FLOWER OF VIRTUE BY AMERIGO VESPUCCI (RICC. 1774) - ARTCODEX

The third son of Nastagio Vespucci, a Florentine notary, and the noblewoman Elisabetta Mini, he was born in Florence on March 9, 1454. In 1489, commissioned by the banker Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, he moved to Seville, where he met Christopher Columbus. During a voyage in the service of Portugal in 1501, he noted that the extent of the discovered areas extended to 50 degrees south latitude, realizing that he was in the presence of a previously unknown continent. This was also thanks to the humanistic culture in which he had been educated since childhood by his uncle Giorgio Antonio, a renowned scholar, combined with his family's mercantile experience, a valuable added value. A navigator and profound scholar of the seas, during his voyages he explored much of the eastern coast of South America. His figure is highly controversial, due to his letters, the authenticity of which has often been questioned, in which he speaks of the Mundus Novus , the New World. Their rapid diffusion led the cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to use the feminine gender ( America ) of the Latinized name Americus to indicate the new continent in a world map drawn in 1507, contained in the Cosmographiae Introductio . Waldseemüller's idea was that the name referred to present-day South America, that is, the lands visited by Vespucci. In 1508, Amerigo Vespucci was appointed "Piloto Mayor de Castilla" by King Ferdinand II of Aragon, becoming responsible for organizing expeditions and training pilots and cartographers, teaching them the use of the quadrant and the astrolabe. He died in 1512 in Seville.

A precious manuscript holds a crucial clue to the culture of the man who gave his name to the New World, explaining why he, a cultured merchant, and not others, no matter how great navigators, were aware of the greatest discovery of the modern age. A masterpiece of 15th-century Florentine illumination, this precious manuscript was written by the famous Amerigo Vespucci, the man who gave his name to the New World. It is one of the most illustrated texts, especially in the 15th century: a collection of stories with a moralistic meaning featuring animals, whose behavioral characteristics are linked to life lessons. This system, codified by classical culture, of contrasting vices and virtues and, through the literary device of the fable, disseminating it even to the less cultured social classes, persists through the fantasy world of Walt Disney and beyond. The illustrative apparatus of the Riccardiano manuscript of 1774, preserved in the Riccardiana Library in Florence, is due to the hand of Mariano del Buono, a great miniaturist active in Florence in the second half of the 15th century, who created splendid images despite their small size, in a format imposed by the structure of the page and quite typical for this type of text. The codex is divided into two parts: the first is dedicated to the Flower of Virtue , while the second is dedicated to the Sphere , a short poem on mythological and geographical subjects, made important by the presence of precious papers attributed to Goro Dati, a politician and silk merchant, which was widely known and widely read at the time. It is truly evocative to imagine that Amerigo copied this text as a young man, almost a portent for his future as a cultured and astute merchant and navigator.