The Sixteenth-Century Sicily: The Map in the Sala delle Carte Geografiche of Palazzo Vecchio

At the heart of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence lies an unexpected space where art, science, and political power converge: the Sala delle Carte Geografiche, created in the sixteenth century to house an extraordinary cycle of painted maps. Among these, one of the most striking is the map of Italy completed in 1578, a large cartographic painting on wooden panel depicting the entire Italian peninsula and its islands with remarkable care. Within this composition, sixteenth-century Sicily occupies a position of particular prominence. The island is rendered with close attention to its geographical features and enriched with inscriptions and symbols that convey its history and significance in that period. This article explores how Sicily in the sixteenth century is described and celebrated through Stefano Bonsignori’s “map of Italy,” set within the prestigious context of the Sala delle Carte Geografiche in Palazzo Vecchio.

The Sala delle Carte Geografiche of Palazzo Vecchio

The Sala delle Carte Geografiche—also known as the Guardaroba or the Sala del Mappamondo—is a space unlike any other, conceived around 1563 by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici together with the architect Giorgio Vasari. According to the original plan, the room was intended to serve both as a wardrobe for the Medici treasures and as a cosmographic chamber, celebrating geographical knowledge and the expanding horizons of the known world. All four walls are lined with monumental walnut cabinets, on whose inner doors are painted 53 oil maps on wooden panels depicting lands and seas of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas as they were understood in the mid-sixteenth century. Above the maps once stood busts of emperors and hundreds of portraits of illustrious men, while at the center of the room dominates a colossal terrestrial globe measuring more than two meters in circumference, one of the oldest surviving examples of its kind. The ensemble was further enriched by lavish decorative elements: gilded inscriptions, illustrated cartouches, the heraldic emblems of the Medici, and fantastical creatures inhabiting the corners of seas and lands alike. This spectacular three-dimensional “atlas” was not conceived solely for scientific or educational purposes. It was also a celebratory statement, intended to display the enlightened dominion of the Medici over an ordered and comprehensible world, projecting Cosimo I as the symbolic “lord of the universe.”

The Medici Cartographic Project and Stefano Bonsignori’s Map of Italy

The creation of the maps for the Medici Guardaroba was a collective and long-term undertaking. Launched in 1563 under the direction of the Dominican cosmographer Egnazio Danti, at the behest of Cosimo I, the project saw the completion of the first thirty maps by 1575. Danti, both a scientist and a cartographer, drew on the finest sources available at the time, combining the ancient geographical framework of Ptolemy with the most recent discoveries of the early modern world. He also adopted the innovative Mercator projection, allowing for a more realistic representation of the Earth’s surface. In 1576, following Danti’s removal—he was suspected of heresy for his views on calendar reform—the project was entrusted to Stefano Buonsignori, better known as Bonsignori, an Olivetan monk and court cartographer to Francesco I de’ Medici. Bonsignori brought the enterprise to completion over roughly a decade, painting twenty-three additional maps by 1586. Of these, six depicted European states (Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Schiavonia, and Greece), ten represented known regions of Africa, two covered the East (Scythia and Tartary), four portrayed the polar zones, and one was devoted to the Strait of Magellan. Most of the maps were derived from updated editions of Ptolemy’s atlas, supplemented with modern data, while others—particularly those of the New World—relied on more recent contemporary sources. The innovations of leading cartographers such as Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius were also taken into account, directly inspiring the design of several panels.

The map of Italy stands among Bonsignori’s most significant achievements and is dated to 1578. It is a large-scale painting, approximately 115 by 111 centimeters, executed in oil on wood with extraordinary attention to detail. Bonsignori drew extensively on the finest Italian cartography available, most notably the celebrated maps of Giacomo Gastaldi, the mid-sixteenth-century Venetian cartographer, whose work he closely followed. Despite this clear debt to earlier models, the final result is visually striking and impressively accurate. The peninsula is shown in a near-vertical orientation, traversed by coordinates and rhumb lines typical of nautical charts, and embellished with relief-painted mountain ranges, rivers, and densely inscribed place names. The use of the Mercator projection—essentially the same system, with later refinements, still employed today—ensured a balanced rendering of geographical forms, underscoring the advanced scientific approach shared by Danti and Bonsignori.

Sixteenth-Century Sicily: Historical Context

To fully appreciate the cartographic representation, it is useful to recall Sicily’s political and social situation in the sixteenth century. At the time Bonsignori was painting his map, during the 1570s and 1580s, the island was neither part of the Medici domains nor one of the independent Italian states. Instead, it belonged to the Spanish monarchy. Following complex European dynastic developments, Sicily had come under the direct control of the Spanish Habsburgs. In 1556, Emperor Charles V—already king of Sicily as Charles IV of Aragon—abdicated and transferred the Sicilian crown to his son Philip II, marking the beginning of a long period of Spanish rule on the island. Together with Naples, Sicily formed one of Spain’s two major Italian viceroyalties, with Palermo serving as the viceregal capital.

In the sixteenth century, Sicilian society was strongly agrarian and highly productive. The island was widely regarded as the “granary” of the Mediterranean thanks to its extensive cereal cultivation, and it was home to a network of autonomous and prestigious cities. Palermo housed the viceroy and the ancient Sicilian Parliament; Messina was a powerful port city endowed with special privileges; Catania flourished at the foot of Mount Etna; and other centers such as Syracuse and Trapani thrived on trade. Culturally, sixteenth-century Sicily functioned as a crossroads where Spanish and Italian influences coexisted. Spanish rule introduced Iberian artistic and architectural models, while local intellectual figures continued to emerge, including the mathematician and astronomer Francesco Maurolico, who in 1545 published a Descrittione dell’Isola di Sicilia accompanied by one of the earliest modern maps of the island. From a political and military perspective, after the upheavals of previous centuries, the sixteenth century brought relatively few conflicts to Sicilian soil. The island enjoyed a degree of internal stability under Spanish governance, even as it remained exposed to external threats, particularly the raids of Barbary pirates along its coasts. This condition of stability is echoed, in a celebratory key, in Bonsignori’s map, as becomes evident in the text of its cartouche.

The Historical-Mythological Cartouche Dedicated to Sicily

Within Stefano Bonsignori’s map of Italy there is a single cartouche devoted specifically to Sicily, positioned in the lower right portion of the panel, close to the island itself. Far from serving a purely descriptive purpose, the text constructs an elaborate narrative of Sicily’s origins and successive dominations, reflecting a distinctly Renaissance worldview in which myth, reworked biblical tradition, classical historiography, and contemporary politics are woven together. The account opens with Camese, a mythical figure placed in an archaic chronology “before Noah,” who, expelled from Italy, arrives in Sicily at the head of colonial groups. This is followed by other legendary foundations: the arrival of Galate, son of Egyptian Hercules, sent by Tusco, king of Italy, together with Tuscan peoples; then the coming of Sicano from Spain, from whom the island was said to have first taken the name Trinacria and later Sicania. The cartouche ultimately derives the name Sicily from Siculo, son of Greek Hercules, or, according to other traditions, from Sicolo or Sicelèo, likewise of Iberian origin. After this mythic phase, the text recalls the arrival of the Greeks, their struggle with the Carthaginians for control of the island, and the subsequent Roman domination, followed by a period of instability after the end of imperial rule. The conclusion adopts an explicitly celebratory tone: Sicily is described as a land now defended by the King of Spain, blessed with a mild climate and fertile soil, while the many “fables” written by the Greeks are presented as narratives that, beneath the veil of myth, conceal important truths. In this way, the cartouche does more than accompany the geographical image. It elevates Sicily as a space of ancient civilization and legitimizes the contemporary political order, inserting Spanish rule into a long and uninterrupted continuum of history and culture.