum laudari conantur, et
pax vere in eis regnat sempiterna.

Henricus Martellus, Insularium Illustratum.

Manuscript compiled in Florence c.14801490 (London, BL, Add. MS 15760, fol. 41v42r (item 79).

Athos mons, quem nunc Montem Sanctum appellant: a Xerxe P[er]sarum rege seiunctum olim a continenti
velificatusq[ue] ut inquit Iuvenalis. Nunc continenti Tracie conuiunctus sequitur vicinus quidem
Stratonicensi: Salonicensi q[ue] civitatibus. Est aut mons altissimus [editissimus in the text] habetq[ue] in
vertice oppidi vetustissimi vestigia non pua[?] quem oppidum Acroaon dixere in quo quidem homines
diutius vivere quam in ceteris locis tradunt. Ambitur vero mons universus passibus cxxiii milibus
plenusq[ue] est monasteriis sacris[que] edibus Basilio, Crisostomo, & Nazianzeno sanctis patribus dicatis in
quibus monaci solitariam vitam ducentes contemplationi orationiq[ue] tantum intenti, pane atq[ue] aqua
contenti. Interdum tribus tantum in ebdom[a]da diebus cibum sumunt et breviter summas divitias putant
nihil cupe[re]. Sunt vero monasteria plus q[uam] triginta monacorum autem numerus pene infinitus: valles
habet plerasq[ue] amenissimas olivis fic[i]busq[ue] plenas porrectusq[ue] in mari orientem solem spectat
a[d] Lemnos insula[m].
 Imago Mundi 60:2 2008 Mount Athos in Early Renaissance Isolarii 165

Cartographier une quasi-le sacree:

le Mont Athos dans les insulaires du debut de la Renaissance
Le Mont Athos, le troisieme doigt de la presqule de Chalkidike dans le nord de la Grece, enclave monastique
autonome pendant plus dun millenaire, est un trait frappant dans les livres dles de la Renaissance.
Dans les premiers insulaires il apparaissait habituellement comme une le de forme circulaire comprenant
quatre monasteres principauxune representation qui nentretenait pas de ressemblance avec la realite.
Les chercheurs ont eu tendance a ecarter ces representations du Mont Athos comme rudimentaires
et inexactes. Cet article propose une nouvelle evaluation de ces cartes dans leur contexte, en les interrogeant
suivant leur specificite culturelle et en tant quobjets visuels complexes. En tant quelements dune
longue tradition manuscrite, ces cartes sont susceptibles de changer en fonction des epoques et des
contextes geographiques dans lesquels elles furent copiees. Cette approche nous conduit a suggerer que
les cartes du Mont Athos figurant dans les insulaires, plutot que detre des representations de la
realite, etaient surtout concues comme des instruments de memorisation et de morale pour ledification
personnelle.
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Karten einer heiligen Insel: der Berg Athos in Isolarien der Fruhrenaissance
Der Berg Athos ist der dritte Finger der Halbinsel Chalkidike im nordlichen Griechenland und seit uber
tausend Jahren eine von den Monchen selbstverwaltete Enklave. Die Halbinsel bildet ein prominentes Motiv
in den Isolarien der Renaissance. In fruhen Fassungen erscheint sie gewohnlich als runde Insel mit vier
Hauptklosterneine Darstellung, die keine Anklange an die Realitat hat. Wissenschaftler tendierten bisher
dazu, diese Reprasentationen als rudimentar und ungenau abzuqualifizieren. In diesem Beitrag sollen diese
Karten aus ihrem Zusammenhang und ihrer kulturellen Eigenart heraus neu interpretiert und als komplexe
visuelle Artefakte gewertet werden. Sie gehoren zu einer langen Manuskripttradition innerhalb derer sie
mehrfache Veranderungen erfahren haben. Diese Veranderungen hangen von der Zeit der Entstehung und
dem geographischen Kontext ab, in dem sie verwendet wurden. Die Untersuchung dieser Zusammenhange
legt die Vermutung nahe, dass die Athos-Darstellungen in den Isolarien weniger Abbildungen einer Realitat
sein sollten, sondern vielmehr als mnemotechnische Hilfen zur moralischen Selbstbildung gedacht waren.

Cartografiando una Casi-Isla Sagrada:

Monte Atos en los Isolarios de Principios del Renacimiento
Monte Atos, el tercer apendice de la Pennsula Calcdica en el norte de Grecia y un enclave monastico
autonomo durante mas de mil anos, esta presente de forma llamativa en los libros de islas renacentistas. En
los primeros isolarios aparece normalmente con forma redondeada a modo de isla, mostrando los cuatro
principales monasteriosuna imagen alejada de la realidad. Los investigadores han tendido a desestimar
estas representaciones del Monte Atos por su tosca apariencia e inexactitud. Este artculo ofrece una
revalorizacion de esos mapas en su contexto, cuestionandolos en su especificidad cultural y como objetos de
complejidad visual. Como parte de una larga tradicion manuscrita, dichos mapas estan condicionados por los
cambios a traves del tiempo y por los contextos geograficos en los que fueron copiados. Este enfoque sugiere
que mas que como representaciones reales, los mapas de Atos que aparecen en los isolarios fueron concebidos
como recursos mnemotecnicos y morales autodidactas.