There is a portrait of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli standing next to philosopher Marsilio Ficino, one of the foremost minds of the Italian Renaissance. In it, Toscanelli appears as a mysterious man. He wears a turban embroidered alla moresca — in the Moorish-style — in a 15th-century Florence committed to fighting against the Turks. But who was Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli?

Born in Florence in 1397 and graduated from Padua medical school in 1424, he was a learned physician, astronomer, mathematician, and cartographer interested in finding a new way to “steal” the spice routes from Arab traders.