Occasional Papers

Andrea Corsali & the Southern Cross

Andrea Corsali & the Southern Cross

In 1515 Andrea Corsali, an Italian under the patronage of the Medici family, accompanied a Portuguese voyage down the African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope, en route to Cochin, India. On his return Corsali's letter to his patron describing the voyage was published. It included the earliest illustration of the stars of the Crux, the group of stars known today as the Southern Cross. The context of his remarkable discovery is explored here in an essay by Anne McCormick, prepared  as a continuation of her study "The Book in the Renaissance" at the London Rare Book School, University of London, 2019. 

Edward Ashworth, Artist & Architect

Edward Ashworth, Artist & Architect

An important collection of fourteen original watercolour studies of Hong Kong & Macau, painted by the travelling English architect Edward Ashworth in the mid-1840s, just after the first Opium War and at the very beginning of Hong Kong's first colonial buildng boom. These drawings represent an exceptional documentary archive, sometimes the only recorded images of certain buildings or streetscapes. Ashworth's important article "Chinese Architecture" of 1851 reproduced a few of these images as lithograph plates.