Lot Essay
In July 1459, a meeting took place in Florence between the famous savant Paolo Toscanelli and the ambassadors of King Alphonse V of Portugal; where Toscanelli advanced his theory of the possibility of travelling to the West Indies by a more direct route across the Atlantic ocean. Fifteen years later, he communicated this theory to Christopher Columbus and, on this basis in 1492, during the reign of Ferdinand V, King of Spain, Columbus he discovered the Americas.