Portrait: AI-generated imagined likeness
Explorer · Writer
A navigator from Florence. Through his records of Atlantic voyages, he was involved in the process by which the New World came to be understood as a continent other than Asia. He is a person who thinks about geographical recognition during the Age of Exploration.
View in catalogFlorence
Birth
Atlantic world
Campaign
Mundus Novus
c. 1503
Book
Vespucci voyages
1499–1502
Voyage · Participant
Map: Natural Earth (PD)
He grew up in the commercial culture of Florence and moved to the Iberian Peninsula after working for the Medici family. At a time when commerce, maps, and navigation were intertwined, he turned his attention to the Atlantic world.
Letters based on his experiences voyaging to the coast of South America spread widely and influenced the perception of the New World as a "New World." Later, the name America was derived from his name.
There are problems with exaggeration and editing in Vespucci's voyage records, so we need to be careful about how much of them are based on his actual experiences. Nevertheless, it had a great influence as a document that changed the geographical imagination.
Amerigo Vespucci is a figure who shows how navigation, printing, scholarship, and commerce were linked in the process of rewriting the world map. When you study him, you realize that the Age of Exploration was not just a movement, but a reorganization of world perception itself.
