Zuane Pizzigano

Comparison with later maps of the 15th century shows that other cartographers had copied Pizzigano in several important respects, so his work was significant.

The 1424 Pizzigano map is a nautical portolan chart that is limited to western Europe, northwest Africa, and a large swathe of the north Atlantic Ocean.

Pizzigano indicates a mysterious large red island, with four outlying islets, to the south of the Canaries archipelago, which he identifies as himadoro.

More surprising is Pizzigano's depiction of what appears to be the Azores archipelago further north, as these islands were not officially discovered by the Portuguese until 1431 or possibly 1427 at the earliest.

Earlier maps had also sometimes featured such Atlantic islands (e.g. the Catalan Atlas of 1375), with names partially taken from ancient European sources.

For a time, historians thought he may have based the island group on a suggestive inscription in the 1367 map of the Pizzigani brothers (his relatives, possibly his father), but that interpretation has since been discarded.

It is derived from an old Iberian legend, relating how seven Visigothic bishops, fleeing the Muslim conquest of Hispania in 714, embarked with their flock on ships and fled across the Atlantic to erect a new home on this island.

Southwest of that, around half-way to the Antilia group, lies a semi-circular blue island denoted ixola de uentura.

It is located near the area where the Pizzigani brothers first depicted the legendary Isle of Mam in 1367, and it may have been Z. Pizzigano's intention to duplicate that.