PORTOLAN CHART.

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The Rex Tholomeus portolan chart. This extraordinary portolan chart of Europe ranks among the finest cultural artefacts of the early Renaissance still in private hands. It embodies the emergence of precise, modern cartography and reflects Europe's growing awareness of lands beyond its immediate horizons. It is also the earliest extant chart by a cartographer other than the early 14th-century Genoese mapmaker Angelino Dulceti.Produced in the aftermath of the Black Death and some 130 years before Columbus reached the New World, the chart extends from the scarcely known islands of the open Atlantic to the vast Eurasian steppes of the Golden Horde. In the west, it delineates the shifting frontiers of the Hundred Years' War, the crescent flag marking the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, and the most complete mapping of the British Isles yet achieved. In the east, it records the surviving Crusader strongholds on the margins of the Levant, their Mamluk conquerors, and the final outposts of the Byzantine Empire. To the north, an unusually rich rendering of Norway includes depictions of gyrfalcons, prized by medieval nobility.In the south, the inclusion of a full-length portrait of Ptolemy - predating the rediscovery and Latin translation of his Geographia by Jacopo Angeli in 1410 - significantly enhances understanding of early Renaissance perceptions of the second-century geographer. Titled "Rex" and shown crowned, he is depicted in a manner not uncommon in medieval imagery, reflecting

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