Vinko Paletin and his Contribution to Cartography

This paper explores Vinko Paletin’s contribution to cartography. It can be divided into three areas: maritime affairs and navigation, globe production, and map production. Vinko Paletin as a sailor has been written about by others, so in this paper we only look at this briefly. In this article, we provide information about his translation of The Art of Navigation (L’arte del navegar) based on copies of that book kept in the National and University Library in Zagreb, the State Archives in Zadar and some other libraries outside Croatia. In addition to copies of the covers and Paletin’s foreword, we present the contents of that handbook with specialreference to the third chapter, which deals with nautical charts. The literature mentions three globes which have been attributed to Paletin. Two are certainly not his work, and there is almost no information about the third. Perhaps the problem lies in the Italian word mappamondi, which may mean either a globe or a map of the world. The paper examines in detail Paletin’s 1551 map of Spain and presents several other which preceded it. Finally, we assess the value of Paletin’s map, which served many cartographers as a model and template for their own maps of Spain.