After the death of Fra Mauro (active ca. 1430-ca. 1459/1464), no one in the Camaldolite Order carried on his cosmographic work. The congregation of the San Michele monastery conserved his world map but ignored his other cosmographic works, which included maps, drawings, and writings. Thus his authorship of the world map was soon forgotten.

Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557), who in 1559 described the map in the second volume of his Navigationi et Viaggi (Navigations and Voyages), attributed the work to an unknown lay brother at the San Michele monastery. Ramusio further suggested that the map reproduced cartographic sources brought back to Venice by Marco Polo (1254-ca. 1324), thus reducing the San Michele world map to an unoriginal compilation of lost sources of greater interest than the map itself.

The name of Fra Mauro was omitted from the first history of the Camaldolite congregation, published in 1579, but even without his name, his cosmographic achievement continued to enrich Renaissance geographical and cartographic research.