The Fra Mauro map, "considered the greatest memorial of medieval cartography" according to Roberto Almagià, is a map made around 1450 by the Venetian monk Fra Mauro. It is a circular planisphere drawn on parchment and set in a wooden frame, about two meters in diameter.
A copy of the world map was made by Fra Mauro and his assistant Andrea Bianco, a sailor-cartographer, under a commission by king Afonso V of Portugal. This copy was completed on April 24, 1459, and sent to Portugal, but did not survive to the present day.
The map was discovered in the monastery of San Michele in Isola, Murano, where the Camaldolese cartographer had his studio, and is now located in the final room of the Sale Monumenti in Venice, in the Museo Correr.
A number of historians of cartography, starting with Giacinto Placido Zurla (1806) studied Fra Mauro's map. A critical edition of the map was edited by Piero Falchetta in 2006.
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—Allen Tate (1899–1979)