Biography

Angelo Cattaneo holds a Ph.D. in History from the European University Institute in Florence and is a Researcher in History at the New University of Lisbon. His primary research interests revolve around the history of the cultural construction of space and forms of spatiality from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, by studying cosmography, cartography, travel literature, and the spatiality of languages and religions. He is the author of Fra Mauro’s Mappa mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice (Brepols, 2011). He also co-edited the volumeHumanisme et découvertes géographiques (Médiévales 58, 2010). Since 2012 is one of the coordinators of the research project Interactions between rivals: the Christian mission and Buddhist Sects in Japan (c.1549-c.1647), financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Angelo’s research has been supported by numerous awards, such as the FCT and C.N.R.S. Postdoctoral Fellowships, the EFEO/Gulbenkian and the John Carter Brown Grants.

Project Summary

This project concerns the Venetian reception of Ptolemy's Geography in the fifteenth century, at the intersection of different cultural milieux, humanists, patricians, “gente di mare,” magistri, and monastic culture. This study will also reconsider a classical theme in the historiography of the Renaissance: a comparison between two cultures and two forms of humanism that are profoundly linked to one another, the Florentine and the Venetian. Finally, the project will address the complex process of re-constructing the cultural space of Antiquity and at the same time moving beyond it.