Pietro Vesconte
Italian cartographer from Genoa
Pietro Vesconte (fl. 1310–1330) was an Italian cartographer and geographer from the Republic of Genoa. A pioneer of the field of the portolan chart, he influenced Italian and Catalan mapmaking throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He appears to have been the first professional mapmaker to sign and date his works regularly.
Life
Although Vesconte was born in Genoa, he produced much of his work in Venice. He was active between 1310 and 1330, producing numerous maps. His nautical charts are among the earliest to map the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions accurately. He also produced progressively more accurate depictions of the coastlines of northern Europe, in particular that of Britain and, to a lesser extent, Ireland.
Pietro Vesconte's 1311 portolan chart of the east Mediterranean is the oldest signed and dated nautical chart that survives from the medieval period. He is also the author of at least four signed multi-sheet atlases (1313, 1318a, 1318b, c. 1321), where the various sheets can be combined into a single nautical chart.
The public source identifies “Pietro Vesconte” as italian cartographer from Genoa. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Pietro, Vesconte and Italian.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1623758. VIAF identifies the subject as 57172404. The Library of Congress control number is no00001644. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1310, 1330, 1311 and 1313.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pietro Vesconte” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.