Giorgio Sideri

Callapoda da Candia's map of his native island (1562).

Giorgio Sideri called Callapoda (active 1537–1565) was a 16th-century cartographer, born in Candia (Crete), who worked in Venice, where map-making skills were essential to the mercantile economy and to protection and control of the far-flung Venetian thalassocracy.

Four of his navigational charts and five hydrographical atlases, often in ink and watercolor on parchment are known; they bear dates ranging from 1537 to 1565 and several are dedicated to Venetian nobles.^[1]

Giorgio Sideri Callapoda came briefly into the news when his copy of a previously unknown fifteenth-century portolan chart by Fra Mauro was sold at auction in Milan, October 1984 at a price of 900 million Italian liras.^[2]

It was signed in a cartouche Giorgi Callapoda a Candia faciebat, and dated 1541; the coat-of-arms in the map shows that it was made for the Venetian commander of galleys Francesco Zeno the elder, a member of the noble Venetian family of Zeno.

Notes

1. Antonio Ratti, "A Lost Map of Fra Mauro Found in a Sixteenth Century Copy" Imago Mundi 40 (1988), pp. 77-85.
2. Ratti 1988:77-85.