The most famous surviving portulan charts are highly comprehensive, carefully produced documents, rich in artwork and, in some cases, magnificently bound. These examples were not designed for use at sea, but to nurture geographical culture in the same way as treatises, compendiums, travel tales. In offices appropriate for study, scholars imbued with humanist culture composed collections on the isles of the Mediterranean, annotated with erudite comments on the visible vestiges of Antiquity. These collections, decorated with dozens of maps painted with gouache, were in part inspired by nautical cartography.