Print from Kircher's China Monumentis representing Matteo Ricci with Ly Paulus (Xu Guangqi) standing in front of an altar surmounted with a cross and a picture of the Virgin and Child.
Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) was an Italian Jesuit missionary to China who became the court mathematician in Peking. He introduced Western mathematics to China and translated mathematical books into Chinese. He became the first to translate the Confucian classics into Latin. His books 'Geometrica Practica' and 'Trigonometrica' were translations of Christopher Clavius' works into Chinese. In 1584 and 1600, he published the first maps of China ever available to the West.
Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) was a Chinese bureaucrat, agricultural scientist, astronomer, and mathematician of the Ming Dynasty. Following his meeting with Ricci, Paulo converted to Christianity and was baptised Paulus in 1604.
The original artefact or artwork has been assessed as public domain by age, and faithful reproductions of the two dimensional work are also public domain. No permission is required for reuse for any purpose.
The text of this image record has been derived from the Royal Museums Greenwich catalogue and image metadata. Individual data and facts such as date, author and title are not copyrightable, but reuse of longer descriptive text from the catalogue may not be considered fair use. Reuse of the text must be attributed to the "National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London" and a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0 license may apply if not rewritten. Refer to Royal Museums Greenwich copyright.
Identifier
InfoField
Print Room Location Code: H 20.6 1677 Unidentified Prints & Drawings Number: P1488 id number: PAF7431
Collection
InfoField
Fine art
Licensing
This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain for the following reason:
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse
This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer.
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/PDMCreative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0falsefalse
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain". This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details.
File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.