Anthropocene - Geographical Visualization 2/3 - The arrival of Coronelli's globes in 1683 at Versailles, spectacular representations of the planet and the starry sky

Can we imagine the astonishment and avant-garde thoughts among the aristocrats of the court of Versailles, which were produced by the 2 giant globes of the Venetian cosmographer Vincenzo Coronelli, offered by Cardinal d'Estrées to Louis XIV, the French "Sun King", then at the height of his power?

These two representations of "the earth and the sky", the most monumental in the world at the time, were of course intended to flatter King Louis XIV, by presenting to him "at his feet" the world and the starry vault as the level of cartography of the early 1680s allowed them to be represented.

But what bold ideas could these two globes, 4 meters in diameter and weighing 2 tons each, have sparked in some French minds, when the Italian astronomer and mathematician Giordano Bruno had been arrested, tortured and burned alive in Rome on February 17, 1600 by the Catholic authorities of the Vatican for proposing an infinite cosmological model, devoid of a center, in continuity with the research of the Pole Nicolas Copernicus published in 1543, and therefore where the Earth, and even the Sun and the solar system, would not be at the center of the Universe?

What previously required a daring intellectual leap from the flat world map of 1569 by the Fleming Gerardus Mercator, and the maps of the "Iraqi" Mohamed Abul-Kassem Ibn Hawqal in 977 with his map Surat al-Ardh where Mecca is at the center, and of the scholar educated in Cordoba, capital of Al-Andalus, the "Moroccan" Al-Idrisi, presenting in 1154 after fifteen years of work thanks to the patronage of Roger II, Christian king of Sicily descended from the Norman conquerors, the world map Kitab Roujar and the globe in silver Tabula Rogeriana, was now visible to the eyes of visitors: the roundness and smallness, and therefore the fragility of the planet.

Ultimately too large to be installed at Versailles, Coronelli's globes were installed in a special pavilion at the Château de Marly, 7 km from Versailles, then fell into oblivion, before being installed today and freely accessible in Paris at the François Mitterrand site of the National Library of France.

While maritim maps were primarily intended to guide European merchant ships in search of spices, gold, sugar, and later European royal vessels in their quest for trade monopolies, leading to wars, it can be suggested that the fashion for world maps and globes that developed in 17th- and 18th-century Europe contributed to whetting European appetites, leading to colonial empires.

But Coronelli's globes and smaller globes also surely contributed to the emergence of many scholars who understood the Earth finite size and the Mankind's imperialistic race: discovering, exploiting, and polluting the environment to the point of branching off fundamental natural cycles.