J. B. Harley, D. Woodward - History of Cartography Vol. 3 , Cartography in the European Renaissance 3(2007, University of Chicago Press).pdf

T H E H I S T O RY O F C A RT O G R A P H Y VOLUME

THREE

V o l u m e E d i t o r i a l

T h r e e A d v i s o r s

Denis E. Cosgrove Richard Helgerson Catherine Delano-Smith Christian Jacob Felipe Fernández-Armesto Richard L. Kagan Paula Findlen Martin Kemp Patrick Gautier Dalché Chandra Mukerji Anthony Grafton Günter Schilder Stephen Greenblatt Sarah Tyacke Glyndwr Williams

T h e

H i s t o r y

o f

C a r t o g r a p h y

J. B. Harley and David Woodward, Founding Editors 1 Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean 2.1 Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies 2.2 Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies 2.3 Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies 3 Cartography in the European Renaissance 4 Cartography in the European Enlightenment 5 Cartography in the Nineteenth Century 6 Cartography in the Twentieth Century

T H E H I S T O RY O F C A RT O G R A P H Y VOLUME

THREE

Cartography in the European Renaissance PA RT

Edited by

DAVID WOODWARD

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS • CHICAGO & LONDON

David Woodward was the Arthur H. Robinson Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2007 by the University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2007 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07

1 2 3 4 5

Set ISBN-10: 0-226-90732-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-90732-1 (cloth) Part 1 ISBN-10: 0-226-90733-3 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-90733-8 (cloth) Part 2 ISBN-10: 0-226-90734-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-90734-5 (cloth)

Editorial work on The History of Cartography is supported in part by grants from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Geography and Regional Science Program and Science and Society Program of the National Science Foundation, independent federal agencies. For a complete list of financial supporters, see pages vii–x of part 1.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Application has been made for CIP data from the Library of Congress.) Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in The History of Cartography are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the agencies that provided financial support. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences– Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48 –1992.

Financial Support Federal Agencies Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities Geography and Regional Science Program and Science and Society Program of the National Science Foundation

Foundations and Institutions Balzekas Family Foundation, Ltd. The Barra Foundation Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Wrociaw The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation The Diebold Foundation The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation Geography Knowledge Fund in the Idaho Community Foundation Ironwood Foundation

The Muriel and Norman B. Leventhal Family Foundation, Inc.‡ The Rand McNally Foundation Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Jack Ringer Family Foundation Salus Mundi Foundation Dorothy, Louis, Susan, and Richard Sigel Family Fund The Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, The Newberry Library

Organizations and Corporations 1000 Friends of Wisconsin‡ Richard B. Arkway, Inc., and Cohen and Taliaferro, LLC Association of Canadian Map Libraries and Archives Aster Publishing Corporation Boston Map Society, Harvard Map Collection California Map Society Jo Ann and Richard Casten, Ltd. Chicago Map Society

Christopher Columbus Museum Coventry Village of Wisconsin Limited Partnership* ESRI Het Fluitschip/ Vermeulen, A. C. J. Map Society of Wisconsin Martayan, Lan, Augustyn, Inc. Mercator Society of the Research Libraries, The New York Public Library The New York Map Society

Philadelphia Print Shop The Rocky Mountain Map Society Sarah Slobin and staff of the New York Times Graphics and Maps Department‡ Society for the History of Discoveries‡ Voyageurs‡ Western Association of Map Libraries The Wisconsin Calligraphers’ Guild‡

Matching gifts from Cray Research, Inc. General Motors Foundation IBM The New York Times Foundation, Inc.

Amoco Foundation, Inc. The Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Inc. Becton Dickson Foundation Capital Group, Inc.

Sponsors Roger S. and Julie Z. Baskes William B. Ginsberg Arthur and Janet Holzheimer

Arthur L. Kelly Bernard Lisker Glen McLaughlin

Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Nebenzahl‡ David Rumsey John Taylor

Founders W. Graham Arader III Rand and Patricia Burnette, in memory of Helen Wallis‡ Joseph H. and Monica G. Fitzgerald Warren Heckrotte Robert A. Highbarger

Duane F. Marble Douglas W. Marshall Thomas McCulloch Erhan Oner George Parker‡ Brian D. Quintenz

Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr. Rodney W. Shirley William S. Swinford Clark L. Taber Albert R. Vogeler

Benefactors Roger Arentzen R. K. B. James Eugene Bryant Barbara E. Butler Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth A. Chambers Alan G. Cheek Tom and Verena Conley W. N. Davis, Jr. Mary Lynn H. Dickson Muriel H. Dury Clinton R. Edwards Ralph and Tess Ehrenberg Peter Enggass Edward Espenshade‡* Robert L. Fisher Gerald F. Fitzgerald John W. Galiardo

Mary H. Galneder‡* J. Scott Hamilton Teri Jaeger Gari Ledyard Andrew J. LeRoy Jon M. Leverenz‡ Judith and Scott Loomer‡ Barry L. MacLean George F. McCleary, Jr. Barbara Backus McCorkle Harold Moellering Elaine and Jerome Nerenberg Dr. Harold L. Osher Theodore W. Palmer Mary Sponberg Pedley‡ R. Michael Peterson Jonathan Potter

William S. Reese Walter Ristow Arthur H. Robinson‡ Thomas F. Sander Constantine B. Scarvelis Joseph and Françoise Shein Jeanne K. Snyder, in memory of John P. Snyder‡* Alex Tait Norman J. W. Thrower Edward R. Tufte Sarah Tyacke‡ Richard Umansky Ann Harwell Wells Eric W. Wolf Clifford H. and Alberta A. Wood‡ Rosalind Woodward‡

Patrons Dr. Cyrus Ala’i Michele Aldrich Jonathan J. G. Alexander Sylvia Alexander and Allen D. Bushong Stanley K. and Patricia L. Arnett II Mrs. Gwendolyn R. Barckley Frederick U. Baron–High Ridge Books, Inc. Christopher and Barbara Baruth Thomas and Linda Beall Dr. Sanford H. Bederman Judith F. Bell Nikhil and Arun Xie Bhattasali Aníbal A. Biglieri Carlo Luigi Brambilla Christian Brannstrom and Wendy E. Jepson Stephen A. Bromberg William H. Browder, Jr. Wesley and Linda Brown John G. L. Cabot John Cloud Harold C. Conklin Jeremy Crampton Robert Dahl Gerald A. Danzer Catherine Delano-Smith Louis DeVorsey‡ John W. Docktor Gary S. Dunbar Evelyn Edson‡ Tom Edwards Clark Eide Johan W. Eliot, M.D.

Norman Fiering‡ Richard and Dorothy Fitch, in memory of Robert Ross Theodore N. Foss and Kent S. Dymak Loretta Freiling‡ Dr. Gregory J. Gajda Jenkins Garrett Prof. John H. Geerken Fred J. Goldsmith Linda Grable-Curtis Dr. and Mrs. Robert W. Graebner Suzanne Graham, M.D. Sara S. Gronim John M. Gubbins, F.R.G.S. Bob Gurda‡ Brad Hanson John Hawkins Francis Heller Guntram Herb and Patricia LeBon-Herb Francis Herbert Philip Hoehn Tracy L. Honn and Mark Bernstein‡ Bangbo Hu Murray Hudson Fuad Issa Bert and Mary Lee Johnson‡ Constance Jordan Richard L. Kagan Chris Karcher James T. Kirk Anne and Larry Knowles‡ Valerie Krejcie* John G. Krisilas G. Malcolm Lewis

Evelyn Lincoln‡ John and Sally Long Jack Lowell Curtis A. Manchester III Paul C. Marengo and Joan P. Simmons T. K. McClintock Marianne M. McKee Allen H. Meyer Carmen and Jack Miller P. J. Mode Mark Monmonier‡ Harry and Geraldine Montgomery Joel and Beverly Morrison Victoria M. Morse and Bill North Mary Murphy Curt Musselman‡ In memory of Oscar I. Norwich Braham Norwick Judy M. Olson‡ Vincent Osier Frank T. Padberg, Jr. Dick de Pagter Miklos Pinther Kiky Polites Jeremy Pool Peter and Bernice Porrazzo Brian Prodin Francesco Prontera Paula Rebert and Philip Melnick M. Reilly and B. K. Schnee Dennis and Judy Reinhartz Charles D. Reynolds Steve Ritchie George and Mary Ritzlin‡

Pierre L. Sales Gwen Schultz Joseph E. Schwartzberg Marsha L. Selmer Sinclair A. Sheers Robert B. Shilkret Robert Silberman Susan D. Slaughter Neil Smith Dava Sobel

Frank K. Spain Bruce N. Spring David and Deirdre Stam Muriel Strickland Julie K. Sweetkind-Singer Richard Talbert Fraser and Monica Taylor Richard F. Thomas J. Thomas Touchton

Rainer Vollmar Larry A. Vos James Walker, M.D. Pauline Moffitt Watts Scott D. Westrem Barbara Whalen‡ Ronald Whistance-Smith Kathleen M. Woodward‡ Cordell D. K. Yee and Ingrid Hsieh-Yee

Friends Arshes Anasal James Axtell Constance A. and David E. Beam‡ Soma Golden Behr‡ Karen Beidel and Greg Carbone John Bennet and Deborah K. Harlan David Bosse Orin D. Brustad D. Graham Burnett Charles A. Burroughs Edward (Joe) Carrington Martin M. Cassidy Gary Chappell Ms. Barbara M. Christy Brock R. Covington Richard Dittman Robert H. Dott‡ Bruce Fetter Allen N. Fitchen Warren W. Furth Albert Ganado William G. Gartner John B. Garver Mason P. Goldman Thomas D. Goodrich Ronald E. Grim Stanley and Nancy Haack‡ John H. Harwood II

Kenneth E. Hill Marianne Hinckle Steve Horowitz Alice C. Hudson Elton R. Kerr A. Jon and R. Ann Kimerling* Christopher and Margaret Kleinhenz‡ Richard and Jane Knowles‡ Josef W. Konvitz George Leonard and Susan Hanes Leonard Dee Longenbaugh Michael M. Ludeman Jane C. and Louis J. Maher Jr.‡ Dr. Donald S. Marshall Mark Mattison Vincent G. Mazzucchelli Gregory C. McIntosh William A. McKinstry Judith L. Meyer and Robert T. Pavlowsky‡ Richard and Pat Moll* Nobuo Nagai Donald J. Orth In memory of George Parker Samuel T. Perkins Beverly A. Poling Joseph Poracsky

Thomas Ports George S. Read Penny Richards and Peter Turley‡ Philip L. Richardson Leonard and Juliet Rothman Curtis L. Roy Paul H. Saenger‡ Donald Schnabel Peter L. Siems William F. Spengler David and Ingrid Stallé Richard W. Stephenson Robert W. Stocker II Thomas, Ahngsana, and Sainatee Suarez Helen Hornbeck Tanner G. T. Tanselle John and Anne C. Tedeschi Jerry Thornton Carol Urness David G. Utley Richard C. Veit and Yolanda Theunissen Steven James Vogel Herbert M. Vogler, M.D. Stephen J. Walsh Bruce A. Warren W. Ken Westray David B. Wolf John A. Wolter

Additional support from Jonathan G. Andelson Randy Anders Diane Warne Anderson Judith L. and Gary L. Bakke, in memory of Janet Washa J. Bartholomew Phil Barton Mary Beth Beal Jeffery Bernard Henry S. Bieniecki John Boyer

Alan K. Brown Daniel Brownstein Mead Cain David Callahan and Roberto Muzzetta‡ R. Wayne and Donna K. Callahan‡ C. W. Carson Bill Cronan and Nan Fey‡ David and Audrey Dean* In memory of Michael Dulka and Nancy Vick Edstrom Sally Eberhardt and Graham McPhee‡

Trudi J. and Jack E. Eblen* Grant E. Gauger Linda Graff Robert Grummer‡ Isidro Guzman, Jr. Joan H. Hall‡ John E. Hansen‡ John B. Hattendorf Kenneth Heim‡ Jane C. Hutchinson‡ Ms. Barbara Jenkin‡

John T. Juricek Mark D. Kaplanoff Robert Karrow Steven Kosakowski Kathleen M. and Frederick Kruger, in memory of Janet Washa Pauline H. and James D. Kuelbs‡ James P. Lacy Kristen Overbeck Laise David C. and Greta J. Lindberg‡ Deryck O. Lodrick‡ Brian Lordan A.S.M. Darrel L. McDonald Durward and Carolyn L. McVey‡* Nancy M. Meier-Singer‡ Nancy Goddin Miller Ronald Lynn Miller Faith B. Miracle‡

Sam Moore Walter A. Nebiker Henry Norris Maurice A. O’Connor III Elayne S. Orr‡ Ann and Meridith “Buzz” Ostrom‡ J. B. Post Jeffrey Pretes Jean M. Ray John H. Rebenack John R. Ribeiro Stephen M. Robinson* Robert Ross Sharon E. and Guenther H. Ruch‡ Tony and Mickie M. Schmudlach‡ Margaret and Peter Scholtes‡ Kirsten A. Seaver Cherie Ann Semans

Peter J. Severud Jason Shih T. Sinnema Benjamin Spaier Herbert L. Spira Carol A. Springer, M.D. Scott Steinke Robert D. and Mary L. Stolen, in memory of Janet Washa Frederick L. Tamm-Daniels Marina Tolmacheva Sarita F. Trewartha‡ Judith A. Troia‡ Brian A. Turk Richard and Peggy Ugland James M. Wells‡ Stephen E. Wiberley, Jr., and Patricia J. Wiberley‡

‡ A portion or all of this donation was given in memory of David Woodward (1942 –2004). * A portion or all of this donation was given in memory of Arthur H. Robinson (1915 –2004).

Contents

List of Illustrations xix List of Abbreviations xxxvii

Historiography 99 Medieval and Renaissance Star Knowledge and Representation 101 Medieval Constellation Illuminations as Precursors to the Renaissance 105 Advances in Two-Dimensional Mapping 106 Individual-Constellation Illustrations in the Early Renaissance 109 Early Renaissance Printed Planispheres and Planispherelike Maps 110 Early Atlases 113 Trends and Changes Regarding Iconography and Format 114 Bayer’s Uranometria: A Model for the Future 115 Specialized Star Charts 118 Concluding Remarks 122

PART 1 Preface, David Woodward xxxix

Setting the Stage 1

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change, David Woodward 3 The “Renaissance” as a Concept 5 The Progressive Model and a Suggested Compromise 6 Continuities 7 Changes 11 Conclusion 23

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century, Victoria Morse 25

The Roles of Maps in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries 28 The Fourteenth Century 44 Conclusion 51

Lunar, Solar, and Planetary Representations to 1650, R. H. van Gent and A. Van Helden 123 Pre-Telescopic Representations of Heavenly Bodies 123 Viewing the Heavens through the Telescope 125 Conclusion 134

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

Globes in Renaissance Europe, Elly Dekker 135 Introduction 135 The Legacy 136 The Cosmographer’s Globe 141 The Use of Globes 148 Renaissance Globes: Humanism Materialized 158

maps and renaissance culture Cosmography and Celestial Mapping 3

Renaissance Star Charts, Anna Friedman Herlihy 99

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650, Denis E. Cosgrove 55

Charting

Cosmography as a Renaissance Project 55 Definitions, Meanings, and Uses of a Changing Cosmography 56 History and Geography of Renaissance Cosmography 61 The Cosmographic Work: Map, Text, and Illustration 76 Cosmographic Images 82 Conclusion 98

The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean, Corradino Astengo 174 Introduction 174 Extant Works 177 Customers and Patrons 178 Materials 182 Manufacture 185

xii

Contents Workshops, Individual Production, and Anonymous Charts 189 Technical Features: Rhumbs, Wind Roses, Scale 191 The Axis of the Mediterranean 194 Ornamental Features 199 Place-names 203 Centers of Production 206 Conclusions 235

Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century, George Tolias 263 Definitions and Origins 263 The Birth of the Genre: Florence, Fifteenth Century 265 The Golden Age: Venice, Sixteenth Century 268 A Second Heyday: The Low Countries and Venice, Seventeenth Century 276 Function and Uses of the Isolarii 279

The Visual, Mathematical, and Textual Models for Mapping in the Renaissance 9

The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Fourteenth to Beginning of the Sixteenth Century), Patrick Gautier Dalché 285 From the Translation to the Construction of a Model (End of the Fourteenth to Middle of the Fifteenth Century) 287 The Geography as a Model for the Image of the World 318 Toward a “Mathematical Cartography” 333 In-Depth Study and the Move beyond the Model (End of the Fifteenth to Beginning of the Sixteenth Century) 342 Conclusion 358

10 Map Projections in the Renaissance, John P. Snyder 365 Projections for World Maps 365 Projections for Sea Charts 374 Projections for Regional Maps 378 Projections for Celestial Maps 378 Conclusion 380

11 The European Religious Worldview and Its Influence on Mapping, Pauline Moffitt Watts 382 Columbus 385 Protestant Bibles 387 Calvin and Luther 388 The Mappe-Monde Novvelle Papistiqve 390 Ortelius 392 Celtis and Münster 393 Map Mural Cycles 395 Conclusions 399

Literature and Maps 12 Early Modern Literature and Cartography: An Overview, Tom Conley 401 Experience and the Production of Space 401 Materialities: Text and Map as Landscape 403 Topography and Alterity 404 The Isolario and Literary Form 405 Cartography and Emotion 407 The Theatrum mundi as Text and Atlas 408 Allegory and Utopia 409 Conclusions 410

13 Literature and Mapping in Early Modern England, 1520 –1688, Henry S. Turner 412 Poetry: Terms and Meanings 412 Poetry: New Developments 415 Donne 416 Milton 417 Drama 419 Poetics and Maps: Early Modern Social and Intellectual Contexts 420 Conclusion: Toward an Analysis of Early Modern Topographesis 423

14 Cartography and Literature in Early Modern France, Nancy Bouzrara and Tom Conley 427 The Cartographer as Writer 429 A Cosmographer for Three Kings: André Thevet 432 Circumstance and Text of the First French Atlas 433 The Writer as Cartographer 434 Three Styles and Moments 434 Conclusions 436

15 Literary Mapping in German-Speaking Europe, Franz Reitinger 438 Utopian Fiction 438 Satire 440 Devotional Books 441 Illustrated Broadsheets 443 Emblem Books 446 New Beginnings 447 Conclusion 448

16 Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy, Theodore J. Cachey Jr. 450 17 Mapping Maritime Triumph and the Enchantment of Empire: Portuguese Literature of the Renaissance, Neil Safier and Ilda Mendes dos Santos 461 The Journey There and Back Again: The Roteiro and the Poetic Exaltation of Empire 462

Contents The Epic Lyricism of Luís de Camões (1524?–1580) 463 Pilgrimages Large and Small, Far and Near 464 Conclusion 466

18 Literature and Cartography in Early Modern Spain: Etymologies and Conjectures, Simone Pinet 469 Etymologies: Metaphoric and Literal Uses 470 Conjectures 475

technical production and consumption 19 Land Surveys, Instruments, and Practitioners in the Renaissance, Uta Lindgren 477 Introduction: The Situation in 1450 477 Land Surveys 479 Instrumentation Employed 489 How Surveyors or Mapmakers Obtained Their Knowledge 500 Links between Surveying and Maps 505 Conclusion 508

20 Navigation Techniques and Practice in the Renaissance, Eric H. Ash 509 The Medieval Craft of Pilotage 509 Oceanic Navigation 514 Navigational Training: Learning and Doing 522 Mathematical Navigation: Theory and Practice 525 Conclusion 527

21 Signs on Printed Topographical Maps, ca. 1470 – ca. 1640, Catherine Delano-Smith 528 The Absence of Standardization 531 Map Signs in the Older Literature 537 Analyzing Renaissance Printed Topographical Maps 539 Signs on Printed Topographical Maps 541 Conclusion 579

22 Techniques of Map Engraving, Printing, and Coloring in the European Renaissance, David Woodward 591 General Technological Considerations 591 Changing Woodcut and Copperplate Styles and Their Effect on Map Printing: Line, Lettering, and Color 598 The Impact of Map Engraving and Printing 606 Afterword 610

23 Centers of Map Publishing in Europe, 1472 –1600, Robert Karrow 611 Sources of Data 611 Analysis of Map Production by Type of Cartography 612

xiii Analysis of Map Production by Printing Technique 613 Analysis of Map Production by Decades 614 Analysis of Map Production by Region 620 Conclusion 621

24 Maps as Educational Tools in the Renaissance, Lesley B. Cormack 622 Introduction 622 Geography, Cosmography, and Maps 622 Early Modern Education 623 Theories of Education 625 Correspondence to Practice 628 Mathematical Practitioners and Maps 633 Ideological Implications of Maps in Education 635 Conclusion 636

25 Maps in Renaissance Libraries and Collections, George Tolias 637 Maps as Memory Aids 637 Map Collecting and Arrangement 642 Functions and Uses of Cartographic Material 652

maps and their uses in renaissance governance 26 Maps and the Early Modern State: Official Cartography, Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt 661 Introduction: Kings and Cartographers 661 States and Space 662 Mapping States 669 “Pleasure and Joy” 677

27 Portraying the City in Early Modern Europe: Measurement, Representation, and Planning, Hilary Ballon and David Friedman 680 Measuring the City: Italy and the Culture of Survey 681 Representing the City 687 Planning the City: The Italian Evidence 696

28 Maps and Rural Land Management in Early Modern Europe, Roger J. P. Kain 705 Maps and Property Disputes 706 Property Maps and Colonial Settlement 708 Cadastral Maps in Taxation Reform and the Evaluation of State Land Resources 710 Property Maps and Agrarian Improvement 712 Property Maps: A Response to the Increasing Fiscal and Symbolic Value of Land 716

29 Warfare and Cartography, ca. 1450 to ca. 1640, John Hale 719

xiv

Contents

30 Maps and Exploration in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, Felipe FernándezArmesto 738 Introduction 738 Explorers’ Use of Maps 740 Explorers as Mapmakers 746 Collation of Explorers’ Information 754 Exploration and the World Image 757

State Contexts of Renaissance Mapping

italian states 31 The Italian Map Trade, 1480 –1650, David Woodward 773 Florence 773 Rome 775 Venice 779 The Map Trade in Northern Italy after 1576 791 Conclusions 794

32 Cycles of Painted Maps in the Renaissance, Francesca Fiorani 804 The Ancient Pedigree 804 Wall Maps 805 Cycles of Painted Maps 806 The Dominion 808 Beyond the Dominion 813 The World Map 813 The Continents 814 The Regions of the World 816 The Holy Land 820 Italy 821 City Views 825 Conclusion 827

33 Cartography in the Duchy of Savoy during the Renaissance, Paola Sereno 831 The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 831 The Seventeenth Century: From the Theatrum Sabaudiae to Borgonio’s Carta generale 847

34 Cartographic Activities in the Republic of Genoa, Corsica, and Sardinia in the Renaissance, Massimo Quaini 854 Difficulties in Constructing a Map of the Genoese State 859 The Development of a Local Topographic Cartography 864 Corsica under Genoese Rule: An Early Case of “Colonial” Cartography? 865 A Comparative Case: Sardinia 870 Conclusions 872

35 State, Cartography, and Territory in Renaissance Veneto and Lombardy, Emanuela Casti 874 States and Cartography 876 Maps and the Various Magistratures in Venice 877 Administrative Cartography in the Management and Control of Territorial Resources 880 Political-Military Cartography and Territorial Defense 892 The Role of Descriptive Regional Cartography in the Provision of Territorial Information and the Celebration of Power 900 Pastoral Visits Cartography and Eccesiastical Power in Lombardy 904 Conclusion 907

36 Cartography in the Central Italian States from 1480 to 1680, Leonardo Rombai 909 Maps for General Administration (Regional Chorographies) 909 Special-Purpose Maps 915 Agrarian Cadastral Cartography 927 Urban Maps and Views 931

37 Cartography in the Kingdom of Naples during the Early Modern Period, Vladimiro Valerio 940 Astronomy and Geodesy at the Aragonese Court of Naples 941 The Enigma of the Aragonese Parchments (Pergamene Aragonesi) 945 The Map of the Borders of the Kingdom and the Last Cartographic Works of the Period of Aragonese Rule 951 City Plans of Naples: Production and Aims 954 The Printed Maps Dating from before the New Survey of Stigliola 960 Official Surveys: Maps of the Kingdom Compiled by Nicola Antonio Stigliola and Mario Cartaro 962 The Map by Giovanni Battista Nicolosi 970 Conclusion 973

portugal 38 Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance, Maria Fernanda Alegria, Suzanne Daveau, João Carlos Garcia, Francesc Relaño 975 Introduction 975 Early Nautical Cartography 977 Chartmakers and Charts: The Practitioners 987 The Charts 990 Institutions and Political Policies 1002

Contents Portuguese Cartography of Its Overseas Routes and Territories 1010 Terrestrial Cartography in Portugal 1034 Printed Cartography in Portugal 1059

spain 39 Spanish Peninsular Cartography, 1500 –1700, David Buisseret 1069 Introduction 1069 The Medieval Traditions 1070 The Sixteenth-Century Scientific Milieu 1072 Decline and Revival in the Natural Sciences, 1550 –1700 1079 The Mapping Sense among Spain’s Rulers 1081 Royal Mapping on the Peninsula 1083 Regional Cartography 1085 Conclusion 1091

40 Spanish Nautical Cartography in the Renaissance, Alison Sandman 1095 Introduction: Nautical Cartography in the Sixteenth Century 1096 Sea Charts as Part of the Nautical Bureaucracy 1103 The Padrón Real 1107 Selling Charts to Pilots 1130 Conclusions 1138

41 Spanish Colonial Cartography, 1450 –1700, David Buisseret 1143 The Various Groups of Cartographers Working on Maps of Spain’s Overseas Territories 1144 The Main Areas of Spanish Colonial Cartography 1148 Conclusion 1171

PART 2

german lands 42 Cartography in the German Lands, 1450 –1650, Peter H. Meurer 1172 Introduction 1172 The Dawn of Early Modern Cartography 1177 An Italian Interlude 1182 Cartography in the Heyday of German Humanism 1189 German Cartography in the Reformation Period 1207 The Period of the First Surveys 1221 Influences of the Flemish School in the German Area 1228 German Cartography in Late Humanism: An Overview 1236 Conclusions 1245

low countries 43 Surveying and Official Mapping in the Low Countries, 1500 – ca. 1670, Cornelis Koeman and Marco van Egmond 1246 Early Mapping of the Low Countries and the Historical-Political Background of Cartographic Development 1246 From Picture to Map: The Birth of a Modern Cartography 1249 Regional Topographical Mapping of the Low Countries 1257 Military Mapping of the Low Countries (to ca. 1648) 1271 Summary Remarks 1290

44 Commercial Cartography and Map Production in the Low Countries, 1500 – ca. 1672, Cornelis Koeman, Günter Schilder, Marco van Egmond, and Peter van der Krogt 1296 Louvain: Center of Learning 1296 The Rise of Commercial Cartography in the Low Countries (to ca. 1672) 1298 Atlases from the Low Countries (to ca. 1680) 1318 Wall Maps Published in the Netherlands 1341 Globes from the Low Countries (to ca. 1680) 1356 Summary Remarks 1374

45 Maritime Cartography in the Low Countries during the Renaissance, Günter Schilder and Marco van Egmond 1384 Dutch Pilot Guides and Sea Atlases 1385 Single-Sheet Charts: Printed and Manuscript Traditions up to 1630 1404 Summary Remarks 1428

46 Mapping the Dutch World Overseas in the Seventeenth Century, Kees Zandvliet 1433 The Historical Background of VOC and WIC Mapmaking 1434 The Education and Status of Oceanic Navigators, Land Surveyors, and Military Engineers 1434 The Dutch East India Company 1436 The West India Company 1449 The Rhetorical Role of Company Maps 1458 Conclusion 1460

france 47 Maps and Descriptions of the World in SixteenthCentury France, Frank Lestringant and Monique Pelletier 1463 Oronce Fine and the Ptolemaic Tradition 1464

xvi

Contents André Thevet and Nicolas de Nicolay: Cosmographes du roi 1467 Contacts with Italy and Flanders 1474 Conclusion 1479

48 National and Regional Mapping in France to About 1650, Monique Pelletier 1480 National Mapmaking from Oronce Fine to Guillaume Postel (1525 –1570): Fine, Jolivet, Nicolay, and Postel 1480 Regional Mapmaking and the First Atlas of France, 1539 –1594, Edited by Maurice Bouguereau 1489 New Trends in National Mapmaking: François de La Guillotière and Christophe Tassin 1493 The Administrative Mapmaking of Nicolas Sanson (1600 –1667) 1497 The Itinerary and the Map (1515 –1645) 1500 Conclusion 1502

49 French Cartography: The ingénieurs du roi, 1500 –1650, David Buisseret 1504 Introduction: The Sixteenth Century 1504 The Engineers of Henri IV (1589 –1610) 1505 The ingénieurs du roi during the Reign of Louis XIII (1610 –1643) 1514 Conclusion 1519

50 Representations of Territory by Painters, Engineers, and Land Surveyors in France during the Renaissance, Monique Pelletier 1522 Maps and Plans Relating to Disputes 1522 The Birth of Estate Maps 1525 The Role of Maps in Regional and National Development 1530 Representations of Cities: Panoramas, Perspective Views, and Profiles 1532 Conclusion 1537

51 The Mapping of Samuel de Champlain, 1603 – 1635, Conrad E. Heidenreich 1538 Exploration and Mapping 1539 Data Gathering for Maps 1542 Conclusions 1547

52 Marine Cartography and Navigation in Renaissance France, Sarah Toulouse 1550 Renaissance Normandy: A Seaward-Looking Province 1550 Neighboring Brittany and Distant Marseilles 1554 The Influences on Cartographers 1555 Projection: Rhumbs and Loxodromes 1556 Magnetic Declination 1557 The Production of Charts 1557

The Use of Charts: Plotting Position 1559 The Uses of Norman Charts 1561 Charts That Remained Manuscript Works 1562

53 Publishing and the Map Trade in France, 1470 – 1670, Catherine Hofmann 1569 A Century of Trial and Error, 1480 –1580 1569 The Influence of the Low Countries, 1580 –1630 1575 The Age of Independence, 1630 –1670 1578

british isles 54 Mapmaking in England, ca. 1470 –1650, Peter Barber 1589 The English Heritage to 1525 1589 Foreign Influences to 1525 1595 Change, 1526 –1550 1598 Consolidation, 1550 –1611: An Overview 1608 Mapping the Country, 1550 –1611 1620 Mapping the Countryside, 1550 –1611 1637 Mapping the Towns, 1550 –1611 1648 Icons, Emblems, and Decoration, 1550 –1611 1657 Mapmaking in Early Stuart England, 1612 –1650 1666 Conclusion 1668

55 Colonial Cartography in a European Setting: The Case of Tudor Ireland, J. H. Andrews 1670 The Political Background 1671 Maps and the Administrator 1671 Ireland’s Cartographic Personality 1672 The Earliest Official Maps 1673 An Early Elizabethan Consensus 1675 The First Measured Survey 1677 Provincial Cartography: The West and South 1678 Provincial Cartography: The North 1681 The Empire of Great Britain 1682

56 The Kingdom of Scotland: Cartography in an Age of Confidence, Jeffrey Stone 1684 First Steps toward a Scottish Cartography 1685 The Emergence of a Scottish Cartography: The Role of Timothy Pont 1686

57 The London Map Trade to 1640, Laurence Worms 1693 Imports and Importers 1694 Maps Published in England 1695 The Engravers 1712 Regulation and Control 1714 Finance and Patronage 1717 Marketing and Distribution 1718 Conclusion 1720

Contents

58 Chartmaking in England and Its Context, 1500 – 1660, Sarah Tyacke 1722 Introduction 1722 The Early Period (to 1560) 1725 English-Made Overseas Charts and Their Survival Rates (1560 –1660) 1731 English Chartmakers, 1560 –1660 1737 Conclusion 1746

59 Colonial Cartography under the Tudor and Early Stuart Monarchies, ca. 1480 – ca. 1640, Robert C. D. Baldwin 1754 Introduction 1754 Maps and the Promotion of Overseas Ventures under the Early Tudor Monarchs 1755 The “Paper Empire” of Elizabeth I (r. 1558 –1603) 1757 Colonization and Cartography under the Early Stuarts 1767 Conclusions 1779

scandinavia 60 Scandinavian Renaissance Cartography, William R. Mead 1781 The Setting 1781 Pioneering in Nordic Cartography 1782 A Gothic Vision of the North 1786 “An Embryonic School of Cartography” 1788 Cartography and Territorial Claims 1792 The Contribution of the Fortification Engineers 1796 The Birth of the Swedish Land Survey 1800 Charting the Sea 1804 On the Threshold of a New Age 1805

east-central europe 61 Renaissance Cartography in East-Central Europe, ca. 1450 –1650, Zsolt G. Török 1806 The Study of Early Maps in East-Central Europe: Historiographic Overview 1808

xvii Antique and Medieval Traditions: Ptolemy and Portolan Charts 1810 The Mathematical-Astronomical Tradition 1811 The Local Context: Beginnings of Local Mapmaking 1813 The New Paradigm: Regional Cartography in East-Central Europe 1816 The First Printed Map of Hungary 1820 A Transylvanian Humanist: Johannes Honter 1828 Later Printed Maps of East-Central Europe 1833 The Local Use of Foreign Maps 1837 Military Maps of the Eastern Frontiers 1839 In Defense of Europe: Military Mapping during the Turkish Wars 1842 Conclusions 1851

russia 62 Russian Cartography to ca. 1700, L. A. Goldenberg 1852 Reconstructions of General Maps of Russia from Western European Maps 1856 The Beginnings of Russian Cartography and Geography 1858 Local, Regional, and General Maps in Russia 1860 Russian Geographical Discoveries and Mapping of the Asiatic Part of Russia 1873 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov and the Mapping of Siberia: The First Russian Geographical Atlases 1884 Conclusions 1902

Editor and Authors 1905 Bibliographical Index 1907 General Index, Margie Towery 2059

Illustrations with Tables and Appendixes

26 Map of the dominion of Siena, 1589, Sala delle Carte Geografiche, Uffizi Palace, Florence 27 Map of Africa, 1573, Sala della Cosmografia, Palazzo Farnese, Caprarola 28 Disputed territory of the “Gaio” by Alessandro Resta and Vermondo Resta, 1575 29 Pier Maria Gropallo, map from Atlas A, 1650 –55 30 Cristoforo Sabbadino, “Dissegno di Trivisan,” 1558 31 Silvestro da Panicale, map of the Franciscan province of Umbria in the “Atlante dei Cappuccini,” 1632 32 Fernão Vaz Dourado, chart of the Far East, 1571 33 Luís Teixeira, map of Brazil, ca. 1586 34 View of the fortress of Malaca in António Bocarro’s “O Livro das plantas,” 1635 35 João Teixeira Albernaz I, map of Baía de Todos os Santos 36 Fragment of a manuscript map of Portugal 37 Pedro Nunes Tinoco, town map 38 Anonymous view of Aranda de Duero, 1503 39 Anonymous chart attributed to Vesconte Maggiolo, ca. 1510 40 Domenico Vigliarolo, chart of the North Atlantic

Color Plates Part 1 (Following page 342) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Antonino Saliba’s Nvova figvra di tvtte le cose A measured cosmos The earliest Sufi Latinus manuscript Details of the celestial and terrestrial globes from The Ambassadors The St. Gallen cosmographic globe, ca. 1575 Giovanni Battista Cavallini, large-scale nautical chart, 1652 Jacopo Maggiolo, nautical chart of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast, Genoa, 1561 François Ollive, nautical chart of the Mediterranean, Marseilles, 1664 Henricus Martellus Germanus, map of Ceylon Ptolemaic manuscript map of Africa from the Wilczek Brown codex Page from a manuscript edition of the Septe giornate, [1482] Jean Cossin, manuscript world map on the sinusoidal projection, 1570 Portuguese roteiro, attributed to Luís Teixeira Plane chart of the Atlantic Ocean, created after 1549 by an anonymous Portuguese cartographer Four examples of early color printing, 1513 The two known colored versions of Francesco Rosselli’s oval world map, ca. 1508 Signed coloring by Jackomina Liefrinck (Liefrynck) Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts, ca. 1592 Claes Jansz. Visscher, Leo Belgicus Johannes de Ram and Coenraert Decker, Delft, ca. 1675 –78 Wotton Underwood, Buckinghamshire Tapestry map of the Mediterranean Basin, 1549 –51 Self-portrait of Sir Nathaniel Bacon, ca. 1618 –20 The Seven Cities of Cíbola from Joan Martines’s chart of 1578

Part 2 (Following page 1316) 41 Leonardo Torriani, view of Arrecife from his “Descrittione” 42 Bautista Antonelli, map of the road from Veracruz to Mexico City, 1590 43 Koblenz map fragment 44 Erhard Etzlaub’s Rom Weg map, 1500 45 The Landtafel of Rothenburg, 1537 46 Arnoldus Mercator’s map of Trier 47 Detail from the map of the lower Rhinelands by Christiaan Sgrooten 48 Map from the “Kaartboek van de landerijen van het Sint Catharinae Gasthuis,” by Nicolaes van Geelkercken, 1635 49 Jacob van Deventer, manuscript town plan of Leeuwarden, ca. 1560 50 Christiaan Sgrooten, regional map of Veluwe, ca. 1568 –73 51 Plan of Haarlem published by Joan Blaeu

(Following page 950) 25 Giovanni Andrea Valvassore, colored woodcut of the battle of Marignano, ca. 1515

xix

Illustrations 52 Jan Vermeer, Officer and Laughing Girl, ca. 1658 53 Willem Jansz. Blaeu, terrestrial and celestial globes, 1616 54 Chart from Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer’s Spieghel der zeevaerdt, 1584 55 Evert Gijsbertsz., manuscript chart of Central America and South America, before 1596 56 Joannes Vingboons, map of the Gold Coast, ca. 1650

(Following page 1700) 57 Oronce Fine, Recens et integra orbis descriptio, 1534/1536 58 André Thevet, engraved and colored frontispiece 59 Jean Jolivet, “La carte generalle dv pays de Normandie,” 1545 60 Map from “Livre des plans, des passages et chaussées de la riviere de Somme,” ca. 1644 61 Detail of the map representing the course of the Aa River, end of the fifteenth century 62 Chart of the east of Terra Australis (Terra Java), Vallard Atlas, 1547 63 Lyon cité opulente, située es confins de Bourgongne, Daulphiné, & Sauoye, published by Nicolas Lefebvre, 1555 64 Anthony Anthony, plan of the attack on Brighton, ca. 1539 – 49 65 Robert Adams, map of Gironde, 1593 66 Christopher Saxton, map of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Middlesex, 1575 67 Robert Johnson, map of Crickhowell 68 Ralph Sheldon, Warwickshire tapestry map, ca. 1590 69 Mark Pierse, manuscript map of Laxton, 1635 70 Detail from Richard Bartlett’s map of southeast Ulster, ca. 1602 71 Baptista Boazio, The True Description or Draffte of That Famous Ile of Wighte, 1591 72 Gabriel Tatton, chart of the Pacific Ocean, ca. 1600 73 William Downe, map of the Orinoco, Guiana, 1596 74 Anders Streng, Naappila and Rajalahti, Orivesi Parish, Finland, 1634 75 Johannes Honter’s woodcut blocks, ca. 1541– 42 76 Nicolo Angielini, map of Hungary, ca. 1570 77 Martin Stier, manuscript map of the Styrian frontier, 1657 78 Detail from a nineteenth-century copy of a seventeenth-century map of the town of Kashin and its surroundings 79 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, map of the Iset River 80 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, ethnographic map of Siberia

Figures Part 1 1.1 Collage of world maps and geographical diagrams by Giuseppe Rosaccio, ca. 1610 4

1.2 Antonio Lafreri, Le sette chiese di Roma, 1575 11 1.3 World map by Francesco Rosselli, ca. 1508 14 1.4 Viewpoints used in cartographic and landscape representations 15 2.1 Zone map by Opicino de Canistris 30 2.2 The divisions of a meadow, before 1208 38 2.3 Diagrammatic map of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain by Matthew Paris 40 2.4 Map of Europe 41 2.5 Diagram of the division of the Promised Land from Richard of Saint Victor, “In Ezechielem” 42 2.6 Map of Canaan from a commentary on the Pentateuch by Solomon Ben Isaac (Rashi), ca. 1233 42 2.7 Plan of Jerusalem, 1140s 43 2.8 Detail of the Aslake world map, fourteenth century 45 2.9 Map of Lombardy by Opicino de Canistris, 1330s or 1340s 48 2.10 Plan of Milan by Petrus de Guioldis from Galvano Fiamma’s “Chronicle Extravagans,” fourteenth century 49 3.1 Peter Apian’s cosmography 57 3.2 Pierre d’Ailly’s cosmographic map 59 3.3 The three basic cosmographic maps derived from Sacrobosco’s Sphaera mundi 62 3.4 Illustrating planetary movement and orbs 65 3.5 Sebastian Münster’s world system of 1550 68 3.6 The competing world systems 71 3.7 Robert Fludd’s cosmography 72 3.8 Jesuit cosmographic iconography 73 3.9 Mapped cosmography: John Speed’s map of the world, 1626 [1632] 74 3.10 The zodiacal houses 78 3.11 Peter Apian’s “Cosmographical glass” 78 3.12 Oronce Fine, Typvs vniversi orbis 79 3.13 André Thevet, L’vnivers 80 3.14 William Cuningham, Cœlifer atlas, 1559 81 3.15 The hieroglyphic monad 81 3.16 A Perfit Description of the Cælestiall Orbes: The infinite Copernican cosmos 83 3.17 Diogo Homem’s “Perpetual novilunar table,” 1559 84 3.18 Detail from Guillaume Postel’s Polo aptata nova charta universi, 1578 (1621 edition) 85 3.19 Mapping the correspondences of the human microcosm 86 3.20 Dante’s Hell 88 3.21 Copernicus’s heliocentric cosmography 89 3.22 Galileo’s illustration of heliocentricity 90 3.23 A geometric cosmogony 91 3.24 Cosmic harmony as the breath of the cosmic organ 91 3.25 Seventeenth-century Christian cosmos 92 3.26 Light and shadow: Mapping the eclipse 93 3.27 Knowledge and cosmic illumination 94

Illustrations 3.28 Mapping the scale of nature 95 3.29 The cosmographic emblem: Jodocus Hondius, Typvs orbis terrarvm, 1589 96 3.30 Emblematic mapping of the two spheres 96 3.31 Vitruvian microcosm 97 4.1 Celestial map by Jost Amman 103 4.2 Map of the new southern constellations 104 4.3 Aquarius from Aratus, “Phaenomena,” manuscript 105 4.4 Aquarius from Aratus, Phaenomena, printed version by Hugo Grotius 106 4.5 Michael Scot’s constellations Tarabellum and Vexillum 106 4.6 Map showing general relationship of constellations to one another from a tenth-century Aratus manuscript 107 4.7 Trapezoidal projection map from 1426 by Conrad of Dyffenbach 108 4.8 An astrolabe-like star map, 1596 112 4.9 Orion, from the first edition of Piccolomini’s De le stelle fisse, 1540 114 4.10 Early equatorial celestial map, 1592 116 4.11 One of Schiller’s new biblical constellations 118 4.12 Published counterproof of Schiller’s constellation Saint Andrew 119 4.13 Comet path map by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli 119 4.14 Early printed comet path map 120 4.15 A pole star chart by Peter Apian 121 4.16 A chart of the Pleiades by Galileo Galilei 122 5.1 Moon drawing by Leonardo da Vinci 124 5.2 William Gilbert’s moon map 125 5.3 Galileo Galilei’s moon drawings (composite) 126 5.4 Saturn composite by Christiaan Huygens 128 5.5 Sunspot drawing by Galileo Galilei 128 5.6 Christoph Scheiner’s sunspot drawings 129 5.7 Thomas Harriot’s moon map 129 5.8 Claude Mellan’s moon map 130 5.9 Plenilunii lumina austriaca philippica by Michael Florent van Langren, 1645 131 5.10 Moon map by Johannes Hevelius, 1647 132 5.11 Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s moon map, 1651 133 6.1 The Ambassadors, painted by Hans Holbein, 1533 136 6.2 The Ptolemaic universe 137 6.3 Drawing of a celestial globe 140 6.4 The oldest terrestrial globe 141 6.5 Terrestrial globe gores 142 6.6 Celestial globe gores 144 – 45 6.7 Depiction of a cosmographic globe 146 6.8 A cup of gilt silver in the shape of a cosmographic globe 148 6.9 J. C. Boulenger with globe 150 6.10 Cosmographic globe gores 152 6.11 Celestial globe from Stöffler’s workshop 154

xxi 6.12 A cup of gilt silver in the shape of a terrestrial globe 156 7.1 The map of Columbus 176 7.2 Coat of arms of the Doria family 179 7.3 Binding of a nautical atlas with the coat of arms of the Knights of Malta 181 7.4 Small nautical chart 183 7.5 Case for nautical charts 183 7.6 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean glued onto four panels 184 7.7 Nautical atlas with accordion-like binding 185 7.8 Nautical chart of the eastern Mediterranean with grid 186 7.9 Unfinished nautical chart once used for book binding 187 7.10 Indications of scale arranged to form the letter “M” 193 7.11 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean with a scale of latitude 195 7.12 Double nautical chart of the Mediterranean 198 7.13 Example of a richly decorated nautical chart of the Mediterranean 200 7.14 Miniature of Genoa, with the port and the Lanterna 201 7.15 Nautical astrolabe 204 7.16 Large-scale nautical chart of the Tyrrhenian Sea 206 7.17 Reference map of the Mediterranean 207 7.18 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean by Matteo Prunes 208 7.19 The Maggiolo family of cartographers 209 7.20 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean by Nicolaus Vourdopolos 219 7.21 Nautical chart of the Adriatic by Alvise Gramolin 220 7.22 Sheet from the atlas by Conte di Ottomanno Freducci 221 7.23 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean by Domenico Vigliarolo 223 7.24 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean by Annibale Impuccio 224 7.25 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean by Joan Riczo Oliva 227 7.26 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean by Giovanni Battista Cavallini 231 7.27 Nautical chart of the Mediterranean by “Angelus” 232 8.1 Map of Chios according to the “Liber insularum” of Cristoforo Buondelmonti, ca. 1420 266 8.2 Map of Mytilene by Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti 269 8.3 Description and illustration of the sea battle of Lepanto (7 October 1571) 272 8.4 Map of Cyprus from Giovanni Francesco Camocio’s Isolario, ca. 1570 –74 273 8.5 Map of Mallorca by Antonio Millo 274

xxii 8.6 Map of the Falkland Islands by André Thevet (according to the geographic coordinates of the map) 275 8.7 The islet of Kalogeros from the north and south sides by Coronelli 277 8.8 Types of isolarii and makers of each type 282 9.1 World map from a fifteenth-century Latin edition of Ptolemy’s Geography 289 9.2 Europa IV in a Latin edition of the Geography 294 9.3 Europe and part of Asia from a German manuscript, first half of the fifteenth century 302 9.4 Half of the map of northern Europe by Guillaume Fillastre after Claudius Clavus 303 9.5 Ptolemy’s second projection with annotations 308 9.6 World map with “Mondo novo” by Alessandro Zorzi 330 –31 9.7 Traces of geographic information on a projection grid 339 9.8 World map in globular projection 353 9.9 World map accompanying Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae introdvctio, 1507 355 9.10 Copy of Ruysch’s world map in Glareanus’s “De geographia,” ca. 1510 –20 358 10.1 Three ways of expanding the world map 366 10.2 Double hemisphere map by Franciscus Monachus, ca. 1527 367 10.3 Perspective projection by Dürer and Stabius, 1515 368 10.4 Oblique orthographic projection by Fausto Rughesi, 1597 369 10.5 Polar stereographic projection with extensions to a square, by John Blagrave, 1596 370 10.6 Double hemisphere stereographic projection by Rumoldus Mercator, 1587 371 10.7 Double hemisphere stereographic projection by Jodocus Hondius, ca. 1595 372 10.8 Double hemisphere stereographic projection by Philip Eckebrecht, 1630 373 10.9 Azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the north and south poles by Giovanni Vespucci, 1524 374 10.10 Interrupted cordiform map of the world by Georg Braun, 1574 375 10.11 Geographic sketches by Leonardo da Vinci 376 10.12 The Mercator projection, 1569 377 10.13 Gnomonic projection by Franz Ritter, 1610 379 10.14 Map of Europe and North Africa for use with a sundial, drawn by Erhard Etzlaub on a “Mercatorlike” projection, 1511 380 11.1 Hartmann Schedel’s world map from Liber chronicarum (the Nuremberg Chronicle) 383 11.2 Detail of Columbus as Saint Christopher from the Juan de la Cosa map, ca. 1500 386 11.3 Calvin’s map of Mesopotamia 388

Illustrations 11.4 Map illustrating the dream of Daniel, printed by Hans Lufft, 1530 389 11.5 Pierre Eskrich’s Mappe-monde novvelle papistiqve 391 11.6 Ortelius’s Peregrinationis divi pavli typvs corographicvs, 1579 394 12.1 Title page from the Theatrum orbis terrarum of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 408 15.1 Macariae et Eudaemonis tabella 439 15.2 Schlampampenland 441 15.3 Labyrinth of the World, 1623 443 15.4 Newe und kurtze Beschreibung der gantzen Himmelischen und Iridischen Welt, des newen Hierusalems und ewig brennenden Pfuls 444 15.5 Tabula cebetis, carta vitae 445 16.1 Map of Dante’s Hell, 1506 454 16.2 Allesandro Vellutello’s map of Provence, 1525 455 16.3 Map from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso 457 17.1 “Earth Protected by Juno & Jupiter,” ca. 1530s 467 19.1 Reference map of Europe 478 19.2 Alberti’s method for land surveying, ca. 1455 479 19.3 Triangulation of the Brussels and Antwerp environs 483 19.4 Geometrical quadrat and heuristic model, 1550 484 19.5 Oldest surviving mining draft of Bohemia near Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg), drawn by Zikmund Prásˇek, 1534 487 19.6 Method for mining survey, 1617 488 19.7 Mine surveying instrument, 1557 488 19.8 Astral clock (nocturnal) in Apian’s Cosmographia, 1540 489 19.9 English nocturnal, ca. 1600 490 19.10 Sun quadrant, seventeenth century 490 19.11 Sundial in the form of a poplar leaf, 1533 491 19.12 Gold-plated quadrat as a universal instrument by Tobias Volckmer, 1608 493 19.13 Dreistab with a protractor and magnetic needle compass from Münster, 1550 494 19.14 Drawing of a Dreistab by Danfrie, 1597 494 19.15 English theodolite, 1590 495 19.16 Astronomical ring instrument from Gemma 496 19.17 Example of a sighting tube on a multifunctional instrument, 1557 496 19.18 Detail of Lanci’s instrument 497 19.19 Measuring with a sighting instrument and chain, 1575 498 19.20 Components of the surveyor’s plane table 499 19.21 Predecessor of the surveyor’s plane table, 1598 499 19.22 Using Pfinzing’s table, 1598 500 20.1 A typical page from the rutter The Safegarde of Saylers, 1590 511 20.2 Part of a manuscript Toleta de marteloio 512 20.3 The title page from Waghenaer’s Spieghel der zeevaerdt, 1584 – 85 515

Illustrations 20.4 Depiction of a mariner’s quadrant, late sixteenth century 516 20.5 A typical mariner’s astrolabe, of Spanish manufacture, 1563 516 20.6 An astronomer’s planispheric astrolabe 517 20.7 Illustration of a man measuring a solar altitude using a mariner’s astrolabe 517 20.8 Illustration of a man measuring a stellar altitude using a cross staff 518 20.9 An ivory back staff, English, 1690 518 20.10 A simple compass of variation 520 20.11 A polar projection chart of the North Atlantic 522 20.12 A typical page from William Borough’s A Discovrs of the Variation of the Cumpas, 1581 525 21.1 Continuity from manuscript to print 530 21.2 Lack of standardization 532 21.3 Explanation of signs on a map 533 21.4 An engraver’s inconsistency 533 21.5 The hand of the engraver 534 21.6 Instructions to surveyors 537 21.7 Perspective and style in pictorial signs 541 21.8 Sea signs 542 21.9 Coastline signs 543 21.10 Cliff signs 543 21.11 Rock and shoal signs 544 21.12 Signs for estuaries and other marine features 545 21.13 Inland lake signs 546 21.14 River signs 546 21.15 Signs for other hydrographic features 547 21.16 Hill and mountain signs 548 21.17 Scarp and volcano signs 551 21.18 Dune signs 551 21.19 Tree signs 553 21.20 Marsh signs 554 21.21 Political boundary signs 556 21.22 Linguistic boundary signs 557 21.23 Nucleated settlement signs 558 –59 21.24 Isolated settlement signs 563 21.25 Monastery signs 564 21.26 Deserted village signs 564 21.27 Confessional signs 565 21.28 Church status signs 566 21.29 Territorial overlord and urban overlord signs 567 21.30 Gallows signs 567 21.31 Signs for seats of Parliament 568 21.32 Route signs 568 21.33 Road signs 569 21.34 Difficult-to-understand map signs 570 21.35 Bridge signs 571 21.36 Ford and ferry signs 571 21.37 Two examples of ferry signs 571 21.38 Beacon signs 572 21.39 Lighthouse signs 572 21.40 Anchorage and hostelry signs 573

xxiii 21.41 21.42 21.43 21.44 21.45 21.46 21.47 21.48 21.49 21.50 21.51 21.52 21.53 22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 22.5 22.6 22.7 22.8 22.9 22.10 22.11

Inland navigation and shipping route signs 573 Distance line signs 573 Arable land signs 574 Viticulture signs 574 Hunting and fishing signs 575 Salt production signs 575 Mine and quarry signs 576 Manufacturing signs 576 Logging signs 577 Metalworking signs 577 Windmill and water-powered mill signs 577 Thermal bath signs 577 Antiquity signs 578 Early Chinese printed map 592 Relief and intaglio 592 Verso of Barbari woodblock, 1500 593 Chisel and plank 593 Graver and end grain 594 Holding the graver 595 Curved graver 595 Comparison between etching and engraving 596 Intaglio rolling press 598 Woodcut map lettering 601 Original woodblock with stereotype lettering plates 602 22.12 Frontispiece showing map coloring 606 23.1 Number of separate maps compared with number of maps in books and atlases, 1472 –1600 612 23.2 Number of maps compared with number of views, 1472 –1600 613 23.3 Number of engraved maps compared with number of woodcut maps, 1472 –1600 613 23.4 Production of woodcut maps and views by region, 1472 –1600 613 23.5 The production of printed maps, 1472 –1600 614 23.6 –23.9 The production of printed maps, 1472 –1510 615 23.10 Areas depicted on maps, 1472 –1600 616 23.11–23.14 The production of printed maps, 1511–1550 617 23.15 –23.18 The production of printed maps, 1551–1590 618 23.19 The production of printed maps, 1591–1600 619 23.20 Total map production by region, 1472 –1600 620 23.21 Map production by region and decade, 1472 – 1600 620 24.1 Volvelle from Blundeville’s Exercises 627 24.2 The Ignatian tree, 1646 629 26.1 Christopher Saxton, map of Somerset, 1579 670 26.2 Egnazio Danti, map of Italy, Sala delle Carte Geografiche, Palazzo Vecchio, ca. 1563 – 67 672 26.3 Jan Vermeer, The Art of Painting, ca. 1662 – 65 675 26.4 Pieter van der Beke, Flanders, 1538 676 27.1 Imola, Leonardo da Vinci, 1502 683

xxiv 27.2 Pisa, attributed to Giuliano da Sangallo 684 27.3 Rome, Leonardo Bufalini, 1551 685 27.4 Analytical drawings of Antonio Lafreri’s plan of Milan, 1573 686 27.5 Siege of La Rochelle (1628 –30), Jacques Callot 692 27.6 Madrid, Pedro Teixeira Albernaz, 1656 693 27.7 Paris, Jacques Gomboust, 1652 694 27.8 London, Wencelaus Hollar, 1666 695 27.9 Plan of Vienna, Augustin Hirschvogel, 1552 697 27.10 Pratica, a project for the expansion of the Borgo, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, 1539 699 27.11 Genoa, Modello for the Strada Nuova development, 1551 699 27.12 Genoa, project sponsored by Pietro Battista Cattaneo for the extension of the Strada Nuova development, 1595 700 27.13 Ancona, survey plan, Jacomo Fontana, 1585 –90 701 27.14 Ancona, proposal for the expansion of the city, Jacomo Fontana, 1585 –90 701 27.15 Rome, Piazza Collegio Romano, 1659 703 27.16 Rome, the neighborhood around Santa Maria della Pace, 1656 704 27.17 Rome, project for the square at Santa Maria della Pace, Pietro da Cortona, 1656 704 28.1 Albi, Département du Tarn, France, ca. 1314 707 28.2 Diagram of a seignory for the Munster plantation, 1585 – 86 709 28.3 Geometriska Jordebok map of Väversunda in Dals Hundred, Östergötland, Sweden, by Johan Larsson Grot, 1633 –34 711 28.4 Map of the Menago River lowlands in the Veneto, Italy, by Panfilo Piazzola, ca. 1570 713 28.5 Surveying activity in England and Wales, 1470 – 1640 714 28.6 Spofforth, Yorkshire, England, by Christopher Saxton, 1608 715 28.7 Kilton Park, Somerset, England, by George Withiell, late seventeenth century 717 29.1 Cosimo de’ Medici planning the attack on Siena, by Giorgio Vasari (detail) 724 29.2 Route of Don Lope de Acuña through the FrancheComté, 1573 726 29.3 Plan of the siege of Groningen, 1594 728 29.4 Fortifications of Crema, ca. 1632 730 29.5 Hans Sebald Beham’s siege of Vienna, 1529 732 29.6 Jacques Callot’s Siège de Breda, 1628 733 29.7 Jörg Breu the Younger, siege of Algiers, 1541 734 29.8 Claes Jansz. Visscher’s siege of Breda, 1624, engraving 736 29.9 Jean de Beins, map of the siege of Soyons, 1629 737 30.1 Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s map, probably by John Dee, ca. 1582 742 30.2 Detail of the north polar region from Gerardus Mercator’s 1569 world map 743

Illustrations 30.3 Early example of the inclusion of information on soundings 750 30.4 Antonio Pigafetta’s sketch of the Strait of Magellan 752 30.5 A near-contemporary copy of Nicolas Barré’s sketch of the Florida and South Carolina coasts 752 30.6 Hernando Gallego’s coastal chart of the Solomon Islands, 1568 753 30.7 Coastal profiles of the west coast of Greenland by James Hall, ca. 1605 754 30.8 Map of Spanish discoveries in the new world, illustrated ca. 1511 756 30.9 World map by Juan de la Cosa, 1500 760 30.10 The Cantino map, 1502 760 30.11 The King Hamy map, 1502? 761 30.12 Vesconte Maggiolo’s map, 1504 761 30.13 Pedro Reinel’s map ca. 1504 (known as Kunstmann I) 762 30.14 Nicolò de Caverio’s map, 1505 762 30.15 The Pesaro map, ca. 1505 – 8 763 30.16 Map known as Kunstmann II, 1506 763 30.17 1843 redrawing of the map known as Kunstmann III, ca. 1506 764 30.18 Vesconte Maggiolo’s map, 1511 764 30.19 Pı¯rı¯ Re ı¯s world map, ca. 1513 765 30.20 Vesconte Maggiolo’s map, 1516 765 30.21 World map in the Miller Atlas, ca. 1519 766 30.22 1843 redrawing of Jorge Reinel’s map, ca. 1519 (known as Kunstmann IV) 766 30.23 Vesconte Maggiolo’s map, ca. 1519 (known as Kunstmann V) 767 30.24 The Turin map, ca. 1523 767 30.25 1525 map attributed to Diogo Ribeiro (known as the Castiglione map) 768 30.26 The Salviati map, ca. 1525 768 30.27 Giovanni Vespucci’s map, 1526 768 30.28 Diogo Ribeiro’s map, 1527 769 30.29 Diogo Ribeiro’s map, 1529 (in Rome) 769 30.30 Diogo Ribeiro’s map, 1529 (in Weimar) 770 30.31 Giovanni da Verrazzano’s map, 1529 770 31.1 Chart of the Lafreri-Salamanca collaboration 776 31.2 Area of printmaking activity in sixteenth-century Rome 776 31.3 Genealogical chart of the De Rossi family 777 31.4 One of the twelve plates of antique Rome by Etienne Du Pérac 778 31.5 Area of printmaking activity in sixteenth-century Venice 780 31.6 Giacomo Gastaldi’s map of the Piedmont, 1555, engraved by Matteo Pagano 781 31.7 Giacomo Gastaldi’s La Spaña, 1544 782 31.8 Giacomo Gastaldi’s Italia, 1561 783 31.9 Giacomo Gastaldi’s map of Lombardy 784 31.10 Giacomo Gastaldi’s Cosmographia universalis 785

Illustrations 31.11 City view of Florence from Giulio Ballino’s De’ disegni delle piu illustri città, & fortezze del mondo, 1569 789 31.12 Giovanni Antonio Magini’s map of the territory of Bologna, 1595 792 31.13 Map of Terra del Fuego, from the Arcano del mare by Sir Robert Dudley 793 31.14 Manuscript map of Terra del Fuego 793 31.15 Reduced version of Dudley’s printed sea chart of the east coast of North America 794 32.1 Plan of the Renaissance wing, first floor, Ducal Palace, Venice 809 32.2 Plan of the Renaissance wing, second floor, Ducal Palace, Venice 809 32.3 Map of the Bolognese, 1575, Sala Bologna, Vatican Palace, Rome 811 32.4 Map of Asia Minor, 1565, Terza Loggia, Vatican Palace, Rome 817 32.5 American hemisphere, ca. 1582, Terza Loggia, Vatican Palace, Rome 818 32.6 Map of Indochina and Indonesia, 1573, Guardaroba Nuova, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence 819 32.7 Plan of the library, Monastery of San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma 821 32.8 Map of the Holy Land at the time of Abraham, 1575, library, Monastery of San Giovanni Evangelista, Parma 822 32.9 Map of Flaminia, 1578 – 81, Galleria delle Carte Geograﬁche, Vatican Palace, Rome 824 32.10 View of the city of Graz, 1565, main courtyard, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence 826 33.1 Reference map of northwest Italy 833 33.2 Network of salt-duty warehouses in the province of Nice, 1548 – 49 834 33.3 Bertino Riveti, detail of the map of the river Chisone, 1558 836 33.4 Final survey of Cuneo territory, 1566 838 33.5 Bartolomeo Mellano’s map of the boundary between Savigliano and Cervere, 1565 839 33.6 Giacomo Soldati’s map of the Susa valley, 1591–93 844 33.7 Ducal canal from Fossano to Bra, with new mills, 1584 – 89 845 33.8 Plan of Turin by Giovanni Caracha, 1572 846 33.9 Map of area from Turin to the Alps by Agostino Parentani, ca. 1640 848 33.10 Revello from the Theatrum sabaudiae 850 33.11 Detail from the Carta generale by Giovanni Tommaso Borgonio, engraved by Giovanni Maria Belgrano, 1679/80 852 34.1 Reference map of Liguria and Corsica 855 34.2 View of Genoa, 1481 856 34.3 Battista Sormano, “Pianta del sito delle marine di Vado,” 1569 859 34.4 Ercole Spina, “Parte della Lunigiana,” 1592 861

xxv 34.5 34.6 34.7 34.8 34.9 34.10 34.11 35.1 35.2 35.3 35.4 35.5 35.6 35.7 35.8 35.9 35.10 35.11 35.12 35.13 35.14 35.15 35.16 35.17 35.18 35.19 36.1 36.2 36.3 36.4 36.5 36.6 36.7 36.8 36.9

Map from Atlas B, 1648 863 Detail of map from Atlas B, 1648 864 José Chafrion, map of Liguria, 1685 865 Corografia Xofori de Grassis [Bordoni], 1598 868 Detail of part of Corsica from the Corografia Xofori de Grassis [Bordoni], 1598 869 Nicolò Todesco, city map of Aleria, 1484 870 Sardinia insvla by Sigismondo Arquer, 1550 872 Reference map of northeastern Italy 875 Reference map of northeastern Italy in the fifteenth century 877 Reference map of northeastern Italy in the sixteenth century 877 Powers of the Venetian magistratures and sources of information for the magistratures 880 Relations among the different agents and the roles of cartography in administrative practice 880 Detail from “Dissegno di Trivisan” 885 Cristoforo Sorte, “Dissegno da adaquar il Trivisan,” 1556 887 Detail from Sorte’s “Dissegno da adaquar il Trivisan” 887 Iseppo Paulini and Tommaso Paulini’s map of their proposal to protect the Venetian lagoon, 1608 890 Map of Lombardy by Giovanni Pisato, ca. 1440 894 Explanatory diagram of Pisato’s map of Lombardy 895 The Almagià map of the Verona region, fifteenth century 896 Francesco Squarcione’s map of Padua and the surrounding territory, 1465 897 Map of Palmanova, first half of the seventeenth century 899 Cristoforo Sorte’s map of Peschiera’s new fortifications, 1571 (3 July) 900 Map of Lake Garda 901 Cristoforo Sorte’s map of Padua and Triviso, 1594 903 Map of the pieve of Pontirolo Vecchio and the surrounding area, 1566 906 The area under the pieve of Missaglia by Aragonus Aragonius, 1611 907 Reference map of the central Italian states 909 Piero del Massaio, “Etrvria moderna,” 1469 910 Map of the Parma area 911 Giovan Battista Aleotti, “Corografia dello stato di Ferrara” 914 Leonardo da Vinci, Etruria, ca. 1503 917 Map of the lower Valdarno from Pontedera to the sea, ca. 1550s 918 Smeraldo Smeraldi, map of the Po, 1589 919 Bartolomeo Gnoli, “Disegno delle valli di Comacchio,” 1630 –50 921 Francesco Zati, perspective view of the area of Gallicano and Barga 922

xxvi 36.10 Giovan Francesco Cantagallina, perspective map, 1616 924 36.11 Gherardo Mechini, “Popolo di Santo Lorenzo à Grieve” (Florence) 925 36.12 Map of the via Flaminia, 1659 – 61 926 –27 36.13 Smeraldo Smeraldi, “Rilievo di un podere situato sulla strada Claudia [l’Emilia] Presso il Castello di Pontetaro (Parma),” 1607 928 36.14 Frosino Zampogni, view of the Bosco di Frati, 1628 929 36.15 “Torre Nova,” 1660 931 36.16 Leonardo da Vinci, map of Imola, 1502 935 36.17 Cipriano Piccolpasso di Durante, map of Perugia 937 37.1 Reference map of southern Italy 942 37.2 Detail of a map of Calabria (eighteenth-century copy) 945 37.3 Index of the copies made by Ferdinando Galiani in Paris of the Aragonese maps 947 37.4 Detail of northern Calabria (eighteenth-century copy) 949 37.5 Detail of a map of the Cilento region (eighteenthcentury copy) 949 37.6 Detail of a parchment showing the Gargano promontory (sixteenth- or seventeenth-century copy) 950 37.7 Detail of a parchment depicting the region around Nola (sixteenth- or seventeenth-century copy) 951 37.8 Map of the borders of the kingdom of Naples (eighteenth-century copy) 953 37.9 Plan of Naples by Carlo Theti, 1560 955 37.10 Plan of Naples by Etienne Du Pérac, 1566 957 37.11 Detail from the plan of Naples by Alessandro Baratta, 1627 959 37.12 Perspective in Baratta’s view of Naples 959 37.13 Map of the kingdom of Naples by Paolo Cagno, 1615 961 37.14 “Provincia de Calabria vltra” (sixteenth-century copy) 963 37.15 Detail from “Provincia di terr[a] di Lavoro” (sixteenth-century copy) 964 37.16 Conventional signs and symbols in the atlas of the kingdom of Naples by Stigliola and Cartaro, ca. 1595 964 37.17 Border of the kingdom of Naples in the atlas of the kingdom of Naples by Stigliola and Cartaro, ca. 1595 965 37.18 Decorative motifs from “Provincia de contado de Molise” (sixteenth-century copy) 965 37.19 Fresco titled “Principato Citra” by Luigi Rodriguez 966 37.20 “Nova totius terrarum orbis” 968 37.21 Map of the kingdom of Naples by Paolo Cartaro, 1642 969

Illustrations 37.22 “Terra di otranto” by Mario Cartaro (eighteenthcentury copy) 970 37.23 Drawing of the Terra di Bari 972 38.1 Reference map of Portugal 977 38.2 Signed and dated chart of the African coast by Jorge de Aguiar, 1492 980 38.3 Detail of the African coast on the mappamundi of Fra Mauro, ca. 1459 982 38.4 Anonymous undated nautical chart of the Atlantic coast, ca. 1471 984 38.5 Fifteenth-century nautical chart of the western Mediterranean and the African coast by Pedro Reinel 985 38.6 Detail from a chart of the north Atlantic by Pedro Reinel, ca. 1504 986 38.7 Chronology of the main Portuguese cartographers and cartographic families of the Renaissance 988 38.8 Numbers of extant Portuguese nautical charts and overseas maps of the Renaissance, by date 991 38.9 Detail of South America from the Cantino map, 1502 993 38.10 World map by André Homem, 1559 995 38.11 Numbers of extant Portuguese maps reproduced in PMC, by date and region covered 996 38.12 Examples of areas portrayed in Portuguese maps of the Mediterranean and the near Atlantic 996 38.13 Chart of the Mediterranean by Diogo Homem, 1570 997 38.14 Chart of the Indian Ocean, anonymous (Jorge Reinel?), 1510 998 38.15 View of Cochim by Manuel Godinho de Erédia 999 38.16 Coastlines as shown on the Portuguese maps of Central America and the Antilles, ca. 1537–1628, compared with modern coastlines 1001 38.17 Locations of the maps in four Portuguese sources 1012 38.18 Profile of Sukur Island by Francisco Rodrigues, ca. 1513 1013 38.19 View of the fortress of Diu in the roteiro from Goa to Diu by João de Castro 1016 38.20 View of Aden, from Gaspar Correia’s “Lendas da Índia,” ca. 1550 1018 38.21 View of Aden from the Civitates orbis terrarum, 1572 1018 38.22 View of the fortress of Diu from Gaspar Correia’s “Lendas da Índia,” ca. 1550 1020 38.23 Coastal view in the roteiro of Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo, ca. 1575 1021 38.24 Coverage of the main chorographic maps by Manuel Godinho de Erédia and derivatives 1023 38.25 View of the fortress and island of Diu, seventeenth century 1024 38.26 Map of the Congo published by Pigafetta, 1591 1026

Illustrations 38.27 Seventeenth-century map of the Rios de Cuama (near the mouth of the Zambezi River) 1027 38.28 Engraved version of Manoel de Almeida’s map of Abyssinia, 1660 1027 38.29 Detail of the east coast of South America, anonymous [Diogo Ribeiro], ca. 1532 1031 38.30 Detail of the east coast of South America, Gaspar Viegas, 1534 1031 38.31 Maps and city plans of the Brazilian coast in the atlases of Luís Teixeira and João Teixeira Albernaz I 1033 38.32 Page from the “Longitudo et latitudo Lusitaniae,” known as the Hamburg Codex 1036 38.33 Comparison of latitude and longitude values from three Portuguese Renaissance sources 1038 38.34 Map of Portugal by Fernando Álvaro Seco, after 1561 1040 38.35 Map of Portugal in the Cadaval Codex, 1617 1043 38.36 Mural map of Portugal attributed to João Teixeira Albernaz I 1043 38.37 The Descripcion del Reyno de Portvgal of Pedro Teixeira Albernaz, 1662 1044 38.38 Map of the southwest coast of the Iberian peninsula, from Cortés’s work 1046 38.39 Copy of a map of the limits between Olivença and Alconchel, 1438 – 81 1047 38.40 View of Bragança by Duarte de Armas, 1509 1048 38.41 Chart from the Cadaval Codex, 1617 1049 38.42 Map of the coast of Minho from the “Descripção dos portos maritimos do regno de Portugal” by João Teixeira Albernaz I, 1648 1050 38.43 Anonymous map of the area of Almeirim, 1632 1051 38.44 António de Holanda’s view of Lisbon, ca. 1530 –34 1053 38.45 An example of a “model map” from Luís Serrão Pimentel’s Methodo Lusitanico 1054 38.46 “Carta do curso do rio Minho,” 1652 1055 38.47 Map of Setúbal by João Gilot, ca. 1652 1056 38.48 Carta da fronteira do Alentejo, attributed to João Teixeira Albernaz I, ca. 1644 1058 38.49 Descripsão da Provincia de Alemtejo, by Bartolomeu de Sousa, 1665 1060 38.50 Mapa dos estuários do tejo e do sado by Manuel de Figueiredo and Gaspar Ferreira Reimão, 1642 1061 39.1 Anonymous map of Argeles, 1458 1071 39.2 Anonymous sixteenth-century map of the surroundings of Valdeaverlo 1072 39.3 Anonymous profile of Cádiz, 1513 1072 39.4 Francisco de Ruesta, plan of the boundary of Salteras, 1660 1074 39.5 Bautista Antonelli, plan of the city of Larache, 1612 1075

xxvii 39.6 Francés de Alava, detail of work to be done on the fortifications of Cádiz, 1578 1076 39.7 Luis Bravo de Acuña, plan of Gibraltar from the west, 1627 1077 39.8 Francisco Negro, plan and perspective view of the castle at Marsala in Sicily, 1640 1078 39.9 Cristóbal de Rojas, plan of Fort Saint Martin at Santander, 1591 1078 39.10 Luis Carducci, plan of the boundaries of Atalaya de Cañavete, 1638 1079 39.11 Luis Carducci, plan of the surroundings of Alcalá La Real, 1631 1080 39.12 Key map from the “Escorial Atlas” 1083 39.13 Part of section 2 from the “Escorial Atlas” 1084 39.14 Anonymous bird’s-eye view of Champagne, ca. 1539 1086 39.15 Jerónimo de Chaves, Hispalensis conventvs delineatio, from the 1579 edition of Ortelius’s Theatrum 1087 39.16 Provinces of the Spanish peninsula newly shown in the 1606 Mercator-Hondius Atlas 1088 39.17 Michael Florent van Langren, Luxembvrgensis Dvcatvs, 1671/72 1089 39.18 Anonymous map of northern Italy 1090 39.19 João Baptista Lavanha, detail of Aragon, 1622 1090 39.20 The areas of Lavanha’s Aragon covered by ecclesiastical maps 1091 39.21 Ambrosio Borsano, “El principado de Cattalvña y Condados de Rossellon y Cerdaña,” ca. 1687 1092 39.22 José Chafrion, right half of the Carta de la parte Meridional del estado de Milan, 1685 1093 40.1 Compass rose from Diego Gutiérrez’s Atlantic chart, 1550 1097 40.2 Detail of South America from Giovanni Vespucci’s world map, made in Seville, 1526 1098 40.3 Detail from the world map of Diogo Ribeiro, 1529 1098 40.4 View of Désirade from Vellerino de Villalobos’s “Luz de nauegantes” 1099 40.5 Printed chart included in Martín Cortés’s Breue compendio, 1551 1101 40.6 Detail from the world map of Diogo Ribeiro, 1529 1109 40.7 Detail from the Juan de la Cosa chart, 1500 1111 40.8 Detail from an anonymous chart, ca. 1505 – 8 1111 40.9 Detail from the redrawing of an anonymous chart attributed to Jorge Reinel, ca. 1519 1112 40.10 Detail from the chart by Nuño García Toreno showing the antimeridian of Tordesillas, 1522 1113 40.11 Detail from the Turin world map, anonymous, ca. 1523 1114 40.12 Detail of the Castiglione world map, attributed to Diogo Ribeiro, 1525 1115 40.13 Detail of the Moluccas from the Salviati world map, attributed to Nuño García Toreno, ca. 1525 1115

xxviii 40.14 Detail with ship from the Salviati world map 1116 40.15 The Wolfenbüttel chart, attributed to Alonso de Chaves, ca. 1533 1117 40.16 Northeast coast of South America, from Diego Gutiérrez’s Atlantic chart, 1550 1119 40.17 Chart of Central America from Alonso de Santa Cruz’s “Islario” 1121 40.18 Detail from the world chart of Sancho Gutiérrez, 1551 1122 40.19 World chart of Sancho Gutiérrez, 1551 1124 –25 40.20 World map of Sebastian Cabot, 1544 1126 40.21 Response to the 1597 “memoria” asking pilots about their charts and instruments 1128 40.22 Chart included in Andrés García de Céspedes’s Hydrografía 1129 40.23 Seventeenth-century view of Seville, as seen from Triana 1131 41.1 Alonso de Santa Cruz, “Cuba” from the “Islario,” 1542 1145 41.2 Diego Gutiérrez, detail from Americae (Antwerp, 1562) 1145 41.3 Juan López de Velasco, map of the Spanish world, ca. 1575 1146 41.4 Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, map of Central America from his Décadas (Madrid, 1601–15) 1147 41.5 Anonymous, illustration of the Jesuit curriculum from the prospectus of the College of Cordelle (Spain, ca. 1750) 1148 41.6 Alonso Álvarez Pineda, map of the Gulf of Mexico, 1519 1149 41.7 Alonso de Santa Cruz, map of Central America and the Caribbean Sea, ca. 1536 1150 41.8 Bautista Antonelli, plan of Santo Domingo, ca. 1592 1150 41.9 Cristóbal de Rojas, plan of Havana, 1603 1151 41.10 Enrico Martínez, sketch of the provinces of New Mexico, 1602 1153 41.11 Anonymous, map of the Gulf of Mexico, 1544 1154 41.12 Domingo del Castillo, map of the California area, 1541 1155 41.13 Nicolás de Cardona, view of Veracruz and San Juan de Ulloa, 1622 1156 41.14 Adrian Boot, view of the port of Acapulco, 1618 1157 41.15 Juan María Ratkay, map of the Tarahumara region, 1683 1158 41.16 Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, map of Mexico, 1691 1159 41.17 Cristóbal de Rojas, plan of the city of Panama, 1609 1160 41.18 Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, map of Colombia, from his Décadas (Madrid, 1601–15) 1161 41.19 Bautista Antonelli, plan of Cartagena, 1595 1162

Illustrations 41.20 Francisco de Ruesta, the government of Venezuela, 1634 1163 41.21 Cristóbal de Rojas, plan of the fort of San Daniel, 1623 1164 41.22 Anonymous, “Cordillera en qve habita la nacion Chiriguana,” 1584 1165 41.23 Samuel Fritz, map of the Amazon basin, 1707 1166 41.24 Bartolomé García de Nodal and Gonzalo de Nodal, map of the southern part of South America, 1621 1167 41.25 Alonso de Ovalle, detail from the map of Chile, 1646 1168 41.26 Joan Blaeu, Paraqvaria, vulgo Paragvay (Amsterdam, 1663) 1169 41.27 Ignacio Munoz, Descripcion geometrica de la civdad y circvnvalacion de Manila (Manila, 1671) 1170

Part 2 42.1 Reference map of the political structure of the German lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 1173 42.2 Fragment of a printed fifteenth-century multisheet wall map of the world 1182 42.3 Cusanus map by Henricus Martellus, redaction A 1185 42.4 Cusanus map by Nicolaus Germanus, redaction B (the Eichstätt map) 1186 42.5 Distortion grid, Cusanus map redaction B 1187 42.6 The components of the Eichstätt map 1188 42.7 The Ruysch map 1189 42.8 Cartographic illustrations in Conrad Celtis’s book of love poems 1190 42.9 Europe in the form of a queen, 1537 1192 42.10 Map of Central Europe in the Nuremberg Chronicle 1194 42.11 Erhard Etzlaub’s Lantstrassen map, 1501 1196 42.12 Distortion grid, Etzlaub’s Rom Weg map 1197 42.13 Johannes Aventinus’s map of Bavaria, 1523 1199 42.14 Apian world map in cordiform projection, 1530 1200 42.15 Map of Switzerland by Conrad Türst, ca. 1497 1202 42.16 View of Augsburg by Jörg Seld, 1521 1204 42.17 Detail of the German region from Waldseemüller’s Carta itineraria Europae 1206 42.18 Map of Lorraine in Waldseemüller’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, Strasbourg 1513 1207 42.19 Heinrich Zell’s map of the German lands, ca. 1544 (1560) 1210 42.20 Sebastian Münster’s map of the Heidelberg area, 1528 1211 42.21 View of Trier from Münster’s Cosmography 1212 42.22 Detail from Tilemann Stella’s map of ZweibrückenKirkel, 1564 1214 42.23 Map of the Zurich area from Johannes Stumpf’s atlas of Switzerland, Landtafeln, 1548 1216

Illustrations 42.24 Lucas Cranach’s map of the Holy Land, ca. 1515 1217 42.25 Wolfgang Wissenburg’s map of the Holy Land 1219 42.26 Detail from Caspar Vopel’s map of the Rhine, 1555 1221 42.27 One sheet from Philipp Apian’s survey of Bavaria, 1568 1224 42.28 One sheet from George Gadner’s survey of Württemberg 1226 42.29 The area around Dresden from the survey of Saxony by Öder and Zimmermann 1229 42.30 Map of Lower Saxony in Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas 1231 42.31 Christiaan Sgrooten’s wall map of the Holy Roman Empire 1233 42.32 Depiction of the capture of Geldern (1587) from Hogenberg’s “Geschichtsblätter” 1234 42.33 Map of Geldern from Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum, 1581 1235 42.34 David Seltzlin’s map of Franconia, 1576 1236 42.35 Matthias Quad’s map of the Holy Roman Empire, 1600 1238 42.36 Isaac Brun’s map of the Holy Roman Empire, 1633 1239 42.37 Road map of the German lands by Johann Georg Jung and Georg Conrad Jung, 1641 1240 42.38 Example of a historical map 1243 42.39 View of Trier from Matthäus Merian’s town book, 1646 1244 43.1 The seventeen provinces, 1543 – 67 1247 43.2 Belgii XVII Provinciarum tabula, by Frederik de Wit, before 1661 1248 43.3 Kaart van de Oosterscher Zee, by Jan van Hoirne, 1526 1250 43.4 Part of the bishopric of Utrecht, ca. 1524 1251 43.5 Perspective view of Utrecht by Antoon van den Wijngaerde, ca. 1558 1252 –53 43.6 Copy by Pieter Claeissens of the 1571 map of the Vrije van Brugge by Pierre Pourbus, 1601 1254 43.7 Manuscript map of the northern part of Holland by Willem Hendricksz. Croock, 1529/30 1256 43.8 Coverage diagram of Jacob van Deventer’s province maps 1257 43.9 Copy of the map of the province of Gelderland by Jacob van Deventer, 1556 1259 43.10 Provincial map of Vermandois by Jacques Surhon, 1558 1261 43.11 Map of Flanders by Gerardus Mercator, 1540 1262 43.12 The Netherlands without dikes and dunes 1263 43.13 Printed waterschap map of Heerhugowaard by Claes Jansz. Visscher, 1631 1265 43.14 Manuscript waterschap map of peat digging in the Oude Polder van Pijnacker and the Oudewegsche Polder, 1691 1266

xxix 43.15 Reference map of cities mapped by Jacob van Deventer 1273 43.16 Detail from the town plan of Dordrecht by Jacob van Deventer, ca. 1560 1275 43.17 Reference map of Christiaan Sgrooten’s topographical maps 1276 43.18 1608 wall map of North Holland and West Friesland, reprinted from the original by Joost Jansz. Bilhamer, 1575 1279 43.19 Printer’s mark of Joost Jansz. Bilhamer 1280 43.20 Manuscript map of South Holland by Hans Liefrinck, 1578 1281 43.21 Giovanni Maria Olgiati, drawing of Maastricht, 1553 1282 43.22 Map of the Frisian village of Dronrijp from the De Robles atlas 1284 43.23 Title page of Practijck des lantmetens, by Johannes Sems and Jan Pietersz. Dou, 1600 1287 43.24 Adriaan Anthonisz.’s plan of the fortified city of Amersfoort, 1594 1288 43.25 Tapestry of Leiden by Joost Jansz. Lanckaert, 1587 1289 44.1 Wall map of Spain, Hieronymus Cock, 1553 1301 44.2 Totivs Dvcatvs Brabaniae . . . by Gerard de Jode, 1565 1302 44.3 Christiaan Sgrooten’s wall map Peregrinatio filiorum dei, engraved by Joannes and Lucas van Doetecum, 1572 1308 44.4 Map of southern South America, published by Cornelis Claesz., ca. 1592 1310 44.5 Circular Leo Belgicus map of the seventeen provinces engraved by Jodocus Hondius in London, late 1590s 1312 44.6 Nova descrittione d’Italia di Gio. Anton. Magino, wall map published by Hessel Gerritsz., 1617 1316 44.7 News map published by Claes Jansz. Visscher 1317 44.8 Editions of Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum, 1570 –98 1319 44.9 World map in Ortelius’s Theatrum, 1570 1320 44.10 Title page, Speculum orbis terrarum, Gerard de Jode, 1578 1321 44.11 Map of Africa in De Jode’s Speculum orbis terrarum 1322 44.12 Title page from Gerardus Mercator’s Atlas, 1595 1323 44.13 Gvineae nova descriptio, added to Mercator’s Atlas by Jodocus Hondius, 1606 1325 44.14 Map of Europe from Atlantis appendix, Willem Jansz. Blaeu, 1630 1326 44.15 Overview of atlas publication between 1630 and 1640 1327 44.16 Carved wooden cabinet designed for Blaeu’s Atlas maior 1330 44.17 Map of Salzburg in the Spieghel 1331

xxx 44.18 Title page from Langenes’s Caert-thresoor 1333 44.19 Map of Europe from Ortelius’s Parergon 1340 44.20 Ville Franche and the plan of Charleville from the Atlas Blaeu–Van der Hem 1341 44.21 Page from a catalog by Cornelis Claesz. with a section devoted to wall maps, 1609 1342 44.22 Gerardus Mercator’s instructions for assembling wall maps, ca. 1570 1343 44.23 Sketch of a roller case for wall maps, Richard Hakluyt the Elder, ca. 1590 1344 44.24 Map of the world by Ortelius, published in Antwerp, 1564 1345 44.25 Gerard de Jode’s wall map of Germany, 1562 1347 44.26 Wall maps of the world published between 1592 and 1648 1348 44.27 Wall map of the world by Petrus Plancius, 1592 1349 44.28 Wall map of the world by Jodocus Hondius, 1595/96 1350 44.29 Willem Jansz. Blaeu’s 1608 wall map of Europe, reprinted by Henricus Hondius, 1624 1352 44.30 Venetian imitation of Blaeu’s wall map of Asia 1354 44.31 Detail of Pieter van den Keere’s wall map of the seventeen provinces, 1607 1355 44.32 Pieter Bast’s bird’s-eye view of Amsterdam, 1597 1357 44.33 Giant atlas—the “Atlas of the Great Elector” 1358 44.34 Dutch share of world globe production (new editions of printed globes) to 1720 1359 44.35 Three terrestrial globe gores by Gerardus Mercator, ca. 1541 1360 44.36 First Amsterdam celestial globe, Jacob Floris van Langren, 1586 1361 44.37 First Amsterdam terrestrial globe, Jacob Floris van Langren, 1589 1362 44.38 Celestial globe by Jodocus Hondius, 1600 1364 44.39 Three gores from Blaeu’s first celestial globe, ca. 1598 1364 44.40 Giant globe by Joan Blaeu 1366 44.41 Detail of the arctic region on a globe by Petrus Plancius and Pieter van den Keere, 1612 1368 44.42 Terrestrial globe by Jacob Aertsz. Colom, ca. 1640 1368 44.43 Terrestrial globe gores of Johannes Janssonius, 1621 1370 44.44 Terrestrial globe gores, possibly published by De Jode, 1584 – 87 1371 44.45 Detail from the terrestrial globe of Michael Floris van Langren, ca. 1645 1372 44.46 Thematic globe gores by Franciscus Haraeus showing the dispersion of different religions 1373 45.1 Diagram of Dutch printed rutters, 1532 –94 1386 45.2 Title page of Jan Seversz.’s De kaert va[n]der zee, 1532 1386

Illustrations 45.3 Woodcut profiles from Cornelis Anthonisz.’s Caerte van die oosterse see, 1558 1387 45.4 Facing pages from Harmen Jansz. Muller’s De caerte vander zee, 1579/80 1389 45.5 Frontispiece from Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer’s Thresoor der zeevaert, 1592 1394 45.6 Chart of the Sunda strait from Waghenaer’s Thresoor, 1602 1396 45.7 Chart from Willem Barents’s Nieuwe beschryvinghe ende caertboeck van de midlandtsche zee, 1595 1397 45.8 Chart from Blaeu’s Het licht der zee-vaert, 1608 1398 45.9 Chart of the Zuiderzee from Johannes van Keulen’s De nieuwe groote lichtende zee-fackel, [1689] 1403 45.10 Third state, ca. 1560, of Caerte van Oostlant by Cornelis Anthonisz. 1406 45.11 Detail from the title page of Adriaen Veen’s Napasser, 1597 1407 45.12 Map of the Indian archipelago and the Far East by Petrus Plancius, published by Cornelis Claesz., 1592 –94 1409 45.13 Willem Barents’s polar map, published by Cornelis Claesz., 1598 1411 45.14 Map showing the route of the first Dutch fleet to the East Indies, 1595 –97 1412 45.15 Map of Europe by Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, 1592 1415 45.16 Cornelis Doetsz.’s Nieuwe paschaerte . . . van Europa, 1602 1417 45.17 Cornelis Doetsz.’s manuscript chart of the Far East, 1598 1418 45.18 Manuscript chart of the Indian Ocean and East Indies by Evert Gijsbertsz., 1599 1420 45.19 Doetsz.’s chart of Europe, published by Blaeu, 1606 1423 45.20 Willem Jansz. Blaeu’s West Indische paskaert, ca. 1630 1425 45.21 Hessel Gerritsz.’s “Carte nautique des bords de mer du nort, et norouest mis en longitude, latitude et en leur route, selon les rins de vent,” 1625 1427 46.1 First state of Hessel Gerritsz.’s map of India and Southeast Asia, made in or shortly before 1632 1440 46.2 Third state of Gerritsz.’s map of India and Southeast Asia, India quæ orientalis 1441 46.3 Detail of official VOC chart of Sumatra and the Strait of Malacca, 1647 1442 46.4 Detail of cadastral map of Banda Neyra, 1630s 1447 46.5 Banda Neyra, 1662 or 1663 1447 46.6 Example of Roman land division 1448 46.7 Gerritsz.’s Brasilysche paskaert, 1637 1451 46.8 Index map from the Christina atlas by Joannes Vingboons, ca. 1650 1453 46.9 Nieuw Nederland compiled by Gerritsz. 1454

Illustrations 46.10 Wall map of Dutch Brazil published by Joan Blaeu, 1647 1455 46.11 Leggerkaart of the colony of Surinam, 1688 1458 46.12 Decorative chart of the Indian Ocean, 1660s 1459 46.13 Watercolor view of a city called Surat by Vingboons 1460 46.14 Watercolor view of Bijapur by Vingboons, 1660s 1461 47.1 Oronce Fine, “La composition et usaige d’un singulier méthéoroscope géographique,” 1543 1465 47.2 Oronce Fine, Nova, et integra vniversi orbis descriptio, 1531 1466 47.3 Nicolas de Nicolay, Vraye & exacte description hydrographique des costes maritimes d’Escosse & des isles orchades hebrides, 1583 1470 47.4 André Thevet, “Terres neveves ov isles des molues” 1473 47.5 André Thevet, “Mipart septentrionalle dv monde” 1475 47.6 Guillaume Postel, Polo aptata nova charta universi 1477 47.7 Le “Caloier de nisare” and its “Engin à barquerottes” 1479 47.8 “Le caloiero de nisaro dit panegea” 1479 48.1 Reference map of France, ca. 1610 1481 48.2 Oronce Fine, Nova totivs galliae descriptio, 1553 1482 48.3 Jean Jolivet, Vraie description des Gaules, auec les confins d’Allemaigne, & Italye, 1570 1484 48.4 Nicolas de Nicolay, Novvelle description dv pais de Bovlonnois, comte de Gvines, terre d’Oye et ville de Calais, 1558 1486 48.5 Guillaume Postel, La vraye et entiere description dv royavlme de France, et ses confins, 1570 1487 48.6 Paolo Forlani, Totivs galliae exactissima descriptio, 1566 1488 48.7 Jean Tarde, Sarlatensis diocesis geographica delineatio vera & exacta, 1594 1490 48.8 Description dv pays armoriqve a present Bretaigne, 1588 1491 48.9 Jean Fayen, Totivs lemovici . . . , 1594 1492 48.10 François de La Guillotière, Charte de la France, 1632 (detail) 1494 48.11 Christophe Tassin, Carte de Normandie, 1634 1496 48.12 Nicolas Sanson, Carte et description generale dv tres-havt, tres-pvissant, et tres-chrestien royavme de France, 1652 –53 1498 48.13 Nicolas Sanson, Segusiani, partie du dioecese et archevesche de Lyon: Le Bas Forez et Beaujolois, eslectoins de Roanne et de Villefranche, 1659 1499 48.14 Jacques Signot, La carte Ditalie, 1515 1501 48.15 Nicolas Sanson, Carte des rivieres de la France cvrievsement recherchee, 1641 1502 49.1 Jean Martellier, “Plan de Calais” 1506

xxxi 49.2 Jean Martellier, “La carte dv govvernement de Calais et pais reconqvis” 1507 49.3 Approximate coverage of the gouvernement maps of Picardy in the BL, Add. MS. 21117 1507 49.4 Jean Martellier, “Carte de la province de Picardie, Bovlonois, Artois et pais reconqvis” 1508 49.5 Approximate coverage of the gouvernement maps of Champagne in the BL, King’s Topographical Collection 1509 49.6 Claude Chastillon, “Carte g[e]n[er]alle de Cha[m]paigne” 1510 49.7 Jean de Beins, “Carte des vallees de Seissel et la Michaille,” 1606 1511 49.8 Jean de Beins,”Govverne[ment] de Grenoble” 1512 49.9 Approximate coverage of the gouvernement maps of Brittany in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS. 3921 1513 49.10 “Carte generalle de Bretaigne” 1513 49.11 “Govverne[ment] de Nantes et Encenix” 1514 49.12 Jean Cavalier, “Carte particvliere de la comté de Rossillon et de la vallee de conflens,” 1635 1516 49.13 N. Du Carlo, “Carte hidrographique des costes de Bretaigne, Guienne, et de partie de lEspagne,” ca. 1625 1517 49.14 Jérôme Bachot, “Carte particulliere de l’isle et bourg dv Conquest,” 1625 1518 49.15 Jean Martellier, “Plan de Peronne,” ca. 1602 1519 49.16 Peronne, 1634 1520 49.17 “Govver[nement] de Rennes” 1520 49.18 Govvernement de Rennes, 1634 1520 49.19 Claude Chastillon, “Plan de Langres” 1521 49.20 Langres, 1634 1521 50.1 A tibériade representing the Ouche Valley, drawn by Jean II d’Orrain for a lawsuit, ca. 1567 1524 50.2 Figurative view of contested land between the abbeys of Granselve and Mas-Grenier-Grandselve-Lasalle, 1521 1525 50.3 Jan Brouault and Paris Alexandre, plan of the territory of the seigneury of Picauville, 1581 1526 50.4 Detail from the map of the censive of the chapter of Saint-Germain-L’Auxerrois between the Louvre and the Châtelet in Paris, sixteenth century 1527 50.5 J. Monnerye, map of the gruerie of Nanteuil-leHaudouin, 1609 1528 50.6 René Siette, “Plan et description particulière des maraits desseichés du petit poictou avecq le partaige sur Icelluy,” 6 August 1648 1529 50.7 Manuscript atlas describing the Vilaine River between Redon and Rennes, 1543 1531 50.8 Jacques Le Lieur, “Livre des fontaines,” 1525 1531 50.9 Guillaume Revel, “Armorial,” ca. 1450 1533 50.10 Evrard Bredin, “Le vray portraict de la ville de Diion,” 1575 1534

xxxii 50.11 Olivier Truschet and Germain Hoyau, Le vray pourtraist naturel de la ville, cité, vniversité et Faubourgz de Paris, ca. 1553 1535 50.12 Perspective view of Lyons, Saint-Just sheet, [1548 –54] 1536 50.13 La Rochelle: View by Christophe Tassin from Claude Chastillon 1537 51.1 Champlain’s manuscript chart “Descrpsion des costs p[or]ts rades illes de la nouuelle France faict selon son vray meridien,” 1607 1540 51.2 Chart of Tadoussac drawn by Champlain in 1608, published in 1613 1541 51.3 Champlain’s first published map, Carte geographiqve de la Novvelle Franse, 1612 1542 51.4 Champlain’s drawing of the English log, log-line, halfminute glass, and log reel 1543 51.5 Champlain’s chart to illustrate a coastal survey 1545 51.6 An analysis of Champlain’s sources for the incomplete map of 1616 1546 52.1 Pierre Desceliers, world chart, 1546 1552 52.2 Jacques de Vaulx, chart of the coast of America, 1584 1553 52.3 Guillaume Brouscon, page from nautical guide 1554 52.4 Jean Guérard, chart of the Atlantic, 1631 1556 52.5 Chart from the Hague Atlas 1558 52.6 Northeast America from the Pasterot Atlas, ca. 1587 1560 53.1 Detail of Jerusalem and the Holy Land 1570 53.2 Pourtrait de la Rochelle & des forteresses que les rebelles y ont fait depuis les premiers troubles jus[q]u à present 1573 53.3 The Gourmonts 1574 53.4 Jean II de Gourmont, Congnois toy toy-mesme, Paris, ca. 1575 1575 53.5 The Leclercs 1576 53.6 Frontispiece from Le theatre francoys 1576 53.7 The Taverniers 1577 53.8 Jodocus Hondius, Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula, 1625 1578 53.9 Nicolas Sanson, Mappe-monde, ou carte generale du monde dessignée en deux plan-hemispheres, 1651 1582 53.10 Pierre Sainton, Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula, 1653 1583 53.11 Claude Chastillon, title page of Topographie francoise, 1641 1584 53.12 Albert Jouvin de Rochefort, detail of central Paris from a map of Paris and its surroundings, 1676 1586 53.13 Almanac for the year of grace MDCLXXXI: Detail of “Les nouvelistes du quay des Augustins” 1587 54.1 Reference map of the British Isles 1592 54.2 Robert Ricart, plan of Bristol, ca. 1480 1593 54.3 Vicar of Bakewell, map of Over Haddon, 1528 1600

Illustrations 54.4 Thomas Geminus (?), Musselburgh / Pinkie Cleugh 1602 54.5 Anonymous, detail from map of Canterbury 1606 54.6 William Lambarde, map of the Kent beacons, 1585 1612 54.7 George Owen, map of Pembrokeshire 1617 54.8 Reyner Wolfe (?), Anne of Cleves’s journey to Calais, 1539 1621 54.9 Christopher Saxton, map of Norfolk, 1574 1625 54.10 John Norden, Myddlesex, 1593 1633 54.11 William Smith, map of Cheshire, 1602 –3 1635 54.12 John Speed, map of Hertfordshire 1636 54.13 Anonymous, map of Byfield and Chipping Warden, ca. 1550 1640 54.14 Richard Bankes, detail from map of Sherwood Forest, 1609 1642 54.15 Thomas Clerke, map of Ivychurch, copied by Thomas Langdon 1646 54.16 Copperplate of the anonymous copperplate map of London, ca. 1557–59 1649 54.17 Richard Lyne, plan of Cambridge, 1574 1652 54.18 John Walker, map of Chelmsford, 1591 1653 54.19 Ralph Treswell, plan of London property, 16 –21 Fleete Lane, 1612 1654 54.20 John Hooker, map of Exeter, 1587 1656 54.21 John Speed’s “Invasions” map, 1603/4 1660 54.22 Ralph Agas, detail of estate map of Toddington, ca. 1581 1662 54.23 Quentin Matsys the Younger, portrait of Elizabeth I, 1583 1664 54.24 Diego de Çaias, hunting knife of Henry VIII, ca. 1545 1665 54.25 Bernard de Gomme, fortification of Liverpool, 1644 1668 55.1 Ireland in the 1520s or 1530s 1674 55.2 Abraham Ortelius, Ireland, 1573 1676 55.3 John Goghe, “Hibernia: Insula non procul ab Anglia vulgare Hirlandia vocata,” 1567 1677 55.4 Robert Lythe, detail from map of central and southern Ireland, 1571 1678 55.5 John Browne, detail from map of Connaught and Thomond, 1591 1679 55.6 Francis Jobson, “Maior comitatvs limerice,” ca. 1587 1680 55.7 Dinish Island and vicinity, Bantry Bay, West Cork 1681 55.8 John Speed, The Kingdome of Irland, 1610 1683 56.1 Part of Pont manuscript 1: Durness and Tongue 1688 56.2 Pont’s manuscript map of Tarbat Ness, Easter Ross 1689 56.3 Part of Extima scotiæ septentrionalis from Blaeu’s Atlas novus, 1654 1691 56.4 Part of Gordon manuscript 53: Fyfe Shyre 1692

Illustrations 57.1 57.2 57.3 57.4 57.5 57.6 57.7 57.8 57.9 57.10 57.11 57.12 57.13 57.14

57.15 57.16 57.17 57.18 58.1 58.2 58.3 58.4 58.5

58.6 58.7 58.8 58.9 58.10 58.11 58.12 58.13 58.14 59.1

Detail from John Norden, Myddlesex, 1593 1695 Woodcut plan detailing Scottish Wars, 1548 1697 The Iovrney of Sainct Paule the Apostle, 1549 1698 Nordovicvm, Angliæ Civitas Anno 1558 I.b.f., 1559 1699 England and Wales, 1568 1700 Anthony Jenkinson, Nova absolvtaqve Rvssiae, Moscoviae, & Tartaria, 1562 1701 Oppidvm Cantebrigiæ, 1574 1702 Robert Adams, engagement off Portland Bill, 1590 1703 Thomas Hood, northern celestial planisphere, 1590 1704 Jodocus Hondius the Elder, Typvs Angliæ, 1590 1706 Detail of the Molyneux terrestrial globe, 1592 1707 The Discription of the Islandes, and Castle of Mozambique, 1598 1708 William Smith, “Vigorniensis (Vulgo Worcestershire) Comitat: Descriptio,” 1602 1709 John Speed, Glamorgan Shyre: With the Sittuations of the Cheife Towne Cardyff and Ancient Landaffe Described, 1607 1710 Ralph Hall, Virginia, 1636 1711 Detail from Philip Symonson, A New Description of Kent, 1596 1713 Thomas Jenner, A Trve Description of the Citie of Rochell, [1621] 1716 Ephraim Pagitt, A Description of the Multitude of Christians in the World, 1636 1719 John à Borough, rough sketch of the channel into the Zuiderzee, 1539 1728 Reference maps for figure 58.1 1728 Coverage of charts drawn by the English, 1560 – 80 1732 Coverage of charts drawn by the English, 1600 –20 1733 Anonymous, plot of a route from the Shetlands to the Norwegian coast on squared paper with a latitude scale in pen and ink, ca. 1600 1734 William Borough, chart of the northeast Atlantic, ca. 1580 1736 Binding made from Borough’s chart 1736 Sketch of the mouth of the river Ob, 1568 1738 Robert Norman, chart of the Azores to Beachy Head, 1581 1739 Detail from John Norden’s map of London 1740 Celebes in Gabriel Tatton’s atlas of sea charts, ca. 1619 1741 Fragment from Harmen and Marten Jansz.’s chart of the world, 1606 1743 Drawing by Maerten de Vos, 1589 1743 John Daniel, North Atlantic, 1639 1747 George Best, world map in praise of English voyagers, 1578 1758

xxxiii 59.2 Humphrey Gilbert, world map conceptualizing the Northwest Passage, 1576 1759 59.3 John Dee, map of the North Atlantic incorporating Martin Frobisher’s discoveries, ca. 1580 1760 59.4 Michael Lok, map of the Northwest Passage, 1582 1762 59.5 Baptista Boazio, map of the West Indian voyage, 1588 1763 59.6 Edward Wright, world map on Mercator’s projection, 1599 1764 59.7 John White, manuscript map, 1585 1765 59.8 Sir Walter Ralegh, map of Guiana, ca. 1595 1766 59.9 William Baffin, map of the Mughal territories, 1619 1768 59.10 The “Velasco map” showing the coast of North America from Newfoundland to Roanoke, ca. 1611 1769 59.11 John Smith’s version of Richard Norwood’s map of Bermuda land grants 1770 59.12 John Smith, map of Virginia, 1612 1773 59.13 John Smith, map of New England, 1616/17 1775 59.14 William Alexander, map of New Scotland, 1624 1776 59.15 William Wood, map of New England, 1635 1777 59.16 “The Baltimore map” of Maryland, 1635 1778 60.1 Reference map of Scandinavia 1782 60.2 Jaakko Teitti, a freehand sketch of the Karelian isthmus in eastern Finland, ca. 1555 1783 60.3 Claudius Clavus, manuscript map of the north in Ptolemy’s Geography, Nancy manuscript, 1427 1784 60.4 Map of the north from Ptolemy’s Geography, ca. 1490 1785 60.5 Map of the north from Ptolemy’s Geography, ca. 1481 1785 60.6 Jacob Ziegler, map of the north, printed in 1532 1786 60.7 Olaus Magnus, Carta marina, Venice, 1539 1787 60.8 Finland from the Carta marina 1789 60.9 Marcus Jordanus, map of Denmark, 1585 1791 60.10 Abraham Ortelius’s map of Iceland based on a map by Guðbrandur Thorláksson 1793 60.11 Andreas Bureus, Lapponia, 1611 1794 60.12 Andreas Bureus, Lake Mälaren, ca. 1613 1795 60.13 Sample map by Georg Ginther Kräill von Bemebergh 1796 60.14 Georg Ginther Kräill von Bemebergh, map of the conquest of Riga, 1621 1797 60.15 Olof Hansson Svart (Örnehufvud), mineral map, 1629 1798 60.16 The “Spy Map” (Spionkort) of Stockholm, 1640s 1799 60.17 Heinrich Thome, map of Copenhagen and its environs, 1624 1800 60.18 Andreas Bureus, Orbis arctoi nova et accurata delineatio, 1626 1801

xxxiv 60.19 Early town plan prepared by the surveyors of the Lantmäterikontoret in Finland 1804 61.1 Reference map of East-Central Europe 1807 61.2 Horoscope, 1467 1812 61.3 Astrolabe, ca. 1519 1813 61.4 Boundary map, Reszege, Hungary 1814 –15 61.5 Bernard Wapowski, map of Sarmatia, ca. 1528 1818 61.6 Bernard Wapowski, map of Poland, ca. 1526 1819 61.7 Giovanni Andrea Valvassore, map of Hungary, ca. 1538 1821 61.8 Tabula Hungarie, 1528 1824 61.9 Johannes Honter, map of Transylvania, dated 1532 (copy printed after 1539) 1829 61.10 Johannes Honter, map of Transylvania, second edition (after 1546) 1830 61.11 Johannes Honter, images of terrestrial globes, 1530 and 1542 1832 61.12 Waciaw Grodecki, map of Poland, 1570 1834 61.13 Detail from Wolfgang Lazius’s map of Hungary, 1552/56 1835 61.14 Johannes Sambucus, map of Hungary, 1571 1836 61.15 Descriptio regni Hungariae . . . , ca. 1595 1838 61.16 Detail of Radziwill’s map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 1613 1841 61.17 The military border on a 1563 manuscript map 1843 61.18 Natale Angielini’s printed leaflet, 1565 1845 61.19 Ottavio Baldigara, fortification plan of the castle of Eger, Hungary, 31 March 1572 1846 61.20 Giovanni Jacobo Gasparini, border zone map, ca. 1580 1848 61.21 Ferenc Batthány, sketch map, ca. 1600 1849 62.1 Egnazio Danti’s map of Muscovy 1853 62.2 Reference map of the Russian area 1855 62.3 Anthony Jenkinson’s map of Muscovy, 1562 [1570] 1857 62.4 Pskov-Pechorskaya Virgin Mary icon, end of the sixteenth century 1860 62.5 Map of the Solovetski Islands on the icon “Bogomater’ bogolyubskaya s predstoyashchimi zosimoy i savvateyem solovetskimi i stsenami ikh zhitiya” 1861 62.6 Old Russian map of a plot of land, 1536 –37 1862 62.7 Map of the area around the city of Zvenigorod and the Savvino-Storozhevskiy monastery, 1664 1867 62.8 Map of the waste land of the village of Izmailov, 1670s 1868 62.9 Map of the localities along the Donets River, 1679 1869 62.10 Land map, Yaroslavl uyezd 1870 62.11 Map of the localities along the Vorskla and Oleshnya Rivers, 1652 1871 62.12 Map of the region between the Don and Oskol Rivers with the Polatovskiy and Novooskol’skiy ramparts, ca. 1697 1872

Illustrations 62.13 Aleksey Galkin and Fyodor Rosputin, map of the lands on both sides of the Tunguska River between the Yeniseysk and Ilimsk uyezds, 1685 1874 62.14 Map of Siberia, 1667 [1697] 1876 62.15 Map of Siberia, 1667 [after 1702] 1877 62.16 Map of Siberia, 1667 [1669] 1878 62.17 Nikolay Gavrilovich Spafariy’s map of Siberia, 1678 1881 62.18 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, map of Siberia, 1687 1882 62.19 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, map of the Yenisei River 1888 62.20 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, description of the “Chertëzh vsekh sibirskikh gorodov i zemel” with an account of the progress of his cartographic works in Moscow in 1698 1890 62.21 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, “Chertëzh vsekh sibirskikh gorodov i zemel,” 1699 1891 62.22 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, heading for introductory article, table of contents, and catalog 1892 62.23 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, “Chertëzh zemli vsey bezvodnoy i maloprokhodnoy kamennoy stepi” 1892 62.24 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov, examples of geographical map headings, 1697 1893 62.25 “Chertëzh vsekh s kameni potoki rek,” copy by Ivan Seymonovich Remezov 1894 62.26 Instructional examples of the maps of the slobodas of the Tobolsk uyezd, 1704 1895 62.27 “Chertëzh zemli irkutskogo goroda,” copy by Ivan Seymonovich Remezov 1896 62.28 “Chertëzh zemli tarskogo goroda” from the “Chertëzhnaya kniga sibiri” 1897 62.29 “Chertëzh zemli tarskogo goroda” from the “Sluzhebnaya chertëzhnaya kniga” 1898 62.30 Artistic details on Semyon Ulianovich Remezov’s geographical maps 1898 62.31 Examples of combinations of symbols, abbreviations, and inscriptions, 1701 1899 62.32 Town plan of Pelym on the map of the Pelym uyezd 1899 62.33 Heading and introductory text of the ethnographic map of Siberia 1900 62.34 Semyon Ulianovich Remezov’s map of Kamchatka 1901

Tables Part 1 1.1 Text and image in three main functions of maps in the Renaissance 7 9.1 Introductions to geography, ca. 1495 –1525 351 19.1 Differences between longitude and latitude values from four coordinate tables and modern values 481 22.1 Sizes and costs of paper (high quality) per ream (500 sheets or 20 quaderni) 597

Illustrations

xxxv

35.1 Venetian magistratures responsible for the management of territory 879 38.1 Countries where Portuguese manuscript maps mentioned in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660) are preserved 992 38.2 Portuguese maps, manuscript and printed, identified in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660) 992 38.3 Latitude values for selected places, Renaissance sources versus modern 1039 40.1 Prices of charts and other instruments for various years, 1519 –1592 1132

Part 2 43.1 Christiaan Sgrooten’s topographical maps of the Low Countries, 1568 –1573 1277 44.1 Contents of the Atlantes novi by Blaeu and Janssonius 1329 44.2 Blaeu’s Atlas maior 1330 44.3 Overview of the Civitates orbis terrarum by Braun and Hogenberg 1334 44.4 The town atlases of Italy by Blaeu 1337 44.5 The town atlases by Janssonius 1338 45.1 Professions of sellers of maritime printed matter, mainly from the seventeenth century 1400 45.2 Contents of Johannes van Keulen’s De nieuwe groote lichtende zee-fakkel 1404 55.1 Tudor and early Stuart maps of Ireland and parts of Ireland 1673 62.1 Measures in sixteenth and seventeenth century Russia 1863

Appendixes Part 1 6.1 List of globes and globe gores made in Europe from 1300 until 1600 160 7.1 Charts of the Mediterranean in public collections, 1500 –1700 238 7.2 Members of the Oliva and Caloiro e Oliva dynasty with the cities where they worked and the years 262 9.1 Ptolemy’s Geography, editions from 1475 to 1650 361 21.1 Maps used in the analysis of signs on topographic maps 581 30.1 Pre-1530 manuscript maps showing the relationship between the Old and New Worlds 759 31.1 A historiographical and bibliographical note 796 31.2 Locations with Italian composite atlases and significant collections of Italian sixteenth-century printed maps probably deriving from composite atlases 799 32.1 Partial list of map cycles 828 38.1 Number of charts of each author reproduced in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660), listed by area depicted 1062

38.2 Distribution of the charts reproduced in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660), listed by area depicted 1063 38.3 The twenty-five Portuguese world maps reproduced in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660) 1063 38.4 Portuguese cartographers who were authors of charts of the Mediterranean and of the Atlantic reproduced in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660) 1064 38.5 Portuguese cartographers who were authors of charts of the Far East (Asia and Indonesia) reproduced in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660) 1065 38.6 Portuguese cartographers who were authors of charts of Brazil reproduced in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660) 1066 38.7 Portuguese cartographers who were authors of charts of the American continent reproduced in PMC (ca. 1485 –1660) 1067 38.8 Coastal sites represented by Gaspar Correia in the “Lendas da Índia” (1563) 1067 38.9 Examples of military or propaganda maps 1068 40.1 Cosmographers and allied professionals at the Casa de la Contratación, 1503 –1603 (in order of first appointment) 1139 40.2 Timeline of the office of pilot major at the Casa de la Contratación, 1508 –1620 1141 40.3 Revisions of the padrón real, 1508 –1600 1142

Part 2 43.1 The first printed Dutch maps of the (mainly) Dutch provinces in the middle of the sixteenth century, 1538 –1581 1291 43.2 Printed waterschap maps, 1572 –1650 1292 43.3 Prototypes of printed province maps, 1575 –1698 1295 44.1 Maps published in Hieronymus Cock’s Quatre Vents 1376 44.2 Summary of Gerard de Jode’s maps 1377 44.3 Bernard van den Putte’s woodcut maps 1377 44.4 Wall maps published in Antwerp (sixteenth century) 1378 44.5 Selection of wall maps—mainly prototypes— published in Amsterdam, ca. 1590 – ca. 1670 1379 44.6 Multisheet maps of the Low Countries, 1557– ca. 1700 1381 44.7 Globes published in Amsterdam, ca. 1596 – ca. 1605 1382 44.8 Production of Dutch globes, ca. 1606 –1648 1383 45.1 Dutch printed rutters, 1532 –1594 1429 45.2 Pilot guides published in the Netherlands, 1584 –1681 1431 45.3 Sea atlases published in the Netherlands, 1650 –1680 1432 51.1 Maps by Samuel de Champlain 1548 52.1 Norman charts and atlases 1563 58.1 Survival of the earliest English marine representations and charts of overseas, ca. 1560 –1660, listed by decade 1748

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used throughout this book. Abbreviations specific to a given chapter are listed in the first, unnumbered, footnote of that chapter.

BL BNF HC 1

HC 2.1

British Library, London Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

HC 2.2

HC 2.3

xxxvii

The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 3, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

pl at e 1. ANTONINO SALIBA’S NVOVA FIGVRA DI TVTTE LE COSE. (See p. 76.) Saliba’s map is confined to the elemental spheres of the cosmos, its concentric circles expanding from a subterranean zone of metals, fires, and aquifers, through a terraqueous surface illustrated by a crude polar world map, to three zones of air corresponding to Aristotle’s meteorological theory, and finally to the zone of fire with its phoenix and salamander. Saliba’s subsurface cosmography reveals various levels of activity: human mining in addition to natural phenomena such as subterranean waters, volcanic activity, hot

springs, and the spread of metallic veins believed to grow within the living body of earth. In some versions, the earth’s core is represented as hell, while the sun and moon appear in the corners of the chart to suggest the planetary spaces beyond. Phenomena in the three regions of air fell within the scope of cosmography, as Apian’s revolutionary images of comets’ tails pointing toward the sun indicate. Size of the original (including text): 56.4 X 81 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel (Kartenslg. 3,6).

pl ate 2. A MEASURED COSMOS. (See p. 83.) Perhaps the most accomplished sixteenth-century attempt to map the scale of the world machine, Bartolomeu Velho’s “Figvra dos corpos celestes” illustrates the geometry and geography of the elemental earth, with air and fire represented by clouds and flames, the seven planetary spheres with the length of day given for each planet, the firmament with zodiacal signs, the primum mobile

in blue, and the empyreum in red. The cosmos is bathed in celestial light spreading from the corners of the page, with God the Father in the top right, the Cross and Dove (Son and Holy Spirit) top left, and the choirs of angels surrounding. Size of the original: ca. 34.3 X 47 cm. Bartolomeu Velho, “Cosmographia” (1568). Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Res. Ge EE 266, fols. 9v–10r).

pl ate 3. THE EARLIEST SUFI LATINUS MANUSCRIPT. (See p. 105.) This manuscript of the Ptolemaic catalog features - -i ﬁgures. The constellation maps modeled after Islamic al-S. uf stars are numbered to correspond to the Ptolemaic catalog,

and the sizes of the stars are graduated to correspond to their magnitude. The pattern of the stars within the constellation roughly mirrors that in the night sky. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Arsenal MS. 1036, fol. 5).

pl at e 4. DETAILS OF THE CELESTIAL AND TERRESTRIAL GLOBES FROM THE AMBASSADORS. (See p. 135.) Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting is illustrated as ﬁgure 6.1.

Size of the details: ca. 35 X 35 cm and ca. 26 X 26 cm. Photograph © National Gallery, London (NG 1314).

pl at e 5. THE ST. GALLEN COSMOGRAPHIC GLOBE, CA. 1575. (See p. 147.) The globe was acquired by the abbot Bernhard II for the monastery of St. Gallen. Although the stand has the date 1595 alongside the abbot’s coat of arms, the globe was probably made much earlier, but its provenance and maker are unknown. In addition to the outlines of the

main continents, there are a number of constellations drawn on this globe in the oceans, thus combining the terrestrial with the celestial sphere. Size of the original: diameter 121 cm; height 233 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zurich (inv. nr. DEP 846).

pl at e 6. GIOVANNI BATTISTA CAVALLINI, LARGESCALE NAUTICAL CHART, 1652. (See p. 205.) A detailed chart of the coast from Nice to Civitavecchia from the nautical “Teatro del Mondo Marittimo” by Cavallini, Leghorn.

Size of the original: 57 X 66 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence (MED G. F. 27).

pl ate 7. JACOPO MAGGIOLO, NAUTICAL CHART OF THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE ATLANTIC COAST, GENOA, 1561. (See p. 210.)

Size of the original: 92 X 125 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Museo Navale di Pegli, Genoa (NIMN 3372).

plate 8. FRANÇOIS OLLIVE, NAUTICAL CHART OF THE MEDITERRANEAN, MARSEILLES, 1664. (See p. 233.)

Size of the original: 88 X 130 cm. Photograph © Musée National de la Marine / Patrick Dantec, Paris (9 NA 23).

pl ate 9. HENRICUS MARTELLUS GERMANUS, MAP OF CEYLON. (See p. 267.) The map is included in several known copies of the “Insularium illustratum” (ca. 1480–90) and is based on the Ptolemaic map of the island, whose name is preserved (Taprobana Insvla Indiana). A note on the map mentions that the island is surrounded by an archipelago of 1,378 islets. Henricus Martellus does not appear to have produced

an original cartographic work. He complemented Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s isolario with maps of islands as well as of mainland regions, presenting a composite universal atlas based on the material available at the time. Size of the original: 46.3 X 30.2 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BL (Add. MS. 15760, fol. 62r).

pl ate 10. PTOLEMAIC MANUSCRIPT MAP OF AFRICA FROM THE WILCZEK BROWN CODEX. (See p. 317.) Size of each mounting board: 39 X 28.3 cm. Photography

courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence (Acc. 31137).

pl at e 11. PAGE FROM A MANUSCRIPT EDITION OF THE SEPTE GIORNATE, [1482]. (See p. 323.) Francesco Berlinghieri is shown in the illuminated “C” at the top of the page. The circles in the right margin show Berlinghieri, Ficino, and Ptolemy in different scenes from the text; the ovals on the

left all depict Ptolemy. Size of the original: 44 X 31 cm. Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, Milan (AC XIV 44, fol. 1r). By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

pl at e 12. JEAN COSSIN, MANUSCRIPT WORLD MAP ON THE SINUSOIDAL PROJECTION, 1570. (See p. 372.) This projection, based on elegant sine curves, is an equal-area

projection and was popularized almost a century later by Guillaume Sanson and John Flamsteed. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Rés. Ge D 7896).

pl at e 13. PORTUGUESE ROTEIRO, ATTRIBUTED TO LUÍS TEIXEIRA. (See p. 462.) From the “Roteiro de todos os sinais, conhecimentos, fundos, baixos, alturas, e derrotas que há na costa do Brasil desde o cabo de Santo Agostinho até o estreito de Fernão de Magalhães.” This depiction of the Brazilian coastline near Porto Seguro, the region where Pedro Álvares Cabral and his ﬂeet made landfall on their maiden journey to South America in 1500, contains three separate

textual narratives: the primary description of the coastal descent from “ylheos” to “porto seguro,” at top; toponymic titles (at ninety-degree angles to the coast) reminiscent of early portolan charts, at middle; and sophisticated instructions for entering and departing from ports and harbors (at ninety-degree angles to the coast), at bottom. Photograph Henrique Ruas, courtesy of the Biblioteca da Ajuda / IPPAR, Lisbon (52-XII-25, fol. 10v).

pl ate 14. PLANE CHART OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN, CREATED AFTER 1549 BY AN ANONYMOUS PORTUGUESE CARTOGRAPHER. (See p. 519.) The chart’s latitude scale is prominently depicted in the middle of the ocean. Sig-

niﬁcantly, this chart also has an oblique meridian, located just off of the Labrador coast. Size of the original: 63 X 88 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Cartes et Plans, Rés. Ge B 1148).

pl ate 15. FOUR EXAMPLES OF EARLY COLOR PRINTING, 1513. (See p. 594.) A comparison of four maps of Lorraine from Claudius Ptolemy, Geography (Strasbourg, 1513), reveals considerable variation among the colors used to print the three woodblocks in this experimental printing (red, yellow / brown, and black). Close examination also reveals subtle differences in the state and content of the three blocks.

Photographs courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence (upper left); the American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Libraries (Rare 420 pt, pl. 47) (lower left); the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Atlas N-3-A) (upper right); and the National Library of Finland, Helsinki (N. 2173) (lower right).

pl ate 16. THE TWO KNOWN COLORED VERSIONS OF FRANCESCO ROSSELLI’S OVAL WORLD MAP, CA. 1508. (See p. 604.) A comparison of these two colored versions reveals differences in the geographical content based on the coloring alone. Note the coastline of the continent in the Antarctic area. It is not named Antarticvs; the “C,” for Circvlvs, in front of

that word has been colored over in the lower example. See also ﬁgure 1.3. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana (top). Photograph © National Maritime Museum, London (G201: 1/53A) (bottom).

pl at e 17. SIGNED COLORING BY JACKOMINA LIEFRINCK (LIEFRYNCK). (See p. 606.) An unusual instance of the colorist’s signing a map or title page, in this case the title page of the 1586 edition of the Speculum nauticum of Lucas

Jansz. Waghenaer. Jackomina (Mynken) was the daughter of the engraver Hans Liefrinck. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Rés. G 46).

pl ate 18. DITCHLEY PORTRAIT OF ELIZABETH I, ATTRIBUTED TO MARCUS GHEERAERTS, CA. 1592. (See p. 669.) An imposing ﬁgure of Elizabeth I—Gloriana in all her glory—stretches the metonymic association of the monarch and

the nation by literally towering over the lands in her possession. The map itself is drawn after the Christopher Saxton model. Size of the original: 241.3 X 152.4 cm. Photograph courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 2561).

pl ate 19. CLAES JANSZ. VISSCHER, LEO BELGICUS. (See p. 674.) This version of the bellowing Leo Belgicus—literally, the Belgian Lion—was executed during the Twelve-Year Truce, a lull in the ﬁghting of the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Netherlands. On the left are views of ten cities of the northern Netherlands that were then governed (de facto) by

the States General and the House of Orange; on the right are ten cities under the control of the Spanish regents and Philip III. Note the slumping suit of armor in the lower right corner, identiﬁed as “Sleeping Mars.” Photograph courtesy of the Stichting Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam (no. 1248).

pl at e 20. JOHANNES DE RAM AND COENRAERT DECKER, DELFT, CA. 1675-78. (See p. 694.) This splendid map of Delft illustrates the role of city views and maps as a form of civic boosterism. The image stresses Delft’s importance as a seaport and center of trade in faience and cloth. It combines a proﬁle view (at top) and a plan view (middle, with a

smaller-scale plan upper right), with various public buildings surrounding the plan. Size of the original: 160 X 180.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Gemeente Musea Delft, Collectie Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof (D 162).

pl at e 21. WOTTON UNDERWOOD, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. (See p. 707.) The map was probably made at some time between 1564 and 1586 to illustrate points of dispute between the communities of Wotton Underwood and Ludger-

shall arising from rights of common on the one hundred acres of “Wotton Lawnd.” Photograph courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino (Stowe Manuscripts, ST 59).

plate 22. TAPESTRY MAP OF THE MEDITERRANEAN BASIN, 1549–51. (See p. 724.) This is the ﬁrst tapestry in the collection of what was originally twelve tapestries of the Conquest of Tunis series commissioned by Charles V and detailing his expedition to Tunis in 1535. Only ten of the original cartoons (full-size drawings on paper in charcoal and overlaid with watercolor), designed by Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen between about

1544/45 and 1550, survive (all in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna). Twelve full-size tapestries (editio princeps) were woven from Vermeyen’s cartoons by Willem de Pannemaker in Brussels from 1549 to 1554; ten, including this one, now hang in the Palacio de Oriente and Armería Real in Madrid. Size of the original: 520 X 895 cm. Photograph copyright © Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid (inv. 10005895).

pl ate 23. SELF-PORTRAIT OF SIR NATHANIEL BACON, CA. 1618–20. (See p. 735.) Oil on canvas by English amateur painter Nathaniel Bacon, this portrait shows the author holding a drawing and sitting with his books, writing materials, and an

atlas of Abraham Ortelius open to the map of Germania. Size of the original: 205.7 X 153.6 cm. Private Collection / Bridgeman Art Library, New York (GRH 242121).

pl ate 24. THE SEVEN CITIES OF CÍBOLA FROM JOAN MARTINES’S CHART OF 1578. (See p. 743.)

Size of the entire original: 24 X 36 cm; this portion ca. 24 X 19.9 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BL (Harl. MS. 3450, map no. 10).

plate 25. GIOVANNI ANDREA VALVASSORE, COLORED WOODCUT OF THE BATTLE OF MARIGNANO, CA. 1515. (See p. 780.)

Size of the original: 55.5 X 152.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Zentralbibliothek, Zurich (inv. 307).

pl at e 26. MAP OF THE DOMINION OF SIENA, 1589, SALA DELLE CARTE GEOGRAFICHE, UFFIZI PALACE, FLORENCE. (See p. 811.) Fresco designed by Stefano Buon-

signori and painted by Ludovico Buti. Photograph courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, New York.

pl ate 27. MAP OF AFRICA, 1573, SALA DELLA COSMOGRAFIA, PALAZZO FARNESE, CAPRAROLA. (See p. 815.) Fresco designed by Orazio Trigino de’ Marii and painted by

Giovanni Antonio Vanosino. Photograph courtesy of Scala / Art Resource, New York

pl ate 28. DISPUTED TERRITORY OF THE “GAIO” BY ALESSANDRO RESTA AND VERMONDO RESTA, 1575. (See p. 839.) Alessandro Resta and his son Vermondo prepared several maps and documents to settle a dispute over an area

of land called the “Gaio.” This map was an intermediate one, with calculations apparent and only partly colored. Photograph courtesy of the Archivio di Stato, Turin (Camerale Piemonte, articolo 664, fascicolo 10).

pl ate 29. PIER MARIA GROPALLO, MAP FROM ATLAS A, 1650–55. (See p. 862.) “Delineatione de’ territorij di Rezzo, Eiquetico, et della Pieue conﬁnanti, con la Lauina è Sèna di Sauoia, fatta à 19.luglio.1653.”

Size of the original: 43 X 81 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Archivio de Stato, Genoa (Raccolta cartograﬁca 1268–1292, MS. 39, pl. VII).

pl at e 30. CRISTOFORO SABBADINO, “DISSEGNO DI TRIVISAN,” 1558. (See p. 882 and ﬁg. 35.6.) Watercolor and pen drawing on parchment from the archives of the Venetian body responsible for the protection of the lagoon environment and water resources (the Savi ed Esecutori alle Acque). Sabbadino was one of the leading ﬁgures in the sixteenth-century debates concerning the regulation and management of the waters of the lagoon and its tributary rivers. Convinced of the need to preserve the waters of the lagoon from silting and other obstructions, he represents one of the points of view voiced

in a debate that involved various interests: agriculture, trade, and the need to preserve water resources and the lagoon. So the map not only outlines a Venetian project for the control and management of water resources in the Treviso area; it also makes a very important contribution to our knowledge of the history of the river system in the area. Size of the original: ca. 89.6 X 68.1 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Archivio di Stato, Venice (Savi ed Esecutori alle Acque, serie Piave, dis. 5).

plate 31. SILVESTRO DA PANICALE, MAP OF THE FRANCISCAN PROVINCE OF UMBRIA IN THE “ATLANTE DEI CAPPUCCINI,” 1632. (See p. 925.)

Size of the original: 28.5 x 38 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Archivio dell’Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, Museo Francescano, Rome (inv. n. 1288).

pl at e 32. FERNÃO VAZ DOURADO, CHART OF THE FAR EAST, 1571. (See p. 999.)

Photograph courtesy of the Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais / Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (fol. 8).

pl ate 33. LUÍS TEIXEIRA, MAP OF BRAZIL, CA. 1586. (See p. 1000.)

Photograph Henrique Ruas, courtesy of the Biblioteca da Ajuda / IPPAR, Lisbon (52-XII-25).

pl ate 34. VIEW OF THE FORTRESS OF MALACA IN ANTÓNIO BOCARRO’S “O LIVRO DAS PLANTAS,” 1635.

(See p. 1023.) Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Pública de Évora.

pl ate 35. JOÃO TEIXEIRA ALBERNAZ I , MAP OF BAÍA DE TODOS OS SANTOS. (See p. 1033.) The eighteenth of thirty-two charts in João Teixeira Albernaz I’s atlas “Descripçao de todo o maritimo da terra de S. Crvz. chamado vvlgar

mente o Brazil,” 1640. Photograph courtesy of the Instituto do Arquivos Nacionais / Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (Teixa en 1640, Casa Forte 162, fol. 56).

plate 36. FRAGMENT OF A MANUSCRIPT MAP OF PORTUGAL. (See p. 1041.) East is at the top.

Size of the original: 31.5 X 21 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid (R. 242, Sign. C/I c 82).

pl ate 37. PEDRO NUNES TINOCO, TOWN MAP. (See p. 1051.) From Tinoco’s “Livro que tem todas as plantas e perﬁs das igrejas e vilas do preorado do Crato,” 1620.

Permission courtesy of the Seminário Liceal das Missões, Cernache de Bonjardim (Cod. 427.24).

plate 38. ANONYMOUS VIEW OF ARANDA DE DUERO, 1503. (See p. 1072.) This town plan was composed during a lawsuit and resembles contemporary plans from other parts of Europe.

Size of the original: 52.8 X 59.8 cm. Photograph courtesy Spain, Ministerio de Cultura, Archivo General de Simancas (MPD. X-1).

pl at e 39. ANONYMOUS CHART ATTRIBUTED TO VESCONTE MAGGIOLO, CA. 1510. (See p. 1110.) Four charts in this atlas (in two pairs) cover the New World. The section shown covers the West Indies and part of the northwest coast of South America. The next two pages show the Atlantic, with sections of Africa, western Europe, and Labrador on the

left page, and sections of Africa and South America on the right. Note the many markings in the ocean showing sandbars and other hazards. This chart may well have been copied from the ﬁrst pattern chart made by Amerigo Vespucci. Size of each page: ca. 26.7 X 20.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BL (Egerton 2803, fols. 7v–8r).

pl ate 40. DOMENICO VIGLIAROLO, CHART OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC. (See p. 1136.) This is his only known chart to show any part of the New World, though he certainly did not focus on those sections of interest to Spain. Note also

the line of zero longitude at the Canaries. Size of the original: 52 X 37 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York (MS. K18, map no. 5).

Preface

Cartography in the European Renaissance forms a pivotal place in The History of Cartography series. Chronologically, volume 3 takes up where volume 1 left off, continuing the Euro-Mediterranean tradition of mapmaking from the Middle Ages. Its emphasis differs from earlier volumes in defining the broad influence and role of maps in society rather than focusing on their making. The number of authors has increased from an average of ten per volume to sixty-four. This volume is also the last in the series to follow a geographic structure by cartographic culture; the remaining volumes are being planned as multilevel encyclopedias organized alphabetically. The bulk of this volume explores the European cartographic traditions of the Italian States, Portugal, Spain, the Germanic States, the Low Countries, France, the British Isles, Scandinavia, East-Central Europe, and Russia. Such an organization by geographic regions was a pragmatic decision based on the background and interests of researchers in the field and the vast secondary literature. In choosing the thirty-three authors for these sections, we largely followed the principle of inviting scholars who reside in these countries and who are fully familiar with the literature in the respective languages. This decision also proved to be the source of one of the most challenging aspects of the volume, introducing another filter of interpretation and meaning through translation. On balance, however, we hope that the reader will appreciate the mine of literature in languages other than English that is found in these pages. Language was not the only hurdle; approaches to the subject varied considerably from Anglo-American practice and frequently started diplomatic dialogs of some complexity and contention. It was difficult at the beginning to persuade our authors that the History is not a history of how particular regions were mapped, but a study of how various cartographic cultures arose in different geographic centers, although not surprisingly, regions were usually mapped by the people who lived in them. This emphasis caused some overlap in the treatment of such figures as, for example, Gerardus Mercator and Johannes Honter and Portuguese cartographers who spent most of their lives in exile in other countries.

As our plans for this volume emerged, it became obvious that this organization by geographic region could not tell the whole story, as the boundaries of Europe during the Renaissance were fluid in the extreme, particularly when it came to the sharing (and pirating) of cartographic information. We thus planned a series of cross-national thematic essays in the first half of the book in three main sections: Maps and Renaissance Culture (including cosmography and celestial mapping; charting; the visual, mathematical, and textual models for mapping; and literature and maps); Technical Production and Consumption; and Maps and Their Uses in Renaissance Governance. These sections, which are subdivided into twenty-eight essays, describe the cultural, social, and intellectual influence that the map gained as a tool and visual icon. Most of these essays are written by scholars who would not normally be considered historians of cartography focused on maps per se but whose interests and work have strongly intersected the historical study of maps. They include leading art historians, historians of science, and social and political historians. Their aim is to describe the many levels on which maps became a central means to structure and understand the world, and how maps offered the means to articulate a cultural and political understanding of the state. The thematic essays raise important issues in the history of cartography that both set an agenda for future research on Renaissance maps and take stock of the growing role of cartography as a way to organize social, political, and cultural space. These essays are meant to be thought provoking, rather than exhaustive, and reflect some of the multilayered approaches that the study of maps has adopted in the past two decades. They show how the authority of maps became an essential factor in influencing the ways in which Renaissance Europeans saw and imagined the geographic layout, order, and substance of the world—with “world” meaning not only an external object to be represented, but also a stage on which internal human aspirations could be played out. These interpretive essays illuminate several levels on which the map can be studied and understood as an artifact, a form of historical evidence, or a text, and they demonstrate both continuities and changes from the me-

xxxix

dieval period. The construction of maps has not been forgotten, however: other chapters provide basic historical and bibliographical information about how maps were surveyed, drafted, engraved, colored, and printed, all processes that affected the content of maps. We have not had to deal with the complex romanization or transliteration found in the books of volume 2, but as in previous volumes we have used the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to transliterate Russian. The sheer number of words in this volume and the overlap of the interpretive essays and national traditions chapters have made consistency a persistent challenge. The general index at the back of the volume is an indispensable tool for finding people, places, maps, and topics that are discussed in different contexts throughout the volume. We have maintained standard spellings for personal names; alternate spellings and the birth, death, or flourish dates for major figures are found in the general index. Titles of books, manuscripts, and maps that we have seen are transcribed as they appear, with the addition of “[sic]” only when there is an obvious error in the original, however, there are literally hundred of items that we have not been able to review ourselves. We have not taken into account different fonts, styles, or capitalization in the original. One particular result has been the use of “v” for “u” when taken from uppercase type. The result, generally, can look weird. But that, in and of itself, is a clue to the reader that in those cases we have not applied any “regularizing” principles. We must note that these pragmatic practices are neither followed nor endorsed by all scholars or authors in this book; inconsistencies do exist. The expansion of the scope of volume 3, and the large increase in the number of authors, has burdened the History of Cartography Project staff, made the monitoring and enforcement of deadlines more difficult, and extended the time for completion. The gestation and writing periods for essays ranged between a few months and almost two decades. We deeply appreciate the patience of those authors commissioned in 1987, shortly after the publication of volume 1. Often through extremely difficult personal circumstances, they stayed with us when the Project staff turned their energies to the three books of volume 2, covering mapmaking traditions in Islam and South Asia, East and Southeast Asia, and other nonWestern societies. In thanking the sixty-four specialist scholars who have contributed chapters to volume 3, I also speak on behalf of the Project staff by acknowledging the good grace with which our authors have accepted editorial intervention at various stages in the work as the subject grew beneath our feet. Only the authors know the extent of the expansion, rewriting, and recasting that resulted from editorial efforts and the demands of the University of Chicago

Preface

Press’s two anonymous readers. I hope that they can now share in the pride of the final result. Several scholars have advised us, either at the early stages of the book’s planning or as the manuscripts were completed in draft form. These include the editorial advisors, who attended a meeting in April 2000 and are listed in the preliminary pages. Early in the process, we were fortunate to attract two historians, Victoria Morse and Daniel Brownstein, both postdoctoral fellows from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Brownstein has broad interests in Renaissance culture, humanism, early modern intellectual history, and the history of medicine. His interest in theories of representation in the Renaissance naturally applied to maps. Dr. Morse was trained as a medievalist and has interests in the intellectual and religious world of the Middle Ages and early modern Europe, art history, and the history of the book. She brought superior contextual skills to the study of the medieval-Renaissance transition. The first task of these two scholars was to review and revise the volume 3 outline, concentrating mainly on the essays introducing the Renaissance period and the national cartographic traditions. Both edited essays and recruited authors in addition to contributing their own writing. Volume 3 owes a special debt to Jude Leimer, who has been managing editor since 1982 and has provided the editorial and managerial continuity so crucial to a project of this kind. She has not only controlled the daily operations of this work in liaison with the University of Chicago Press and with authors, advisors, and translators; with great tact, strength, and personal kindness, she has also directly supervised a team of graduate assistants in editorial checking. Universities are in the business of teaching, and not all teaching is done by professors in classrooms. Our graduate assistants have had instilled in them a training in bibliographical and library work second to none. Jude’s experience with the content of the volume enabled her to make thousands of everyday decisions crucial to the success of the volume. Anyone who has experienced the problems of managing a small office in a large public university will also appreciate how essential were the contributions of Beth Freundlich. Beth started with the Project in September 1996 and has expertly taken control of our finances, accounts, budgets, outreach, and office management. At various times since 2000, she has been aided by Rose Barr, Jan Manser, Teresita Reed, and Paul Tierney. In a work of this size, illustrations consume much time and expense. Dana Freiburger, preceded by Kristen Overbeck Laise and Karen Bianucci Bonick, doggedly pursued libraries and archives to the remotest corners of the globe through all means of communication now available. Due to their efforts, we have been able to select the highest

Preface

quality illustrations and to obtain permission for their reproduction. Line drawings and reference maps were skillfully prepared by the University of Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory in the Department of Geography at Madison, led by its director, Onno Brouwer, and his staff of graduate and undergraduate assistants: Marika Brouwer, Caitlin Doran, Heather Francisco, and Richard Worthington. The Cartographic Laboratory has also provided ongoing support through in-kind donations of staff time and computer equipment. In addition to its role as helping to define the scope and methods of the history of cartography, the History is intended to provide a basic work of reference for both scholars and general readers. As a result, continued attention has been paid to bibliographical accuracy. The graduate assistants who contributed to this volume are Jeff Bernard, Kimberly Coulter, Brian Covey, Margo Kleinfeld, Jason Martin, Jennifer Martin, Brenda Parker, Lisa Saywell, Ben Sheesley, Peter Thorsheim, and Jed Woodworth. They have been helped by the excellent library facilities on our campus and the efficient interlibrary loan department at Memorial Library, led by Judy Tuohy. Expert translations for this volume were by Barbara Marshment (Dutch), Ed Dahl, Kimberly J. Krouth, and Maria Slocum (French), Jeremy J. Scott (French and Italian), Kit Batten (German), Mary Pedley (Latin), and Liam Brockey and Martha White (Portuguese). Other essential clerical, computer, and library help has been provided by Christian Brannstrom, Charles Dean, Caitlin Doran, Paul Dziemiela, Dana Freiburger, Fernando González, Anne Jahnke, Jane Rosecky, and Drew Ross. The high standards of indexes for books in the series have been maintained by Margie Towery. None of this exacting work would be possible without the financial support of many funding agencies, foundations, organizations, and individuals listed on the financial support pages at the beginning of this book. The financial support pages acknowledge all gifts given before the volume went to press in January 2006. We continue to be especially grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation for their faith in and support of the History. In the private sector, we acknowledge the support of the Salus Mundi Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Among the individuals who have made donations to the History, I especially acknowledge the generosity of sponsors and founders W. Graham Arader III; Richard B. Arkway; Roger and Julie Baskes; Rand and Patricia Burnette; A. Richard Diebold, Jr.; Joseph H. and Monica G. Fitzgerald; William B. Ginsberg; Warren Heckrotte; Robert A. Highbarger; Arthur and Janet Holzheimer; Arthur L. Kelly; Norman B. Leventhal; Bernard Lisker; Duane Marble; Douglas W. Marshall; Glen McLaughlin;

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Thomas McCulloch; Ken and Jossy Nebenzahl; Erhan Oner; George Parker; Brian D. Quintenz; Jack L. Ringer; Rudy L. Ruggles, Jr.; David Rumsey; Rodney W. Shirley; William S. Swinford; Clark L. Taber; John Taylor; Albert R. Vogeler; and others who wish to remain anonymous. I further thank Art and Jan Holzheimer for their annual support of a two-month fellowship that has brought outstanding researchers to work with the Project, the scholars at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the excellent resources of our libraries since 2001. I also acknowledge the Institute for Research in the Humanities and its then director, Paul Boyer, for a senior membership that allowed me to focus on the Project in a scholarly and supportive atmosphere. In April 2000, the Institute sponsored a stimulating conference on Renaissance cartography, the twenty-fourth Burdick-Vary Symposium. The Department of Geography, College of Letters and Science, and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin– Madison deserve thanks for their long-term institutional and ﬁnancial support of the Project. I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank several people at the University of Chicago Press. Penelope Kaiserlian, associate director, continued to be one of the Project’s greatest friends and trusted advisors until her move to the University of Virginia Press. We are delighted to have beneﬁted from the expertise in reference books of Linda Halvorson. Robert Williams’s versatile design for the books in the series has continued to stand the test of time. My personal debts have grown too rapidly to specify, but Roz, Jenny, and Justin provided a foundation of loving support to weather the changing seas of this long-term project. David Woodward Madison, Wisconsin December 2002

rian Harley’s influence can be seen in every volume of the History series, but it is David Woodward’s vision and passion for the Renaissance, more than anything else, that shaped volume 3. We are saddened that he died before he could hold these two massive tomes.1 Completing production of the volume after David’s death could not have happened without the generous help of many exceptional individuals, especially those historians of cartography, authors, and staff who answered countless e-mails, offered much-needed advice, labored over complex translations, and unselfishly gave of their time and financial resources over the past two years. They are the backbone of this discipline, and I simply cannot thank them enough. The Project also owes a great debt to Roz

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Woodward, whose emotional support and love have been endless, and to Matthew Edney, who has skillfully and with great energy taken up the directorship of the Project and moved us forward on the next volumes. Although David guided this volume for more than two decades, he was unable to see it through ﬁnal production. For the errors that have slipped through in his absence, I take responsibility. Jude Leimer, Managing Editor Madison, Wisconsin January 2006 1. An obituary and comprehensive list of David Woodward’s work can be found in Matthew Edney, “David Alfred Woodward (1942 – 2004),” Imago Mundi 57 (2005): 75 – 83.

Preface

SET TING THE STAGE

1 • Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change David Woodward

Around 1610, Giuseppe Rosaccio—a Florentine physician and scholar known for his popular cosmographies, two editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, a ten-sheet world map, geographical textbooks, and a description of a voyage to the Holy Land from Venice—published an image that, in its counterpoint of ideas if not in geographical sophistication, represents a cartographic summa of the Renaissance (fig. 1.1).1 Rosaccio’s maps have not been lauded in the canon as have those of Gerardus Mercator or Abraham Ortelius, but he is of interest here because he represents a common figure in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—a professional who moonlighted as a cosmographical author and who wrote for a general audience. This image will serve as a touchstone to several themes discussed in this introduction relating to continuities and changes in cartography between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth. Several aspects of this image make it impossible that it could have been produced a century and a half earlier, while other features would have been familiar to a midfifteenth-century audience. A cosmographer living in 1450 would have been familiar with several allusions in Rosaccio’s image. Roundels representing the four Aristotelian elements of fire, air, earth, and water—with the two lighter elements at the top—anchor the corners of the world. Figures declaring the diameter and circumference of the earth as 7,000 miles and 22,500 miles, respectively, are attributed to Ptolemy’s 62.5-mile degree. The fascination with the different lengths of shadows at different latitudes merits its own small roundel, as does an explanation that people in the northern hemisphere have east on their right hand when facing the sun, while those in the southern hemisphere have the opposite. The two maps showing climatic zones, with the equator, the tropics, and the Arctic and Antarctic circles, would hold no surprises. The eighteen climatic zones, five degrees wide, surrounding the map on the right and their equivalent lengths of the longest day, from twelve hours to six months, would have made sense. On the left map, the iconography of the eight classical wind-heads—the southwest, south, and southeast winds look appropriately desiccated and sick (or even dead)— would all have been familiar, as would the signs of the

zodiac sporting around the edge. The Ptolemaic map at the bottom center might have been somewhat familiar from manuscripts circulating around the time, and its classical geographical content would have been well known to the cosmographer. Likewise, the geographical and chorographical terms annotating their own ideal maplet in the lower left corner— continent, river, mountain, lake, gulf, sea, peninsula, cape, island, shoal, rocks, plain, city—would have not been new. The shield of the powerful Florentine Medici family, then under the leadership of Cosimo the Elder, would have been familiar, and cosimo, spelled out on the balls on the shield, would have made sense, even if all the names of the continents they represented would not. Yet there the familiarity of our 1450 cosmographer with this document would have ended. The map structure is dominated by two circular nets of parallels and meridians, each centered on the equator and central meridian (i.e., nowhere in particular) and oriented with the north pole at the top. The maps have been drawn, not in a perspective view of the world as one might see it from space, but as a constructed geometric globular projection that approximates the spherical shape of the earth. The name labels on the map are in the vernacular Italian except for the Ptolemaic map, where they are appropriately in Latin. Unlike medieval maps, which showed elements from different historical periods in the same map space, there is a desire to show information cosynchronously. So the map in the double hemisphere projection and the Ptolemaic map have been carefully separated into contemporary and historical compartments. The map stands in opposition to a Ptolemaic view of the world beneath. “This is how much Ptolemy knew about the world,” it explains, implying it was not much. The

The abbreviation Plantejaments is used in this chapter for David Woodward, Catherine Delano-Smith, and Cordell D. K. Yee, Plantejaments i objectius d’una història universal de la cartograﬁa Approaches and Challenges in a Worldwide History of Cartography (Barcelona: Institut Cartogràﬁc de Catalunya, 2001). 1. Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472 –1700, 4th ed. (Riverside, Conn.: Early World Press, 2001), 287 (no. 268).

Setting the Stage

fig. 1.1. COLLAGE OF WORLD MAPS AND GEOGRAPHICAL DIAGRAMS BY GIUSEPPE ROSACCIO, CA. 1610. Rosaccio’s geographical collage epitomizes in many ways the European cartographic Renaissance. The Ptolemaic world is set against the modern two-hemisphere map reflecting the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some of the images, such as the Aristotelian concept of the elements and the Ptolemaic calculation of the earth’s circumfer-

ence, still reflect classical learning. But the overall aim is to celebrate the modernity of cartography. The collage is proudly dedicated to Cosimo II de’ Medici, whose heraldic arms incorporate Tuscany and five continents, as if to imply the universal scope of his influence. Size of the original copper engraving: 26.5 31.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Maritiem Museum, Rotterdam (W. A. Engelbrecht Collection 849).

map sets its own time apart from a previous time and deﬁnes itself against it. Rosaccio does not call it the “Renaissance,” but he clearly sees his own geographical view of the world as being very different from that of a previous age. But the new map does not claim to know everything. In the south looms a huge and empty “terra incognita.” Indeed the map is reminiscent of Henri Lancelot de La Popelinière’s Les trois mondes (1582), which divides the world into three equal parts: Old World, New World, and Antarctica. There is much to be discovered, but the inex-

orable parallels and meridians of the map indicate exactly what needs to be found, inviting new observations to be ﬁtted into the empirical puzzle. The most dramatic change is that the known area of the world had more than doubled since 1450. Although our mid-ﬁfteenth-century cosmographer was familiar with the Old World, the notion of a sea route from Europe to India and China might have intrigued him. But the hemisphere on the left is totally new, and its land area appears even larger than that of the old world, even in the habitable temperate zones, ripe for economic development by

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

merchants such as the Medici. Indeed the map has been dedicated to Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, whose youthful portrait (he was 20 in 1610) surveys the whole scene. He is flattered by having the letters of his name, cosimo, divided among the five continents and Tuscany on the Medici shield, with its familiar six balls, although Tuscany has been promoted to the rank of “continent,” and the great southern continent is named “T[erra] Australa.” The imagery alludes quite clearly to his influence not only over Tuscany but also optimistically over the whole world. It should be remembered that Cosimo II became Galileo Galilei’s patron after the publication of the Sidereus nuncius in 1610 and that Galileo proposed to name the four largest moons of Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—the Medicean stars in honor of Cosimo. As our 1450 cosmographer held this piece of paper in his hand, he would not have failed to be struck by the fineness of its engraving (by Alovisio Rosaccio, presumably a relative of Giuseppe) and printing. Printing of texts was still a novelty, and maps were not yet engraved. The small explanatory diagrams on the broadsheet indicate a wide audience for the print—not necessarily the scholar, but the geographical beginner. The combination of a number of images into one summary broadside and the use of the Italian language confirm this. Rosaccio’s map is typical of the hundreds of maps of no particular originality made by polymath-artisans capable of writing about their experiences, but it nevertheless provides a window on the geographical culture of the day. It looks back over the sixteenth century and seems to capture many of the main themes that emerge in this volume: cartographically speaking, the Renaissance was an age that had not yet liberated itself from the authorities of its medieval and classical past, but some of the components necessary to achieve that liberation were already in place. The remainder of this introduction examines in greater depth what continued and what changed.

The “Renaissance” as a Concept The Renaissance, given the literal meaning of the word as “rebirth,” has traditionally been interpreted as a decisive and rapid period of positive change in all aspects of Western history. Several scholars and artists in the ﬁfteenth century perceived that their era was, in the words of Matteo Palmieri (1406 –75), “a new age, so full of hope and promise, which already rejoices in a greater array of nobly gifted souls than the world has seen in the thousand years that have preceded it.” 2 In his treatise on Italian geography and antiquities, “Italia illustrata” (1448 –53), Flavio Biondo may have established the idea that a thousand-year period from a.d. 412 to 1412 constituted a “media aetas” or “Middle Ages,” although the dates

chosen by later historians of course varied. By the time Giorgio Vasari wrote his Le vite de piv eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scvltori italiani in 1550, the notion that medieval artists were very different from “modern” ones in a rinascità had taken ﬁrm root.3 Many books and articles have argued whether or not the term “Renaissance” is useful, and this history of cartography is not the place to rehearse all sides of the debate, which usually starts with a discussion of the dramatic model of cultural change presented in Burckhardt’s 1860 Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien.4 In the “antiRenaissance” debates of the 1970s, often as a corrective to Burckhardt (or at least to a simpliﬁed perception of what Burckhardt said), this dramatic model progressively collapsed. The debates raised several questions, including to what extent the period described by Burckhardt ushered in the age of modernity, whether the period might better be viewed as transitional, and whether the term “Renaissance” should be used at all. Few historians would now defend either the traditional model of a sharp discontinuity between the medieval and Renaissance periods or the notion that one was a general progressive improvement over the other that eventually culminated in our “modern” age.5 The objection to the view of the period as “transitional” was that every period might be viewed as transitional, and, although Renaissance historians replied that the Renaissance was especially transitional, they neglected to state the criteria by which one age might be regarded as more transitional than another. The other extreme was to deny that such a short period of two or three centuries was useful and to propose, as Le Roy Ladurie did, a “longue durée” from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, a period of relatively little change in which population was largely limited by the productivity

2. The quotation from Matteo Palmieri is in the Libro della vita civile (Florence: Heirs of Filippo Giunta, 1529). 3. Wallace Klippert Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 8 –14. On Flavio Biondo and the ﬁrst use of the term “Middle Ages,” see Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2d ed. (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 66; Denys Hay, “Flavio Biondo and the Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the British Academy 45 (1959): 97–128, esp. 116 –17; and Angelo Mazzocco, “Decline and Rebirth in Bruni and Biondo,” in Umanesimo a Roma nel Quattrocento, ed. Paolo Brezzi and Maristella de Panizza Lorch (Rome and New York: Istituto di Studi Romani and Barnard College, 1984), 249 – 66. 4. This debate is well rehearsed in Ferguson, Renaissance, and in the later book of essays edited by Wallace Klippert Ferguson, The Renaissance: Six Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). The essays cover political, cultural, scientiﬁc, religious, literary, and artistic aspects of the period. 5. See William J. Bouwsma’s own comments to the American Historical Review forum referred to in note 8, in his “Eclipse of the Renaissance,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 115 –17.

Setting the Stage

of agriculture.6 Many medievalists agreed, stressing the continuity of thinking in such a period, although it is doubtful that they would claim expertise in the latter parts of it. Seeing the label “Renaissance” as an implication that the period heralded our modern world, many historians replaced it with the term “early modern,” which unfortunately bears the same implication. So, after a period in which the use of the term “Renaissance” fell out of favor, it has now been revived, particularly for cultural history. Coming to its defense was the view that Burckhardt’s contributions far outweighed his shortcomings, and that the criticisms merely introduced a plea for flexibility and an appreciation that historical revolutions rarely happen abruptly.7 Further support comes from the realization that the term “Renaissance” is widely used in popular literature and the media, especially when dealing with the material culture of art and collectible artifacts.8 The choice of the term “Renaissance” and not “Early Modern” for the title of this volume of The History of Cartography responds to such arguments, on the grounds that “Renaissance” remains a useful practical term that is intuitively understood by many people, even if the period to which its characteristics might apply varies by European state. This decision has been made with full knowledge of the fact that the seamless narrative of history cannot be arbitrarily carved up into hundred-year installments. We cannot somehow uncover the “Renaissance” as an independently existing external reality waiting to be discovered. Neither can we effectively pinpoint great events, documents, or individuals that had an immediate impact. But for this volume of The History of Cartography, the practicality of dealing with a period extending from approximately 1480 to approximately 1640 — even with significant regional adjustments—has been confirmed by the experience of our authors in writing their chapters, for they have all produced internally coherent accounts.9 The investigation of how maps were conceived, made, and used in this period provides a case study highlighting some of these historiographical issues in a new way. Indeed it is surprising that Burckhardt completely ignored these cartographic aspects even when stressing the importance of the discovery of the world and its relationship to the discovery of the self, both topics on which the history of cartography has much to say.10

The Progressive Model and a Suggested Compromise The word “Renaissance” implied a rebirth of classical models of thought in philosophy as well as the practical arts, such as architecture and medicine. For historians writing about maps, this dramatic model of change

seemed particularly appropriate, for it set the allegorical, nonmetrical world maps of the Middle Ages, the mappaemundi, in opposition to the secular, measured, projected, scaled maps that Claudius Ptolemy had proposed in the second century a.d. and that had been “rediscovered” by the Latin West at the beginning of the ﬁfteenth century. The cartographic Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was thus portrayed as a record of geographical progress, meaning an improvement in measuring the observed location of places and natural features in the world. For this reason, and for the prestige

6. William J. Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of World History,” American Historical Review 84 (1979): 1–15, esp. 7. 7. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, intro. Peter Gay (New York: Modern Library, 2002). Gay introduces the edition thus: “More telling have been recent objections by economic historians that Burckhardt paid too little attention to economic realities, and to the lives of common people. This is true enough: the range of historical investigation has broadened since Burckhardt’s time—a never-ending process of enlarging the terrain open to historians to which Burckhardt himself made impressive contributions” (xix). 8. For a valuable overview of this question, see Paula Findlen, “Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 83 –114. This article was part of a series arising out of a panel, “The Persistence of the Renaissance,” convened to discuss the state of Renaissance studies at the end of the twentieth century. The panel met twenty years after Bouwsma’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1978, asking what could be salvaged from the idea of the Renaissance as the great turning point in European history. 9. I side with the pragmatic views of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 172: “Far from holding that the term ‘Renaissance’ should be discarded, I would oppose this suggestion as both futile and undesirable. . . . To write an article questioning the use of the term ‘Renaissance’ only swells the bibliography that is filed under the questionable term.” Likewise, Gay, in Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, forthrightly states: “There was a Renaissance, its best name is ‘Renaissance,’ and it took place in the Renaissance” (xix). 10. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860). Burckhardt mentions Petrarch’s geographical contribution as making the first map of Italy but says nothing about cartography in relation to the geographical discoveries of the late fifteenth century. Previous general books and collections of essays focusing on geography and cartography in the European Renaissance include: Numa Broc, La géographie de la Renaissance (1420 –1620) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1980); David Buisseret, The Mapmaker’s Quest: Depicting New Worlds in Renaissance Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert W. Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps: Bio-Bibliographies of the Cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 (Chicago: For the Newberry Library by Speculum Orbis Press, 1993); Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. David Fausett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Monique Pelletier, ed., Géographie du monde au Moyen Aˆge et à la Renaissance (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1989); and W. G. L. Randles, Geography, Cartography and Nautical Science in the Renaissance: The Impact of the Great Discoveries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

Table 1.1 Text and Image in Three Main Functions of Maps in the Renaissance Use

Text

Image

General description (small to large scale)

Cosmography

Cosmographic map

Geography Chorography Topography

Geographic map Chorographic map Topographic map

Sea navigation Land navigation

Portolan, rutter Portolan chart Itinerary Route map

Property management Terrier Cadaster

Estate plan Cadastral map

it afforded nationalistic interests, scholars in the history of cartography found the progressive model suggested by the period of much appeal. A count of articles in the only international journal devoted to the ﬁeld, Imago Mundi (1935 –2003), reveals that fully a quarter of the articles dealt with maps made in the sixteenth century. The progressive model is easy to accept when viewing maps as a vivid record of geographical exploration and discovery. By 1600, the European map of the world had literally doubled in size within just over a century, a development that Sarton called “an achievement of incredible pregnancy.” 11 What used to be represented in one hemisphere now required two. Europe’s exploitative treatment of that other half politically and ethically is a different story, but the sheer increase in geographical knowledge about the world within a very short time was astounding, and—in the sense that knowledge is generally better than ignorance—a clear sign of progress. On the other hand, in terms of the history of cartography, this view of mapmaking in the Renaissance as a model of metrical progress has blinkered our vision by focusing only on those maps that support such improvements in geographical accuracy. In so doing, we tend to impose our present-day standards of “accurate maps” onto the past, usually forming a self-perpetuating canon of “great maps” that conform to our limited notions of positional accuracy. Equally distorting has been a biographical focus on elite political, military, or scholarly ﬁgures engaged in cartography, to the exclusion of the everyday artisan or map consumer. Another defect of the progressive model has been that, by focusing only on the dramatic changes or events (such as the translation of Ptolemy’s Geography into Latin in 1409), it has masked important continuities in mapping practice that can be discerned from the fourteenth to sixteenth century. All these prejudicial approaches unfortunately ignore many of the richly cultural aspects of the history of cartography, such as how ordinary people viewed the world and their place in it.

The remainder of this introduction thus seeks a compromise by pointing not only to the often profound changes that took place in the Renaissance but also to the striking continuities in practice that remained from the Middle Ages. The advantages of discussing the continuities as well as the changes in a complex and sometimes ambiguous collage are that they counter the oversimpliﬁcation of the Renaissance as a sudden and monolithic revolution in cartographic thought in all its aspects and throughout Europe.

Continuities texts A striking continuity between the medieval and Renaissance periods involves the persistence of textual descriptions of the world, which were by no means replaced by their graphic equivalents. Table 1.1 shows the textual and graphic equivalents of three main categories of map function in the periods in question: general description, navigation, and property management. Examples of the continued use of texts in the Renaissance period can be cited for all these categories of function, such as general descriptions of the world, chorographies, land itineraries, portolans (sailing directions), and land surveys. In Volume 1 of this History, the point was made that the word mappa or mappamundi in the Middle Ages could be used to describe either a text or a map.12 This practice continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as with Sebastian Münster’s Mappa Evropae (Frankfurt, 1537), John Smith’s A Map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), or Thomas Jenner’s A Map of the Whole World (London, 1668). Indeed the metaphorical use of the word “map” to describe not only geographical descriptions but also other activities has exploded even in our own day, as we hear almost daily of the “road map” to peace in the Middle East.13 Similarly, the word “chorography” could mean a written or graphic description of a small region (Greek khôros region or district), often at a larger scale than implied by “geography” or “cosmography” but usually at a smaller scale than implied by “topography”; all these terms had textual and graphic equivalents. It is important to realize, however, that the notion of scale hierarchy in 11. George Sarton, “The Quest for Truth: Scientiﬁc Progress during the Renaissance,” in The Renaissance: Six Essays, ed. Wallace Klippert Ferguson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 55 –76, esp. 58. Sarton lists “The Discovery of the Earth” as the ﬁrst of twelve vignettes in the Renaissance history of science, but he does not mention cartography. 12. David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in HC 1:286 – 370, esp. 287. 13. See the list in David Woodward, “‘Theory’ and The History of Cartography,” in Plantejaments, 31– 48, esp. 35, n. 11.

these various terms is by no means explicit; it was the approach to the proportionality of the representation that was important. “Chorography” could include local and regional representations; its scope was not limited to the amount of landscape that could be observed in one view. In the Middle Ages, the best-known work including “chorography” in its title was Pomponius Mela’s firstcentury a.d. De chorographia, a written description of regions of the known world, which had little effect on medieval cartography (the first printed edition of 1471 contained no maps).14 Ptolemy’s Geography, in drawing a distinction between chorography and geography, on the other hand, implied that both were primarily graphic tools for description of the world at different scales and relying on different sets of skills. Chorography was to be the qualitative (to poion) work of the artist or painter, geography the quantitative (to poson) work of the mathematician; these are the same terms for quantity and quality that are found in chapters 6 and 7 of Aristotle’s Categories. But even in Ptolemy’s Geography, which has been touted as responsible for the improvement of maps in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the text was initially of more interest to the Italian humanists. When the Geography was translated by Jacopo Angeli around 1409, the maps were not included. It was not until 1427 that Cardinal Guillaume Filastre’s copy of the work contained maps. Humanists were just as interested in geographic texts, such as those by Strabo and Pomponius Mela, that had few cartographic components but more literary style. Strabo’s Geography was introduced into Florence by George Gemistus Plethon in 1439, but its novelty lay not in maps but in the vast amount of textual information it contained, even though its geographic content was dated to the first century a.d. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the textual meaning of the word “chorography” continued to predominate and was not supplanted by its growing use in the titles of maps, as exemplified in such works as Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion; or, A Chorographicall Description (London, 1622), William Camden’s Britain; or, A Chorographicall Description (London, 1637), or William Gray’s Chorographia; or, A Survey of Newcastle upon Tine (Newcastle, 1649).15 Likewise, the classical and medieval written land itineraries continued to be a robust tool for wayfinding, and these were by no means replaced by their graphic equivalents. Although we have a famous example of an assemblage of graphic and written itineraries in the Tabula Peutingeriana, an image whose pedigree goes back to the fourth century, written directions of how to get from one place to another predominated over maps in the medieval period. One may even question the extent to which graphic itineraries were actually used on the road. For example, the four versions of Matthew Paris’s “strip map” of the pilgrimage route between London and Apulia

Setting the Stage

(Italy) on the way to the Holy Land may have been drawn to act as a kind of surrogate pilgrimage for the reader rather than as a wayﬁnding device.16 Written itineraries were much more common. A prominent example is the fourteenth-century Bruges itinerary with mercantile routes from Bruges to the rest of Europe.17 Such written itineraries remained popular in the Renaissance. Indeed verbal directions have continued to be popular to the present day, depending on the cognitive styles of users or the street layout and major structural features of cities. A request for directions in Venice is still met by “giù il ponte e poi chiede” (down to that bridge and then ask again), while a similar explanation in New York City will reference the coordinate system of its street grid. And the debate is still ongoing as to whether it is more useful in car navigation systems to have a moving map or spoken directions. Finally, textual sailing directions, known as periploi in classical times and portolans (portolani) in the Middle Ages, continued to be favored by many sailors over their graphic equivalents into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in northern European waters, where they became known as rutters. The confusion still persists today, as the term “portolan” is often used when “portolan chart” is intended, leading some to propose that the term be abolished altogether.18 As FernándezArmesto argues in this volume, maps and charts were not used for navigation in the Renaissance as much as written sailing directions.19 graphics A graphically compelling logical challenge to the progressive model of cartographic development between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is posed by the early development and persistence of the Mediterranean sea charts. Campbell’s study of these charts in Volume 1 of The History of Cartography has been continued by Astengo in this volume, but the use of the year 1500 as the dividing line between the two treatments is arbitrary.

14. F. E. Romer, Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 20 –21. 15. For an excellent and wide-ranging philosophical discussion of the historical relationship of chorography to landscape painting, topographical views, and the mapping of small regions, see Edward S. Casey, Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 154 –70. 16. Daniel K. Connolly, “Imagined Pilgrimage in the Itinerary Maps of Matthew Paris,” Art Bulletin 81 (1999): 598 – 622. 17. P. D. A. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” in HC 1:464 –501, esp. 495. 18. Patrick Gautier Dalché, “D’une technique à une culture: Carte nautique et portulan au XII e et au XIII e siècle,” in L’uomo e il mare nella civiltà occidentale: Da Ulisse a Cristoforo Colombo (Genoa: Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1992), 283 –312. 19. See chapter 30 in this volume, esp. pp. 749 –50.

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

Gautier Dalché has argued convincingly for an appearance of such charts around 1200, even though the earliest extant chart—the so-called Carte Pisane—appears to date from the late thirteenth century, in any event squarely within the period normally thought of as “medieval.” 20 From the earliest extant example, the charts were structured with rhumb lines and inscribed placenames perpendicular to the coastline, unlike other maps of the period. Although the number of rhumb lines was customarily doubled beginning in the mid-ﬁfteenth century and the alignment of the Mediterranean on the charts changed by some ten degrees in the sixteenth century, the positional accuracy with which the charts were plotted changed little over the next three centuries. Neither did the signs for rocks and shoals around the coasts. Except for the number and choice of place-names and the extent of coverage beyond the Mediterranean, the style and content of the charts were notably resilient.21 Another continuity that belies a favorite myth about radical cartographic changes in the Renaissance is the persistence of the oblique or elevation view of cities over planimetric or orthogonal representations. Different viewpoints or geometric structures of city representations were largely experimental in the sixteenth century. Certainly there was no simple progress from an oblique viewpoint toward a planimetric representation, as some authors have proposed.22 The examples of orthogonal maps from the ancient and classical world (Neolithic rock art, Babylonian clay tablets, the Forma Urbis Romae [203 – 208 a.d.]) or from the Middle Ages (the Plan of Saint Gall [ninth century], the plan of Venice in the “Chronologia Magna” [before 1346], a plan of Siena’s port city Talamone [1306]) are eloquent witnesses against this model. Arguably the pinnacle of Renaissance town representation in terms of both popularity and sophistication was the Civitates orbis terrarum (1572 –1618), in which the oblique view and elevation, not orthogonality, were the viewpoints of choice.23 Celestial maps and globes enjoyed a degree of continuity during the Middle Ages and Renaissance because the principles on which they were constructed did not materially change. Ptolemy’s Almagest, or at least a shortened version of it, the Epitome, was available throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and coordinates of right ascension and declination continued to be used in the Renaissance for specifying star positions, although the base line from which to compute declination changed from the ecliptic to the celestial equator. What really changed in celestial mapping was the number of new star positions that could be added as a result of the telescope, which was developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Likewise, the principles of surveying associated with the Roman agrimensores, in manuals that can be traced back to the fourth and ﬁfth centuries, were remarkably resilient, even though they were purely descriptive repre-

sentations of landed property and did not lend themselves to the calculation of distances or areas. In the early thirteenth century, surveys began to provide area measurements, and tables exist that give the length of an acre of land for any given width. The “Practica geometriae” (1220) by Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) describes how to use a plumb-bob level to find the horizontal area of a slope and shows how a quadrant can be used in surveying. Although we cannot infer from works such as Fibonacci’s that the recommended instructions were routinely practiced, their appearance does reflect a rudimentary knowledge of measurement units and techniques needed in producing land descriptions. The method of the land surveyor involved measuring angles and distances in a traverse from one point to another, preferably closed. Surveying manuals in the Middle Ages include the French treatise by Bertrand Boysset, “La siensa de destrar” (1405). In “De fluminibus seu tiberiadis” (1355), the Italian jurist Bartolo da Sassoferrato describes how plans might be used to settle disputes over the division of watercourses. In the midfifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti described several methods of land survey, probably based on the practical manuals, but also hinting at the possibilities of triangulation surveys to fix positions, a technique that was not systematically explained until the Libellus de locorum describendorum ratione of Gemma Frisius (1533). But the extent of the use of these manuals and their translation into graphic maps is difficult to document.24 Even in the mid-sixteenth century, when ground measuring instruments and techniques had been commonly

20. See chapter 7 in this volume and Patrick Gautier Dalché, Carte marine et portulan au XII e siècle: Le Liber de Existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostri mediterranei (Pise, circa 1200) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1995). 21. Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in HC 1:371– 463. 22. Denis Wood, “Now and Then: Comparisons of Ordinary Americans’ Symbol Conventions with Those of Past Cartographers,” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 9 (1977): 151– 61. This progressive view is endorsed by P. D. A Harvey in The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). 23. Lucia Nuti, “The Mapped Views by Georg Hoefnagel: The Merchant’s Eye, the Humanist’s Eye,” Word and Image 4 (1988): 545 –70. 24. See F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors: The Growth of a Profession (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 33 –34; Derek J. de Solla Price, “Medieval Land Surveying and Topographical Maps,” Geographical Journal 121 (1955): 1–10; H. C. Darby, “The Agrarian Contribution to Surveying in England,” Geographical Journal 82 (1933): 529 –35; P. Pansier, “Le traité de l’arpentage de Bertrand Boysset,” Annales d’Avignon et du Comtat Venaissan 12 (1926): 5 –36; Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Bertrand Boysset et la science,” in Église et culture en France méridionale (XII e –XIV e siècle) (Toulouse: Privat, 2000), 261– 85; and Bartolo da Sassoferrato, La Tiberiade di Bartole da Sasferrato del modo di dividere l’Alluuioni, l’Isole, & gl’aluei (Rome: G. Gigliotto, 1587). Leon Battista Alberti’s plan of Rome, although using

described in such books as Leonard Digges’s A Boke Named Tectonicon or Abel Foullon’s Vsaige et description de l’holometre, the interest in surveying was often still qualitative. In England, although land surveying developed dramatically after the massive land transfers following the Reformation, mapping lagged behind until the end of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII spent large sums on fortifications, of which a significant amount went toward mapping, but it was not until the reign of James I that maps were routinely made for civilian purposes, such as the delineation of forests or private residences. There were differences in practice between countries. In the seventeenth century, English surveyors, perhaps influenced by the textbooks of John Norden and Aaron Rathborne, tended to stress the precise recording of land use, land resources, and quantitative acreage data in their plans. French surveying differed in that far more attention was paid to the rendering of buildings and their place in the topographical landscape, as in Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s Les plus excellents bastiments de France (1576), with less interest in the precise calculation of acreage and maps for estate planning.25 Local land surveying owed its roots more to the practical needs of measurement than to the philosophical works of classical scholars. It was intended to solve problems of tunneling, land subdivision, road and bridge building, mine layout, river channeling, and other tasks of civil engineering. It was not derived from Ptolemy’s Geography, for Ptolemy stressed that local maps (chorographies) should not be based on measurement, but should instead be made by artists. Rather, land surveying’s instrumentation and practice were closely tied to hydrographic surveying, with one crucial difference. While hydrographers could survey coastlines and oceans with impunity, a large part of the land surveyor’s job involved obtaining permission from landowners to cross their land and placate local inhabitants.26 The surveys of England and Wales under Christopher Saxton in the 1570s or of Bavaria by Philipp Apian (1568) were undertaken with noble patronage so that such access could be granted. These detailed large-scale land maps constituted the discovery of the homeland and contributed to the consolidation of the idea of political unity.27 If the number of maps is in any way a measure of discovery, Europe, not the New World, was the place “most” discovered in the Renaissance, as Karrow points out.28 A final graphic continuity lies in the sacred function of maps. There was no clean break from the sacred mappamundi to the secular world map that can be pinpointed to a single time and place. As Watts shows in her chapter, maps with religious content in the Renaissance were not simply quaint holdovers from the mappaemundi, and the usual dichotomy between religious maps as belonging

Setting the Stage

to the Middle Ages and secular ones as belonging to the Renaissance may be misleading.29 If printing is deemed to be a quintessential Renaissance trait, of the 222 maps printed between 1472 and 1500 in the West listed by Campbell, only about a third (72) are from other than classical or early medieval sources, only a tenth (23) if we exclude the maps of islands in the Greek archipelago in Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti’s isolario, which are in the portolan chart tradition and derived from a 1420 manuscript of Cristoforo Buondelmonti.30 In the sixteenth century, the most popular country portrayed on maps was arguably the Holy Land. Certainly more maps were made of it during the century than of France, Spain, or Portugal. Almost as many maps of the Holy Land were made as world maps or maps of the African continent.31 Maps with religious themes were not limited to maps of the Holy Land; the great map murals of the Vatican made for Pope Gregory XIII—particularly in the Galleria del Belvedere and the Terza Loggia—when taken together are seen as a statement of the ecclesiastic leadership of the church over not only the Italian peninsula but the world at large.32 And thousands of printed maps were sold to the pilgrims who visited Rome; mapsellers in the printers’ and publishers’ quarter of the city, the Parione, were strategically located to take advantage of the pilgrims’ presence. While many of these were secular in nature, serving to remind the pilgrims of the city of Rome, some had a speciﬁc

a polar coordinate system to plot the distances and bearings of buildings from a central point (in the same way that surveyors might plot a traverse), bears little geometrical relationship to the rectangular coordinate system proposed for maps in the Geography. Indeed Alberti’s interest in the Geography appears to have been more as a target of satire than as a methodological source, for his major allusion to the treatise appears in his irony in Praise of the Fly, where he says that the beautiful patterns on the wings of flies may have inspired Ptolemy’s maps. See Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 244. It is more likely that Alberti relied on the methods of land surveyors rather than the principles of Ptolemy. 25. Renzo Dubbini, Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 39. 26. Marica Milanesi, “La rinascita della geografia dell’Europa, 1350 – 1480,” in Europa e Mediterraneo tra medioevo e prima età moderna: L’osservatorio italiano, ed. Sergio Gensini (Pisa: Pacini, 1992), 35–59. 27. Richard Helgerson, “The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England,” Representations 16 (1986): 50 – 85. 28. Robert W. Karrow, “Intellectual Foundations of the Cartographic Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1999), 240. 29. See chapter 11 in this volume. 30. Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472 –1500 (London: British Library, 1987), 232 –33 (table 2). 31. Karrow, “Intellectual Foundations,” 241– 42 and fig. 6.2. 32. See chapter 32 in this volume.

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

fig. 1.2. ANTONIO LAFRERI, LE SETTE CHIESE DI ROMA, 1575.

Size of the original: ca. 39.8 50.8 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BL (Maps 23807.[1]).

religious purpose, such as the map showing the seven churches in Rome to be customarily visited (ﬁg. 1.2).33

management, these functions intertwined with each other, and the demand for customized maps grew. (It is for this reason that most of these administrative maps remained in manuscript.) The structure of regional archives in countries such as Italy, France, or Great Britain reﬂects these administrative needs even today.35 In addition, it is the changing relationship between text and image that is central to understanding the shift in worldview from primarily aural to visual. De Certeau views the transition from itinerary to map as the hallmark of the Renaissance: “If one takes the ‘map’ in its current

Changes Between 1400 and 1472, in the manuscript era, it has been estimated that there were a few thousand maps in circulation; between 1472 and 1500, about 56,000; and between 1500 and 1600, millions.34 The signiﬁcant increase in the sheer number of maps available for viewing calls for an explanation. Certainly maps began to serve a huge variety of political and economic functions in society. As administrative bureaucracies became more complex in meeting an array of needs related to public works, town planning, resolution of legal boundary issues, commercial navigation, military strategies, and rural land

33. See pp. 775 –79 in this volume. 34. Karrow, “Intellectual Foundations,” 8 –9. 35. Detailed descriptions appear in the following chapters.

geographical form, we can see that in the course of the period marked by the birth of modern scientific discourse (i.e., from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility.” 36 We have discussed the ways in which such textual equivalents of maps as itineraries, sailing directions, and written chorographies, popular in the Middle Ages, persisted into the Renaissance. It is not that the huge increase in graphics usurped the functions of the written word, but rather that a new idiom was added to the old. Although much has been written recently about the affinities of graphic maps with verbal or textual passages that serve the function of maps (including the section on maps and literature in this volume),37 we should not lose sight of the growing importance in the Renaissance of a general reorientation toward spatial analogies and the culture of objects. In Ong’s view, a book now became an object rather than a record of what someone had said, “belonging more to the world of things and less to the world of words,” and the interest in plotting the surface of the globe “makes this same Gutenberg era the great age of cartography and exploration. . . . The new world was a world of objects as nothing before had ever been.” 38 How did the nature of maps change in this period, and what was behind the changes? There were a multiplicity of nested periods, regions, and scales of activity, with different criteria for periodization. The timing of the cartographic Renaissance in the Italian states was very different from that in England, for example, so it is difficult to pinpoint transforming events that affected all parts of Europe. Despite these caveats, fundamental changes did take place between the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and we can generalize about them. These changes are discussed under three broad categories that concern the ways people saw and knew about their world by means of maps: (1) changes in the internal relationships of map structure or graphic syntax: the internal logic, language, and arrangement of parts or elements of maps; (2) changes in the relationship of the map to its sources in the observed world, including the individualization, globalization, quantification, and valorization of experience; the erosion of the authority of classical geographical texts; and the conflict between theory and practice (both qualitative and quantitative) from direct observation; and (3) changes in the relationship of maps and society through the dissemination, publication, patronization, and commoditization of geographical knowledge and culture. In some respects this categorization reflects a simplified threefold system of syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, relating approximately to the study of maps as artifacts, representations, and texts, although that is as far as the language of semiotic theory will be invoked in this chapter.39

Setting the Stage

the internal relationships of map structure or graphic syntax One variety of cartographic changes that took place can be broadly discussed under the topic graphic syntax. This involved changes in the way that the parts or elements of maps were systematically arranged in terms of (1) the conception of space as an abstract geometric transformation, (2) how labels and graphic elements were related on maps, and (3) an increasing assumption that the elements represented on a map should be cosynchronous—a separation of time and space, of geography from history. Space as an Abstract Conception The change in the abstract conception of space—from the center-enhancing mappaemundi to the Ptolemaic isotropic structure of mapmaking—has often been called the quintessential modernity of Renaissance cartography. The evidence for this lies in the relative scarcity of terrestrial maps bearing longitude and latitude before the fifteenth century. No terrestrial maps using longitude and latitude survive from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, despite Roger Bacon’s description of one on a sheepskin with cities shown by small red circles in the “Opus maius” (ca. 1265).40 In comparison, by the midseventeenth century, the observation of latitude and longitude as control points for topographical surveys had been introduced in France. What happened in the intervening four centuries is routinely ascribed to the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s manual of mapmaking in the first decade of the fifteenth century. Coordinates The terrestrial coordinate system that Ptolemy describes— applied to the mapping of the heavens since Hellenistic times—assumes an isotropic, uniform surface on which abstract positions are plotted on maps of the world or regions of it larger than the chorographies. The implications of this apparently prosaic statement are complex and far ranging. It implies that the position of one place is no more important than that of another, and that both geometric center and bounding frame are arbitrary constructions re36. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 120. 37. See chapters 12 –18 in this volume. 38. Walter J. Ong, “System, Space, and Intellect in Renaissance Symbolism,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 18 (1956): 222 –39, esp. 229 –30 and 238. 39. This analogy is explored in three of my essays in Plantejaments: “‘Theory’ and The History,” 31– 48; “Starting with the Map: The Rosselli Map of the World, ca. 1508,” 71–90; and “The Image of the Map in the Renaissance,” 133 –52. 40. David Woodward with Herbert M. Howe, “Roger Bacon on Geography and Cartography,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences:

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

sulting from the assumptions about the reference lines from which longitude and latitude are measured. The frame either completes the map or is necessary to draw a clear boundary between the space of the map and the space of the world outside. The notion of a bounded uniform space also implies that the objects placed in it are cosynchronous, a concept that, as we shall see, led to the idea that historical and “modern” maps could and should be separate documents. Since the surface is represented as a uniform space, scale and proportion are also possible. The statement also implies some kind of geometric transformation from the spherical globe to the flat map. Furthermore, the map now has not a single viewpoint, but multiple (strictly speaking, infinite) viewpoints with orthogonal lines of sight (perpendicular to the surface). The resulting world and regional maps had a number of theoretical advantages. Because they were broadly based on a proportioned structure (Ptolemy does not go into the problem of maintaining absolute scale on flat maps derived from a spherical surface), new places could be fitted in as their coordinates became available without “stretching” or extending the map. Furthermore, since the concept was based on a spherical earth in the first place rather than on the more restricted inhabited world known to the Greeks, the Ptolemaic frame could theoretically accommodate discoveries worldwide. This is why the apparently modest world map signed by Francesco Rosselli (ca. 1508) is so important.41 The ca. 1507 globe gores by Martin Waldseemüller are a similar kind of graphic device, perhaps the first such conception of how to make a globe. Both these maps show the whole world in the blink of an eye, in such a way that the viewer does not have to move (figs. 1.3 and 6.5). It is a humanly impossible view, even from space, achieved by an arbitrary unfolding transformation—a kind of exploded diagram— of the sphere, requiring the reader to suspend the apparent reality of a single viewpoint. Rosselli’s map is a fundamentally different representation of the earth than a globe, which is a scale model of the world not requiring a sphere/plane transformation, and which assumes we will move around it or twirl the object in order to obtain a “whole” view. Rosselli’s map was a new idea requiring a different, highly constructed, episteme.42 One of the telling features of the Ptolemaic cartographic system was that the world was shown to the viewer in a net of numbered parallels and meridians that implied its systematic order and orientation. This numbering is a crucial difference between the graticule of a map projection and the grid of a perspective system that artists were developing in the fifteenth century. It implied a scale.43 Measurements of sufficient precision to take full advantage of the Ptolemaic paradigm were not available until astronomical measurements of latitude and longitude had become routine. Even while stressing the advantages

of astronomical observations over travel records, Ptolemy himself realized that the gathering of longitude and latitude information by astronomical means, particularly longitude measured by the simultaneous observations of eclipses, was severely lacking (Geography 1.4). The establishment of east-west distances on land had relied in large part on the reports of merchants, who, Ptolemy quotes Marinus of Tyre as saying, “often exaggerate[d] the distances out of boastfulness,” requiring revision (Geography 1.11–12). For similar calculations by sea, the source was likely the periploi or sailing directions.44 The map projection system also induced in the reader confidence that the map was representing the world in just proportion. But this confidence was clearly misplaced unless observations had been made using measurements. The rhetorical phrase “from actual surveys” came to be a hallmark of quality in maps of the seventeenth century. Before careful measurement, distances from one place to another could be roughly paced; the position of a place could be described in relation to a natural feature (at the confluence of two rivers, for example, or where a river enters the sea). The realization of the need for careful measurement arose in part from the advent of commercial trade enterprises that attempted to standardize units of length and weight. Geographic coordinates were thus mainly of scholarly and not practical concern until reliable astronomical measurements of both longitude and latitude became available in the late eighteenth century, after a satisfactory chronometer had been developed. Coordinates and projection grids certainly were powerful rhetorical devices in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the data behind them was often questionable. Maps and Perspective The visual similarity of the diagrams in the Geography illustrating how map “projections” are constructed and the diagrams used to illustrate linear perspective have led to a great deal of confusion in relating the two. One author directly linked their origin, arguing that Filippo Brunelleschi’s experiments in perspective occurred at about the same time that Ptolemy’s Geography reached Florence.45 The arguments center around Ptolemy’s Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 199 –222. 41. Woodward, “Starting with the Map,” 71–90. 42. See p. 371 in this volume. 43. David Woodward, “Il ritratto della terra,” in Nel segno di Masaccio: L’invenzione della prospettiva, ed. Filippo Camerota, exhibition catalog (Florence: Giunti, Firenze Musei, 2001), 258 – 61. 44. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 30, 62 – 63, and 70 –74, esp. 72. 45. Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Florentine Interest in Ptolemaic Cartography as Background for Renaissance Painting, Architecture, and the

Setting the Stage

fig. 1.3. WORLD MAP BY FRANCESCO ROSSELLI, CA. 1508. Rosselli’s ovoid world map, although modest in size and engraving style, signals a revolutionary change in representing the whole world. It is the earliest surviving map to project all 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude of the earth’s sphere onto a flat plane. It thus enables the viewer to obtain an otherwise impossible view of the whole earth and

confronts the viewer with the possibility of the potential discovery of any place on earth. Three examples of this map have been mentioned in the literature; the other two are in the National Maritime Museum, London, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence (see plate 16). Size of the original copper engraving: 20.5 34.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Arthur Holzheimer Collection.

so-called third projection, which is described in book 7 of the Geography, the only one of the transformations described in that book that is actually geometrically projected from a single origin point. Ptolemy’s aim was to show how the inhabited world would look as seen through an armillary sphere, as in a perspective picture. The conceptual similarities between the construction of Ptolemy’s third projection and linear perspective are beguiling, but the historical links have yet to be convincingly documented. Humanists did not show much interest in rigorous map projections for terrestrial use in the ﬁrst half of the ﬁfteenth century. There was no documented interest in the third projection, and indeed it failed to be illustrated in an important manuscript of the Geography, the Codex Urbinas Graecus 82. Furthermore, other mathematically rigorous perspective projections, such as the stereographic, had been introduced much earlier for nonterrestrial mapping, as in the plotting of retes (coordinate nets for different latitudes) for astrolabes. Despite the conceptual similarities of stereographic projection to linear perspective, such as a single origin point, the common use of stereographic projection during the Middle Ages failed to result in the invention of perspective.46

Centering and Framing The adoption of systematic map projections introduced a variety of centering and framing issues. The center of a projection did not usually imply either the author’s viewpoint or the most important feature to be portrayed. Unlike mappaemundi, in which Jerusalem, Delos, Rome, or some other holy place might be at the center of the map, a map such as Rosselli’s ovoid world map was centered on no particular place (the center is off the coast of modern Somaliland). What could be manipulated was the ﬁeld of view of the projection. Since graduation in longitude and latitude forced the hand of the cartographer to some extent, the area to be covered by a projection had to be carefully calculated. Jodocus Hondius’s twohemisphere map of the world, for example, was designed to show the voyages of Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish to advantage by including the Americas and Europe/Africa in the same hemisphere, an arrangement that is not to my knowledge repeated on any other double hemisphere maps during the Renaissance (ﬁg. 10.7). Discovery of America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974): 274 –92. 46. Woodward, “Il ritratto della terra.”

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

The innovative shapes of map projections in the early sixteenth century— oval, ellipse, double hemisphere, cordiform, double cordiform—may have had something to do with the parallel desire in astronomy for a perfect geometrical concordance of objects in the heavens. Georg Joachim Rheticus, for example, believed there were six planets because six was a perfect number (its factors of 1, 2, and 3 add up to 6). Johannes Kepler also postulated a link between the number of planets and geometry: the five Platonic regular solids plus the sphere.47 Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer seem to have experimented with map projections that interrupted the sphere using regular solids, in exercises echoed by Buckminster Fuller in the twentieth century. These examples underline the concordance between terrestrial and celestial cartography that is stressed in this volume by Dekker.48 Orientation of the map was another issue. The public often asks why north is now routinely placed at the top of world maps, considering that the world has no “up” or “down.” The most straightforward answer is that, during classical times, the people who cared about such things lived in the northern hemisphere and represented their hemisphere uppermost on globes. Since Ptolemy tells us that world maps should be made from globes, it made sense to orient such maps in the same way, with north at the top. Ptolemy’s model was eventually accepted as the norm in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and by the twentieth century it had become the most widely disseminated system of world map orientation, even in the southern hemisphere. Its influence now often extends to maps of smaller areas.49 Orthogonality Another aspect of structure associated with coordinate systems and their implied systematic measurement was orthogonality, which we can define as a property of representation according to which every point on a surface is viewed from a direction perpendicular to that surface. In the cartographic context, this means that points are viewed from directly above the earth. This issue has been most frequently rehearsed in discussions about city plans and views and has generated a bewildering array of terms for describing whether a town is seen directly from above, directly from the side, or from somewhere in between (fig. 1.4).50 The very few examples of printed or manuscript orthogonal plans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—Leon Battista Alberti’s reconstructed “Descriptio urbis Romae,” Leonardo da Vinci’s plan of Imola, the 1545 manuscript plan of Portsmouth, Leonardo Bufalini’s plan of Rome, or Antonio Campi’s plan of Cremona—are frequently held up as quintessential city plans of the Renaissance, whereas the usual method of portraying a city was as an oblique view, in which the angle of view is less than ninety degrees.51

15 PLAN

high OBLIQUE VIEW (isometric or perspective)

low OBLIQUE VIEW (isometric or perspective)

PROFILE elevation or panorama (a low profile)

fig. 1.4. VIEWPOINTS USED IN CARTOGRAPHIC AND LANDSCAPE REPRESENTATIONS. The terms “plan,” “oblique view,” and “profile” are preferred over the options listed in parentheses below them. Oblique views may be high or low, depending on their purpose, and drawn isometrically or in linear perspective. Each element in the representation—street network, buildings, or other features in the landscape—may have its own view. After Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493 –1793 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 5 (fig. 1.4). 47. George Molland, “Science and Mathematics from the Renaissance to Descartes,” in The Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Rationalism, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: Routledge, 1993), 104 –39, esp. 115. 48. See chapter 6 in this volume. 49. An alternative explanation is offered by Casey, who says (in Representing Place, 172) that maps became oriented to the north because “this is where the primary magnetic pole is to be found.” But the puzzling notion of a “primary magnetic pole” perhaps derives from the convention and is not the cause for it. Magnetic compasses align themselves with the earth’s magnetic field; they do not “point” to either pole. 50. Terms for “viewed from directly above” include plan, plan view, geometric plan, ichnographic plan, and orthogonal plan. Terms meaning “viewed directly from the side” include elevation, profile, or panorama (which is a long profile, even 360 degrees). “From somewhere in between” depends on whether the view is from a high or a low angle: either a high oblique view or a low oblique view. The terms plan, profile, view, and oblique are preferred. The complication enters when dealing with how features are represented to scale. Plans are drawn to a constant scale, or at least as constant as the projection will allow. Profiles also have a consistent scale if the information in them is at a constant distance from the viewer. Oblique views may be either isometric or perspective. In the perspective view, the scale of things nearer in the view is larger than that of things farther away. In an isometric view, the scale of elements from the front to the back in the view is the same as the scale of elements from side to side. The vague terms “bird’seye view” or “perspective view” are thus to be avoided. An additional complication enters when dealing with different elements in the view, such as the street network, buildings, or other features in the landscape (e.g., trees, hills). Each element can be represented from different views and at different scales. Thus it is possible to have a street network that is constructed in plan while the buildings on the street are seen either in profile or obliquely. 51. See chapter 27 in this volume.

Setting the Stage

In this context, it is useful to draw a distinction between views that are made from a single known viewpoint (such as might be achieved by an artist viewing the city from a vantage point outside it and representing it as a camera obscura might) and views that are reconstructed as if from a viewpoint only available to one flying above the scene, as in Cornelis Anthonisz.’s celebrated view of Amsterdam. The former constructs a mimetically analogous space by direct observation. The latter requires a mathematical construction and an understanding of perspective geometry in which positions on a planimetric map are plotted onto a perspective grid. In practice, as in the view of Venice by Jacopo de’ Barbari (1500), the construction was not as mathematically rigorous as the theory suggests, with various aerial viewpoints being employed for different parts of the view.52 The oblique view or elevation was also the easiest way of representing the third dimension, the earth’s topographical irregularities on a flat surface, in a “lifelike manner.” 53 In a plan view map, hills and valleys are difficult to portray in three dimensions, as the history of relief representation well illustrates.54 Commensurable hachures and contours were not in common use until the nineteenth century, when military and civil engineers found them useful for measuring slopes. In the Renaissance, the artist might use shading or chiaroscuro, assuming a light source illuminating the mountains from the side and shading them as they might appear from above. Regional maps by Leonardo da Vinci, such as his map of Tuscany, are frequently illustrated as examples.55 Labels In the syntax of the map, it is also possible to distinguish between cartographic and epicartographic elements. Both contribute to the meaning of the whole map, and one is not more important than the other. Cartographic elements are graphic signs within the map frame or on the map plane and can be transformed by generalization and projection, while epicartographic elements are not subject to graphic generalization or projection and lie outside the graphic space or layer of the map. Epicartographic elements include inscriptional names, labels, legends, scales, orientation devices, titles, dedications, notes to the reader, decorative items, or descriptive text about map features. They are usually regarded as being ancillary to the map and have thus not received the analytical attention they deserve. The willingness to include words in the visual space had certainly been present in medieval didactic and narrative painting for the same reasons of clarity in communication. Presumably they were to be read aloud to the viewing audience. For a larger and increasingly literate audience, the inclusion of text posed several issues. One was the choice of language. The increasing

use of the vernacular is evident in the late fifteenth century and the sixteenth century for most classes of printed maps, with the exception of those that were intended for scholarly, clerical, or international audiences, for which Latin still remained the language of choice. Latin was displaced by the vernaculars, first in literature, then in law and administration. In maps, the use of language related to the wider market for such books as Sebastian Münster’s Cosmography. Latin was used for scholarly editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, except for Francesco Berlinghieri’s version in Italian rhyme and Giacomo Gastaldi’s pocket edition published in Venice in 1548. Maps of the world and of islands, for which there might have been a more multilingual market, remained in Latin. Cosynchronicity A third change in graphic syntax involved what could be called the “tense” of the map—whether the map refers to the past, present, or even future. The tense of medieval mappaemundi usually covered a broad span of historical time. No strong distinction between a location and an event was drawn.56 Places that had once been important in history but no longer existed were shown side by side with currently important places. The map told a story, often a very long one. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the atlas became a major genre, this storytelling role was still enormously important in maps. In the Renaissance, we see an increasing distinction between the representation of current and historical geographies on maps. As the past came to be viewed as something other than the present, it became an object of study in its own right. Collections of Ptolemy’s maps began— with Francesco Berlinghieri’s Septe giornate della Geographia and the Ulm edition of Ptolemy’s Geography 52. Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500,” Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 425 –74, and Francesco Guerra et al., “Informatica e ‘infografica’ per lo studio della veduta prospettica di Venezia,” in A volo d’uccello: Jacopo de’ Barbari e le rappresentazioni di città nell’Europa del Rinascimento, ed. Giandomenico Romanelli, Susanna Biadene, and Camillo Tonini, exhibition catalog (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, 1999), 93 –100. 53. Lucia Nuti, “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a Representational Language,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 105 –28. Nuti discusses the preference for oblique views over planimetric maps in the sixteenth century, on the grounds they were “lifelike” (“ad vivum”), and the eventual merging of the plan view with oblique pictures of buildings and monuments superimposed on it. 54. Eduard Imhof, Cartographic Relief Presentation, ed. Harry Steward (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1982). 55. Woodward, “Image of the Map,” 142. 56. Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997), and Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 84 –124.

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

(both published in 1482)—to include tabulae novellae or tabulae modernae (modern maps) side by side with the classical maps of Ptolemy.57 By the time Mercator’s edition of Ptolemy was published in 1578, the modern maps had disappeared. Ptolemy was now to be valued as a historical ﬁgure.58 The use of the word “modern” in map titles became much more common, along with such other commercially attractive catchwords and phrases as “universal,” “new,” and “everything known up until now.” Accompanying such words in titles were those intended to convince the consumer that the cartographer was representing the truth: “True description,” “faithful,” “with the utmost accuracy.” This genre of modern maps was consciously constructed to represent current geography. Information depicted within the frame of the map— within the limits of the sources—was assumed to be up to date. In the sixteenth century, a separate cartographic genre arose: explicitly historical maps depicting places as they once had been. The roots of the genre lay partly in the antiquarian interests of the Italian humanists of the ﬁfteenth century, such as Flavio Biondo, whose fascination with the ruins of Rome drove them to reconstruct the city’s past geography. As Rome recovered from its sack by Charles V’s troops in 1527, maps of ancient Rome were among the most popular items sold by Antonio Salamanca and Antonio Lafreri, the printsellers who emigrated to the printing district of Rome and set up a successful partnership.59 Likewise, historical maps of the Holy Land depicting the lands as they had appeared in biblical times were among the most widely distributed maps in the Reformation.60 In the late sixteenth century, historical maps were gathered into a separate section known as the Parergon (1579 –1606) of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum.61 Maps were now either ancient or modern; the blending of time and space we saw in medieval world maps had translated into a compartmentalizing of old and new, of history and geography. the relationship of maps to sources in the observed world Maps as a Metaphor for Science The use of intersections of longitude and latitude that Ptolemy proposed as control points for mapmaking is not unlike the process by which a researcher gathers observations about the world and compares them against the framework of the laws of nature. It is not surprising that the map has been used as a metaphor for modern science.62 If “science” in the Renaissance meant the pursuit of knowledge about the natural world, the model of cartography built upon the cumulative observations of others.63 Implied also is the importance of collaboration

with contemporary colleagues. For cartography in the sixteenth century, the two best examples are Sebastian Münster and Abraham Ortelius. Toward the end of the preface to his Cosmography, dedicated to Charles V, Münster tells us that he relied on correspondence with observers in countries outside Germany to provide him with corrections and updates based on their local knowledge.64 Ortelius included in the Theatrum orbis terrarum—for the first time—a list of authors whose maps he relied on for his compilations.65 An illustration of this approach to compilation using widely different sources is provided by Nicolaus Cusanus’s intriguing image of the cosmographer as creator, which we find in the Compendium, written in the year of his death, 1464. Nicolaus chose the metaphor of a cosmographer as a man positioned in a city with five gates, representing the five senses. Messengers bring him information about the world using these senses, and he records the information in order to have a complete record of the external world. He tries to keep all the gates open so as not to miss information gathered by any particular sense. When he has received all the information from the messengers, he “compiles it into a well-ordered and

57. The “novella” maps in Berlinghieri were of France, Italy, Palestine, and Spain. The Ulm Ptolemy “moderna” maps added one of northern Europe. See Campbell, Earliest Printed Maps, 124 –25. 58. Claudius Ptolemy, Tabulae geographicae: Cl. Ptolemei admentem autoris restitutae et emendate, ed. Gerardus Mercator (Cologne: G. Kempen, 1578). 59. David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors & Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), 41– 44; see also pp. 775 –77. 60. Catherine Delano-Smith and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 1500 –1600: An Illustrated Catalogue (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991). 61. Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), and Walter A. Goffart, Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570 –1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 62. Stephen Edelston Toulmin, Knowing and Acting: An Invitation to Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1976), and David Turnbull, Maps Are Territories, Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits (Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press, 1989). 63. Edgar Zilsel, “The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945): 325 – 49, esp. 326. Zilsel explains that the idea of progress comes about most clearly in the notion that “scientific knowledge is brought about step by step through contributions of generations of explorers building upon and gradually amending the findings of their predecessors.” Zilsel uses the metaphor of “explorers,” but of course this is precisely the way in which maps of geographical exploration are made. 64. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographiae universalis (Basel: Henri Petri, 1559), praefatio. 65. Zilsel, in “Concept of Scientific Progress,” 344 – 45, regards Ortelius’s list of authors as “the first extensive bibliography in modern scientific literature. . . . [It] too manifest[s] the modern idea of scientific coöperation.” See also Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century.

Setting the Stage

proportionally measured map lest it be lost.” 66 He then shuts the gates, sends away the messengers, and turns to the map, meditating on God as the Creator who existed prior to the entire world, just as the cosmographer existed prior to the appearance of the map. Nicolaus concludes that, “in so far as he is a cosmographer, he is creator of the world,” a carefully worded phrase whose sentiment would get cosmographers such as Gerardus Mercator and André Thevet into trouble with the church a century later.67 Nicolaus’s story illustrates the notion that by creating maps people saw, perhaps for the first time, that they could influence events and create worlds, that they could have the freedom to do things, rather than accept passively whatever God had ordained. Implicit in this passage is the realization that the world and the human representation of it were two different things. Open and Closed Systems The cartographer could create a representation of the world by systematic observation and could control the marks on paper that referred to things in the real world. The cartographer was in control of the situation, as we see from one of those rare glimpses of what was going on in the cartographer’s mind. On the map of the siege of Algiers, Paolo Forlani addresses his readers: “I have respect for the proportions of Italy and Spain vis-à-vis the bridge marked A, but to show all its details to your eyes in the true method of chorography, we have made it the [exaggerated] size and form that you see.” 68 This awareness of the representation itself and of how it relates to the world is certainly not absent in the Middle Ages. Matthew Paris once drew the attention of the reader to the fact that he would have made his map of Britain in the correct proportion had the size of the page allowed it.69 Roger Bacon understood such a need when he indicated that he had represented cities on his thirteenth-century world map with red circles.70 And the makers of the portolan charts, which as we have seen exemplified one of the great continuities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, were clearly aware of the system of signs that they created. What appears to have been missing in the Middle Ages was the inclusion of a formal legend or map key that makes explicit the relationship between a sign and what it signifies. For example, for some categories of information, portolan charts had a monosemic system of color and sign, as in the use of small crosses for rocks and dots for shoals off coasts. A small cross never meant a shoal. But there are no legends. This is not because a legend was not possible, but because none was necessary. The cartographer and the intended users of the map belonged to a highly specialized closed system of communication involving a deeply initiated audience; coding could prosper, but a legend was unnecessary because the audience already knew

the code. In an open system, in which a wider audience is targeted, it is much more difficult to omit the legend. For example, in Sebastian von Rotenhan’s map of Franconia in the late 1520s, published by Peter Apian in 1533, the cartographer tells the reader that a particular sign means a city with a bishopric.71 A modern analogy of closed and open sign systems is the contrast between modern tourist maps, with their mimetic pictures of buildings, presumably intended for a broad international audience, and an aeronautical chart, with its arcane array of signs, designed for an initiated and highly trained audience. As the variety of specialized uses for maps multiplied in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, maps increasingly relied on special cognitive “agreements” between the mapmaker and map user in the form of legends implied or explicit. Joining sea charts as examples of closed sign systems were globes, armillary spheres, celestial maps, engineering plans for public works, military and fortification maps for strategic planning, legal maps to address resource and boundary issues, historical maps for scholars, and biblical maps for exegesis. Each type of map required the development of its own arcane coding system. This difference between open and closed sign systems is analogous to the perceived difference between natural and artificial languages. Since natural images are considered to mimic nature (a line represents a horizon or some other kind of boundary), an external reality, their authority is also external and God-like. The human creation of an artificial representation, such as a technical map with a legend, challenged this authority and spoke to the independence of the mapmaker. Geographical Exploration and Trade Part of the independence of the mapmaker involved an increasing reliance on firsthand accounts of geographical phenomena in an ever-expanding world. This reliance on observations from personal experience is usually placed in opposition to the tradition of medieval book learning 66. Nicolaus Cusanus, Compendium, ed. Bruno Decker and Karl Bormann, Nicolai de Cusa Opera omnia, vol. 11/3 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1964), 17–20. 67. Cusanus, Compendium, 17–20, and Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, 5 – 6. 68. David Woodward, The Maps and Prints of Paolo Forlani: A Descriptive Bibliography (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1990), 26 (map 38). 69. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 496. 70. Roger Bacon, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, 3 vols., ed. Henry Bridges (London: Williams and Norgate, 1900), 1:300. 71. Eila M. J. Campbell, “The Development of the Characteristic Sheet, 1533 –1822,” in Proceedings, Eighth General Assembly and Seventeenth International Congress: International Geographical Union (Washington, D.C.: International Geographical Union, 1952), 426 –30, and Catherine Delano-Smith, “Cartographic Signs on European Maps and Their Explanation before 1700,” Imago Mundi 37 (1985): 9 –29.

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

in which a received wisdom derived from a source external to the individual, such as the scriptures, the church, or the philosophers of Antiquity (Ptolemy, Vitruvius, Strabo, Pomponius Mela, and a host of others).72 The theory of the valorization of experience was not new in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of course. It was in fact a restatement of Aristotle’s proposed empirical method for knowing the world (which, however, was of less importance in the early Middle Ages than the textual authority of his works on natural history). But this desire to describe the world from direct experience was often an unattainable doctrine of perfection, unfulfilled by the observations themselves. Thus Roger Bacon— despite his insistence in the “Opus maius” on the theoretical importance of seeing natural phenomena with one’s own eyes or at least relying on the accounts of travelers who had actually been to the regions they described—rarely employed this method in his geographical writing. Rather he preferred to weigh the descriptions of the scholarly authorities.73 Renaissance cartography has often been linked to the colonial and religious expansion of Europe.74 Mapping supported a sense of territorial self-entitlement that allowed religious and political leaders to claim vast areas of land overseas in the name of Christian European states. In Brian Harley’s words, “Maps were also inscriptions of political power. Far from being the innocent products of disinterested science, they acted in constructing the world they intended to represent. . . . Cartographic power was also a metaphor. It was expressed as imperial or religious rhetoric, as part of the creation ritual of taking possession of the land.” 75 Such ceremonies of possession varied with the colonial power. The Portuguese relied on the abstract means of description, measured latitudes, to claim land. Their argument was that they had developed the technological knowledge to do so and hence had the right to wield it to their advantage.76 Mapping and surveying knowledge seem such an obvious form of evidence for colonial claims that their lack of treatment in some works is puzzling.77 A major theme in the history of exploration cartography has been the encounter with the indigenous traditions of mapping and spatial knowledge.78 Indeed, in the planning for volumes 3 – 6 of this History, Harley maintained that “there should be no separate volume dealing with the indigenous cartographies of the African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific cultures. He believed they could be satisfactorily explained only in the context of European contact. . . . Harley believed this was the only satisfactory way to bring out the contrasts and connections in the worldviews of natives and colonists.” 79 I have defended the decision to create a separate volume for these traditions on the grounds that it provides a convenient comparative treatment.80 Although several of our authors allude to the encounter in the present volume, the

work reflects the development of largely European cartographic cultures. In the view of some scholars, geographical discovery has loomed too large in many accounts of the Renaissance. As Condren put it, “The notions of Renaissance and discovery have retained an almost colloquially close relationship which has done little to aid the rigour of historiography.” 81 Commenting on this, Hay argued that historians were becoming skeptical of the view that “the geographical discoveries of the Renaissance . . . were in any genuine sense a product of the new thought of the period. A fresh interest in the text of Ptolemy may have been influential—but less so, we may suppose, than the writings of Marco Polo.” 82 In contrast to the idea of discovery as an end in itself, Hay asserted that “the motives behind Portuguese exploration . . . were, to say the least, mixed; scientific cartography, a disinterested wish for geographical knowledge were certainly there, but were equally certainly subordinated to a programme dominated by politics, religion and (increasingly) commercial advantage.” 83 It is thus important to separate the different kinds of influence that Ptolemy’s text might have had from those of Marco Polo’s writings. Ptolemy’s text, in 72. Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). 73. Bacon, The Opus Majus, 295. 74. J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (Cleveland: World, 1963). 75. J. B. Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter: An Interpretive Guide to the Travelling Exhibition (Milwaukee: Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin, 1990), 2. 76. Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492 –1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 115. 77. For example, James M. Blaut’s The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993), is silent on cartographic evidence, although its cover sports an attractive map and his approach is significantly geographical. 78. See especially Walter Mignolo, “Putting the Americas on the Map (Geography and the Colonization of Space),” Colonial Latin American Review 1 (1992): 25 – 63; J. B. Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 522 –36; idem, “New England Cartography and the Native Americans,” in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, ed. Emerson W. Baker et al. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 287–313; and David Turnbull, “Local Knowledge and Comparative Scientific Traditions,” Knowledge and Policy 6, no. 3 – 4 (1993 –94): 29 –54. 79. David Woodward, “Preface,” in HC 2.3:xix–xxi, esp. xix. 80. David Woodward, “The ‘Two Cultures’ of Map History— Scientific and Humanistic Traditions: A Plea for Reintegration,” in Plantejaments, 49 – 67, esp. 51–53. 81. Conal Condren, “The Renaissance as Metaphor: Some Significant Aspects of the Obvious,” Parergon, n.s. 7 (1989): 91–105, esp. 101. 82. Denys Hay, “Introduction,” in The New Cambridge Modern History: The Renaissance, 1493 –1520, ed. George Reuben Potter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 1–19, esp. 2. Note the dates of Potter’s volume bracketing the “Renaissance.” 83. Hay, “Introduction,” 2 –3.

Setting the Stage

retrospect, was not primarily of value as a source of geographical information, no matter the esteem in which his data was held in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the product of the archetypal geographer. Indeed, it was perhaps Ptolemy’s anachronistic information that provided a negative impetus for reform. Ptolemy’s positive influence was far subtler, implying through a mathematicization of the known inhabited world by means of longitude and latitude a measured—albeit faulty— estimate of what remained beyond the Greco-Roman inhabited world. Marco Polo’s book, on the other hand— even granted its author’s penchant for exaggeration—provided a narrative description of renewed trading possibilities with the East. Marco’s travels, in turn, were prompted by the Crusades (1096 –1270), which enormously widened the geographical horizons of many classes of people, increased mobility, and fostered a culture of trade and travel. In the thirty years between Columbus’s departure in 1492 and the return of Magellan’s flagship Victoria in 1522, a huge amount of new geographic data had been gathered. The immensity of the ocean between America and Asia was recognized by Europeans for the first time. The West Indies could no longer be confused with the East Indies on world maps with any pretension to accuracy, and the Americas had to be represented as a separate entity, except by those whose commercial minds were still rooted in the idea that Cathay was simply part of the American mainland. But the cartographic record of this period is remarkably slim, particularly in the 1490s, even granted the amount of wastage that must have taken place through secrecy and destruction. Perhaps a dozen key maps survive.84 The globalization of cartography involved what Parry called “the discovery of the sea” in the sense of the realization that the oceans were connected. This involved a cumulative piecing together of key voyages of exploration and trade, including the route to the East and the awareness that the Americas were a fourth continent.85 In his article on the origins of modern science, Hooykaas stresses the importance of the geographical discoveries: When the Portuguese seafarers discovered that the tropical regions were habitable and inhabited, that there was much land south of the equator, that there was more dry land on the globe than had been taught them, that Southern India protruded much farther into the “Indian Sea” than Ptolemy had told them and that the shape of West Africa (the Gulf of Guinée) was widely different from what ancient maps indicated— all this gave a severe shock not only to them but to the learned world as well. . . . [Francis] Bacon was firmly convinced that the voyages of discovery had coincided with the beginnings of the new natural history, and that the latter inevitably had to be followed by a new philosophy (i.e., science). 86

Much European discovery was driven by the enormously lucrative trade in spices, especially pepper and cloves, in the subtropical regions of India and Southeast Asia.87 Discovery of a route to those areas to avoid the overland Eurasian route, which was controlled by a series of middlemen, originally stimulated the competing efforts of the Portuguese and Spanish, later primarily the English and Dutch, in mapping their commercial interests. A web of trade in exotic gems, rare metals, foodstuffs such as sugar, and materials such as cotton and silk fueled the growth of a capitalist world economy in the Renaissance whose cartographic role has been recently stressed by Jardine and Brotton.88 Harris has made the point that cartography was a paradigmatic “big science” in the sense that it employed long-distance networks. He uses the concept of the “geography of knowledge,” by which he means the spatial connections between artifacts and people associated with a particular branch of knowledge, to explain how large corporations operated. He gives four examples, all of which have strong cartographic associations: the Casa de la Contratación de las Indias, the Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), and the Society of Jesus.89 the relationship of maps and society Printing Printing was obviously the controlling technical factor in the enormous increase in the number of maps made in Europe from a few thousand between 1400 and 1472 to millions by 1600. In his inﬂuential essay on the role of prints in culture, Ivins stated: “It is hardly too much to say that since the invention of writing there has been no more important invention than that of the exactly repeatable pictorial statement.” 90 Since prints have been regarded largely in antiquarian and aesthetic terms, he ar-

84. They are fully analyzed in several of the following chapters. 85. J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (New York: Dial Press, 1974), xii. 86. Reijer Hooykaas, “The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?” British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1987): 453 –73, esp. 459, 470. 87. For a useful summary, see Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460 –1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 123 –54. 88. Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Doubleday, 1996), and Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (London: Reaktion, 1997). 89. Steven J. Harris, “Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Conﬁgurations 6 (1998): 269 –304, esp. 279. 90. William Mills Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 3.

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

gued, they have been viewed as a minor art in comparison to painting and sculpture. This depreciation has masked their fundamental value of conveying information. Once defined in this way, “it becomes obvious that without prints we should have very few of our modern sciences, technologies, archaeologies, or ethnologies— for all of these are dependent, first or last, upon information conveyed by exactly repeatable visual or pictorial statements.” 91 As an example, Ivins cited Pliny’s description of the inability of the Greek botanists to disseminate exact descriptions of botanical specimens. To paraphrase Pliny, the various distortions at the hands of successive copyists hindered the ability to reconstruct the original. They thus gave up describing plants with pictures and chose words instead. Since verbal description could not provide positive identifications of species, this set up a roadblock to classification and taxonomy that could only be cleared by the development of a system to make exact copies. Eisenstein’s thoughtful commentary on Ivins’s dictum on the exactly repeatable pictorial statement was particularly welcome to historians of cartography as it used the example of printed maps to enlarge the context. She introduced the topic by stating that “the fact that identical images, maps and diagrams could be viewed simultaneously by scattered readers constituted a kind of communications revolution in itself.” 92 Eisenstein’s view of the importance of printing for the cumulative gathering of information is echoed by Olson, whose general book on the implications of writing and reading unusually contains a section on maps. According to Olson, “The 600 or so maps which have survived from the period before 1300 show no sign of general developmental progression towards a comprehensive map of the world. The principal stumbling block to such a map was the lack of reliable means of duplicating maps, an obstacle overcome only with the invention of printing and engraving, and the invention of a common, mathematical, frame of reference which would permit the integration and synthesis of information being accumulated on the voyages of discovery.” 93 The portolan charts again demonstrate that they form a different map genre. Portolan charts existed from before 1300 and were not routinely printed until the late sixteenth century in the form of the sea atlas, the Spieghel der zeevaerdt. The sporadic exceptions are the isolario of Bartolommeo dalli Sonetti (1485), a few early sixteenthcentury Dutch charts, charts of the Mediterranean by Giovanni Andrea Valvassore (1540), and an engraving based on a chart by Diogo Homem (1568). The major world charts, such as those associated with the various trade casas of Spain and Portugal, remained in manuscript. Olson’s thesis also ignores the fact that centuries of printed maps in the Song dynasty in China did not re-

move a similar obstacle in the “general developmental progression towards a comprehensive map of the world.” The impact of print has usually been described in terms of the wider dissemination of content. While this is partly true, we must not succumb to the convenient view that the advent of printing produced an instant revolution. The concept of publishing did not depend on printing; Pliny the Younger refers to an “edition” of a thousand copies of a manuscript text. But when viewed as conveyors of information, Ivins and Eisenstein argue that the advantage of printed images lay more in the production of versions free from the corruption of the copyist, which could be used for comparative study. When map compilers had at their fingertips several standard printed sources of geographical data, such study was bound to benefit. As maps from different regions, scales, and epochs were brought into contact with each other in the course of compiling successive editions of atlases, contradictions became more visible, and divergent traditions more difficult to reconcile. As Latour has pointed out, the ability to lay out images side by side is extremely powerful: “There is nothing you can dominate as easily as a flat surface of a few square meters; there is nothing hidden or convoluted, no shadows, no ‘double entendre.’ In politics as in science, when someone is said to ‘master’ a question or to ‘dominate’ a subject, you should normally look for the flat surface that enables mastery (a map, a list, a file, a census, the wall of a gallery, a card index, a repertory) and you will find it.” 94 Ivins and Eisenstein perhaps overemphasized the relative weight of the role of feedback and the value of comparison, given the sheer numbers of maps produced. Although copper engraving was able to reproduce basically identical impressions from a plate, the images on these plates constantly became corrupted. Maps were pirated and roughly copied, and it is impossible to trace a clear “improvement” or progressive feedback in their content, as a glance at illustrated bibliographies of printed maps, such as those compiled by Shirley or Burden, will readily confirm.95 Here the corruptive tendencies of the manuscript era would remain, until images could be mechanically reproduced, an advance that would await the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. 91. Ivins, Prints, 3. 92. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 53. 93. David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205. 94. Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 1– 40, esp. 21. 95. Shirley, Mapping of the World, and Philip D. Burden, The Mapping of North America: A List of Printed Maps, 1511–1670 (Rickmansworth, Eng.: Raleigh, 1996).

Setting the Stage

It is easy to assume that maps in the period of discovery had an impact only through their content or lack of it. Some claim that, because few accounts of the discoveries appeared in print until after 1550, the public was not interested in them.96 Others believe that Europeans were so overwhelmed by the sheer novelty of the new information—accounts of new plants, animals, peoples, and indeed of a whole new continent—that they could only assimilate it gradually. Some argue that, because printed maps often did not represent the cutting edge of new geographical information, map printing did not have great consequences in the sixteenth century. The lack of printed nautical charts in the sixteenth century supports this argument, as does the random superimposition on printed maps of rhumb lines that bear no relation to the geographical information underneath or to any nautical function, implying perhaps that the nautical tradition might have been considered more reliable. People were also aware of the subjectivity of such maps. Richard Hakluyt knew of the conﬂicting claims of the Portuguese and Spanish in their ofﬁcial nautical cartography: “I have caused that your Lordshippe shall receyue herewith a little Mappe or Carde of the worlde: the whiche, I feare mee, shall put your Lordshippe to more labour to understande, then mee to make it. . . . For these coasts & situations of the Islands, euery of the Cosmographers and pilots of Portingall and Spayne doe set after their purpose.” 97 However, if one focuses not on the content of maps but on their economic role as consumer commodities, a different picture emerges. Here their graphic form as well as their function was important in establishing a holistic vision of the world.98 Such a vision of the general layout of countries and continents might not have been particularly accurate (a limitation that persists today not only in the general population but also in political leaders), but it engendered a culture of cosmopolitanism in a larger range of social classes. Geography also became an essential part of general education, and the accoutrements of the cartographer (surveying instruments, globe, and armillary spheres) became icons of learning.99

I agree with Zilsel, who believes that, far from being technically straightforward, these technologies can be credited not only with driving the development of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century, but also with the origin of “the ideal of scientiﬁc progress.” Zilsel calls these technologists “superior artisans,” capable of writing about their personal and practical experiences and publishing them in the form of manuals.101 He also stresses the importance of the breaking of the guilds in disseminating information. Under the guild system, apprentices learned a trade but did not necessarily improve on it. Capitalism and economic competition stimulated technical improvement. Sometimes the authors of the manuals explicitly declared that they intended to further the craftsmanship of their colleagues by publishing them. The number of illiterate master craftsmen was surprisingly small in the sixteenth century, for the incidence is usually mentioned only as a curiosity.102 A study by Westfall, a historian of science, conﬁrms this view of the importance of the “superior artisan” for both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment:

The Role of the “Superior Artisan”

96. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450 –1800, trans. David Gerard (London: New Left, 1976), 278 – 82. 97. Richard Hakluyt, Divers Voyages Touching the Disouerie of America, and the Ilands Adiacent vnto the Same . . . (London: T. Woodcocke, 1582), B4v and C3. 98. Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 97–98. 99. Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580 –1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 100. Hooykaas, “Rise of Modern Science,” esp. 471. 101. Zilsel, “Concept of Scientiﬁc Progress,” 326 and 332. See also Molland’s commentary on Zilsel, “Science and Mathematics,” 104 –39. 102. Zilsel, “Concept of Scientiﬁc Progress,” 331–32, and n. 12.

The tendency for map historians to focus on cartography as an activity by or for the elites—princes, military commanders, and scholars—has clouded the point that cartography was fundamentally a technology, along with other practical or industrial arts, undertaken by a middle class of artisans. The role of these artisans— engineers, printers, physicians, alchemists, cartographers, pilots, engravers, and instrumentmakers—was connected with the new conﬁguration of natural history as experimental philosophy and with a shift from an organic to a mechanistic world as described by Hooykaas.100

The most developed scientific technology during the 16th and 17th centuries, in my opinion the first truly scientific technology, was cartography. . . . I think of Gemma Frisius, Willebrord Snellius, Philippe de La Hire, Jean Picard, the two [elder] Cassinis [ JeanDominique Cassini and Jacques Cassini], and other lesser ones. All of the important steps in the development of a scientific cartography, such as the method of triangulation, the determination of latitude by celestial observation, the determination of longitude by means of the satellites of Jupiter, came from these men. Any person known to be skilled in mathematics was apt to find some chore in cartography thrust upon him. For the 630 as a whole [people listed in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries], about one out of eight engaged in some cartography. If we eliminate the physicians, who did very little cartography, the figure was more than one in five. There is no doubt that my data has convinced me that

Cartography and the Renaissance: Continuity and Change

we need to approach the whole issue of science and technology in a way different from that of the past.103

well heeded in the sixteenth century, but obtaining good data for these coordinates—particularly longitude—was another matter. One could maintain that the use of maps to plot observations lagged as much as the sacred uses of maps persisted. This is not to say that profound changes in cartographic method and practice did not take place in the Renaissance. The fact that the abstract theory of geographical coordinates was accepted as a way to make maps was in itself a significant change, as was the construction of maps orthogonally, from an infinity of impossible human viewpoints in space. The implications of this geometric view of cartography for the centering, framing, and orientation of maps were far reaching in the public perception throughout the world. Likewise, a distinct separation on maps of historical from contemporary information took place in the Renaissance, favoring the idea that things represented in the map space should all have the same “tense.” This separation was no doubt motivated by a desire to set aside the antiquarian as being worthy of study in its own right, and to portray it in overtly “historical” maps, while recognizing the need to compile maps with the most up-to-date information possible. Related to this idea is the concept of using the map as a metaphor for accumulating empirical data about the world. Once the theory of the earth’s graticule had been accepted, it became clearer how longitude and latitude positions could be collected to fill in the gaps in geographical knowledge. This procedure of plotting data underlay the main assumption of the new natural philosophy, although it would take more systematic efforts to gather data in the eighteenth century to achieve a more coherent world picture. Nowhere was this issue more relevant than in the demands of European expansion in the Renaissance in the interests of trade, settlement, and proselytization; geographical knowledge was essential to economic, political, and social power. Coincident with this new way of plotting data arose an awareness of the representation itself and of how it related to the world, or an awareness that representations of the world and the world itself were two different things. This resulted in a greater reliance on or more thought given to using artificial codes in cartographic representation. It is not that a fully fledged system of conventional signs was created—this had to await the beginning of the nineteenth century—but that the complexity

Conclusion If we return to Rosaccio’s modest 1610 broadsheet, with which we introduced this chapter, our discussion conﬁrms that it speaks to many of the issues that need to be covered in a volume on the history of cartography in the European Renaissance. Rosaccio’s collage of images clearly demonstrates that— even if he viewed the geographical knowledge of his own time as revealing dramatic changes in content and form from that of the classical scholars—several continuities remained. Central among them were the Aristotelian system of elements, winds, and climatic zones as well as the correspondence between the celestial circles (tropics, poles, ecliptic, and equator) and those that described positions on the earth. Other changes and continuities have been provided with different examples. Geographic information in graphic form was in general slower to catch on than the conventional model of swift, dramatic change in the cartographic Renaissance has led us to believe. Textual descriptions of the world at all scales were long favored by scholars. Maps rarely illustrated geographical texts, and those that were included were often added as an appendage rather than to clarify the meaning of the text. Even the maps accompanying Ptolemy’s Geography were slower to excite interest among humanists than has been supposed, as Leon Battista Alberti’s satirical allusion to the graticule, mountains, and river systems on Ptolemy’s maps might suggest.104 Terms such as mappa and chorographia confusingly applied to either texts or graphics. Itineraries to plot courses on land or sea were favored over their graphic equivalents. Those graphics that were employed tended to be extremely conservative and follow models that had already been established in the Middle Ages. The portolan charts changed little as long as they were conﬁned to the Mediterranean, and views of cities continued to be impressionistic and lacked information based on direct observation, despite the oft-quoted exceptions to the rule. Scholarly celestial maps and globes continued to be compiled in the same fashion as had been prescribed by Ptolemy’s Almagest, with coordinates. (However, the number of star positions increased, particularly toward the end of the period covered in this volume, when telescopic lenses were introduced.) Although methods for compiling land survey maps were described and copious depictions of surveying instruments were included in several manuals in the sixteenth century, theory was far ahead of practice. Ptolemy’s theoretical exhortation to use longitude and latitude to plot new observations was

103. Richard S. Westfall, “Charting the Scientiﬁc Community,” in Trends in the Historiography of Science, ed. Kostas Gavroglu, Jean Christianidis, and Efthymios Nicolaidis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 1–14, esp. 12 –13. 104. See Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, 244.

of representation required the invention of the map key or legend, as a kind of contract between mapmaker and map user. As increasingly specialized genres of maps came to be used, it also became clear that there were open and closed systems of representation, depending on which skills the reader could be assumed to possess. The readership of maps was inevitably broadened by the rapid development of graphic printing and of a commercial map trade that became increasingly independent of elite patronage. Although the new idiom of printing certainly played an increased role in feedback and quality control, it is important not to underestimate the effect of an enormous increase in the sheer number of maps in circulation by 1600 compared to a century earlier.

Setting the Stage

The extension of the map market to the middle classes and even, for cheaper types of maps, the working classes has not traditionally been studied in the history of cartography; greater attention has been paid to the role of maps in the elite European courts of the Renaissance. But it is becoming increasingly clear that, if we are to understand fully how maps were used in this period, new research will need to focus wherever possible on these everyday uses. In addition, when studying the mapmaker in the Renaissance, our attention must sometimes shift from the grand canon of well-known maps to the maps of the “superior artisans” like Giuseppe Rosaccio, of which this volume contains many examples.

2 • The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century Victoria Morse

Makers, Distributors & Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), 2. There is as yet no monographic study of the physical production of medieval maps. See the survey and bibliography in Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 318 and 324 –26. The work done on the creation of the Hereford map is well summarized in Scott D. Westrem, The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), xviii. The production of portolan charts is better studied; see the discussion and bibliography in Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in HC 1:371– 463, esp. 390 –92. There is a short survey of some of the factors relating to map authorship in Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Kartographische Quellen: Welt-, See-, und Regionalkarten (Turnhout: Brepols, 1988), 58 – 65. 3. The number of medieval maps still extant is uncertain, owing to incomplete research and overly restrictive deﬁnitions of what might be considered a map in earlier catalogs and lists. For example, Gautier Dalché notes that he has almost doubled the number of world maps reported in Marcel Destombes, ed., Mappemondes A.D. 1200 –1500: Catalogue préparé par la Commission des Cartes Anciennes de l’Union Géographique Internationale (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1964); see Patrick Gautier Dalché, “De la glose à la contemplation: Place et fonction de la carte dans les manuscrits du haut Moyen Âge,” in Testo e immagine nell’alto medioevo, 2 vols. (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1994), 2:693 –771, esp. 702 and n. 26, where he refers to an inventory of about 400 manuscripts containing one or more maps, as opposed to the 283 manuscripts listed by Destombes. This article has been reprinted in Géographie et culture: La représentation de l’espace du VIe au XIIe siècle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), item VIII. For a more recent inventory of world maps in the BNF, see his “Mappae Mundi antérieures au XIIIe siècle dans les manuscrits latins de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France,” Scriptorium 52 (1998): 102 – 62, esp. 102 –3 and 110. Interesting evidence of the familiarity of maps to at least some medieval readers is provided by maps drawn into the margins of Sallust’s historical works, presumably by readers who felt that a map ought to accompany the text; see Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997), 20. See also Patrick Gautier Dalché, La “Descriptio mappe mundi” de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1988), 88, on the ability of readers to form mental maps. A telling example in the shift of attitude among scholars toward the familiarity of maps in the Middle Ages is the following comment by Lecoq: “Tucked away in the secrecy of books or exhibited on the walls of churches, cloisters, and royal or princely palaces, the image of the earth was displayed abundantly during the Middle Ages”; see Danielle Lecoq, “Images médiévales du monde,” in A la rencontre de Sindbad: La route maritime de la soie (Paris: Musée de la Marine, 1994), 57– 61, esp. 57. Sylvia Tomasch argues that by the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer had a sophisticated appreciation of contemporary cartography; see “Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Geography of Power, the Technology of Control,” in Literature and Technology, ed. Mark L. Greenberg and Lance Schachterle (London: Associated University Presses, 1992), 66 –98, esp. 68.

The Middle Ages has been described as a period that “knew little of maps,” and indeed the number of surviving examples, even if allowances are made for what was probably an extremely high rate of loss, do not suggest that maps were produced and consumed in particularly large numbers between the ﬁfth and fourteenth centuries.1 This assessment is reinforced by what we know of the physical production of maps, which was limited by hand copying, the use of parchment and other expensive supports, and the low level of private ownership of, and of markets for, books and maps until at least the thirteenth century.2 Nevertheless, the patient examination of the surviving evidence of map production and use is beginning to suggest that, while maps may not have been as commonplace at all levels of society during the Middle Ages as they became during subsequent periods or in other cultures, they were important and—at least to some audiences—familiar means of expression and communication.3 This chapter surveys the many functions of maps in later medieval culture (roughly the twelfth through the fourteenth century) and some of the key areas of continuity and change between medieval and Renaissance cartography. A survey of the issues currently under disAbbreviations used in this chapter include: Géographie du monde for Monique Pelletier, ed., Géographie du monde au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1989), and LMP for R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Harvey, eds., Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). 1. P. D. A. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” in HC 1:464 –501, esp. 464. See also Harvey’s comments in his “Medieval Maps: An Introduction,” in HC 1:283 – 85, esp. 283, and his Medieval Maps (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 7: “Maps were practically unknown in the middle ages.” His views on this subject more recently changed: “We probably know of only a tiny proportion” of the world maps produced in thirteenth-century England (Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map [London: British Library, 1996], 38). For the likelihood of a high rate of loss, see David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in HC 1:286 –370, esp. 292. 2. For the limited ownership of books in the later Middle Ages, see Pascale Bourgain, “L’édition des manuscrits,” in Histoire de l’édition française, ed. Henri Martin and Roger Chartier (Paris: Promodis, 1983 – 86), 1:49 –75, esp. 64 – 66 and 72 –73. For a view that emphasizes the continued rarity of the private ownership of maps into the ﬁfteenth century, see David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance:

cussion by scholars of the period is essential to achieving a balanced understanding of both the innovations of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mapmakers and the very real continuities that linked their work to that of their predecessors. Scholars working on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular are suggesting that, in the later Middle Ages, the production and consumption of maps responded to a rapidly changing sense of what a map could and should portray, a change that still remains to be fully explored and explained.4 At the same time, our appreciation of the cartography of the high Middle Ages is becoming more nuanced and subtle with the discovery of new maps and new texts relevant to their study. The reassessment of the probable numbers of medieval maps is just one example of the substantially new understandings introduced by recent scholarship. This chapter is therefore designed to describe some current research directions, with a particular focus on those that help us better understand the relationship between the cartography of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance. It does not aim to replace the chapters in the first volume of The History of Cartography; instead it provides updates and corrections and, more important, focuses the reader’s attention—at the beginning of an extended treatment of cartography in the Renaissance— on the roots that struck deep into the soil of the twelfth through the fourteenth century. Although medieval maps often used to be described as copying a few standard models and repeating a tired assortment of information drawn from classical and biblical sources, it is becoming increasingly clear that they, like all other maps, should instead be understood as tools for thinking and as flexible means of communicating ideas.5 In the Middle Ages, as in other periods, maps could be shaped and manipulated to meet particular needs as their authors drew from graphic and textual traditions, from experience, and from their own ideas to create individual artifacts suited to given contexts. As Gautier Dalché has emphasized, maps, like other representations, do not inform us generally about contemporaries’ perceptions of space, but rather about the mental and technical tools available to the mapmaker.6 Medieval maps must, in short, be approached not as transparent windows into their creators’ and users’ minds but as rhetorically constructed documents belonging to specific times and specific contexts. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of exploring these contexts, whether the specific codicological context of a particular manuscript or the larger social and cultural setting in which the map was conceived, as essential to understanding the full meaning of a given map within its society.7 One particularly fruitful aspect of this more contextualized and differentiated approach to medieval maps is the growing awareness of change within the period. In-

Setting the Stage

stead of a monolithic “medieval map,” we are now able to recognize that maps, like other texts and artifacts, have their own histories that exist in a complex relationship with the cultures that produced them. Recent examples of attention to change in response to the historical moment range from the role of the Crusades in the gradual development of the tendency to locate Jerusalem at the center of world maps to the increasing sense of English national identity expressed on the Evesham map during the Hundred Years War.8 Likewise, it is now easier to appreciate

4. See pp. 44 –51. 5. For a further discussion of this attitude, contrasted with the undoubted creativity medieval authors brought to the use of ancient sources, see Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Un problème d’histoire culturelle: Perception et représentation de l’espace au Moyen Âge,” Médiévales 18 (1990): 5 –15, esp. 6 and 12 –15, and idem, “Sur l’ ‘originalité’ de la ‘géographie’ médiévale,” in Auctor & auctoritas: Invention et conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris: École des Chartes, 2001), 131– 43. For the originality possible in maps copied from other sources, see Danielle Lecoq’s comments about the maps in the Liber ﬂoridus in “La mappemonde du Liber ﬂoridus ou la vision du monde de Lambert de Saint-Omer,” Imago Mundi 39 (1987): 9 – 49, esp. 9. This is a point emphasized in regard to Lambert’s encyclopedia more generally by its most thorough interpreter, Albert Derolez, in Lambertus qui librum fecit: Een codicologische studie van de Liber Floridus-autograaf (Gent, Universiteitsbibliotheek, handscrift 92) (Brussels: Paleis der Academiën, 1978). 6. Gautier Dalché, “Un problème d’histoire culturelle,” esp. 8. On the T-O maps as ideograms, rather than mimetic representations of space, see Pascal Arnaud, “Plurima orbis imago: Lectures conventionelles des cartes au Moyen Âge,” Médiévales 18 (1990): 33 –51, esp. 50 –51. 7. See Gautier Dalché, “De la glose à la contemplation,” 698, on the importance of the codicological context; and Edson, Time and Space, vii–viii, for the necessity of studying the maps found in manuscripts in relation to the surrounding texts. For a fascinating exploration of the social and political context of the Hereford map, see Valerie I. J. Flint, “The Hereford Map: Its Author(s), Two Scenes and a Border,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8 (1998): 19 – 44. For an appraisal of certain aspects of this interpretation, see Westrem, Hereford Map, xxiii–xxv, esp. n. 22 and n. 28. Victoria Morse, in “A Complex Terrain: Church, Society, and the Individual in the Works of Opicino de Canistris (1296 – ca. 1354)” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), analyzes the personal, intellectual, and spiritual settings of a series of unusual maps and diagrams from fourteenthcentury Avignon. More programmatically, Marcia A. Kupfer suggests that a map’s meaning was dependent on its context and framework; see her “Medieval World Maps: Embedded Images, Interpretive Frames,” Word & Image 10 (1994): 262 – 88, esp. 264. 8. For the growing tendency to locate Jerusalem at the center of world maps in the period 1100 –1300, see Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 341, and Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Jerusalem: A Historical as Well as an Eschatological Place on the Medieval Mappae Mundi,” paper presented at the Mappa Mundi Conference, Hereford, England, June 29, 1999. Von den Brincken locates this development after the middle of the thirteenth century, attributing the centrality of Jerusalem to heightened European awareness after the city’s reconquest by the Muslims in 1244. On English identity and the Hundred Years War, see Peter Barber, “The Evesham World Map: A Late Medieval English View of God and the World,” Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 13 –33, esp. 23 –24.

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

the variety of forms of medieval maps, instead of taking the world map as the archetypal form. The other widespread map types— especially the portolan charts, but also local, regional, and city maps—are no longer seen as aberrations or precursors of postmedieval development but as contemporary forms of cartographic expression that collectively helped define the medieval experience of maps.9 This awareness of the changes in the form, content, and use of maps during the medieval period is particularly helpful when we turn to the difficult problem of the transition between medieval and Renaissance cartography. The meaning of the labels “medieval” and “Renaissance” has long been debated, as have the degree and nature of the change between the two periods. The tendency in the history of cartography to look to the Renaissance for the birth of modern mapmaking has led to an overemphasis in this field on the discontinuities with the medieval past. The undoubted continuities between the two periods are dismissed as medieval survivals, astonishing to modern observers for whom the portolan charts of the later Middle Ages and the Ptolemaic maps of the later fifteenth century seem so obviously superior to the zone maps and mappaemundi that continued to be produced.10 More recent studies have begun to examine the maps of the transitional fourteenth and fifteenth centuries more carefully, outlining the continuities and attempting to define the changes that undoubtedly did take place between the medieval and early modern periods more precisely at the specific levels of individual artifacts, thinkers, and communities.11 These studies must be compared with recent work that focuses attitudes toward the representation and control of space in medieval experience, including the development of territorial conceptions of legal jurisdictions and intellectual changes in quantification and measurement.12 Only with the careful examination of specific

9. The idea that the portolan charts, in particular, were atypical of medieval cartography or somehow precursors of later developments still appears, surprisingly, in Robert Karrow, “Intellectual Foundations of the Cartographic Revolution” (Ph.D. diss., Loyola University of Chicago, 1999), 7 and 53. A good discussion of a local map’s connectedness with contemporary society (in this case disputes over rights) may be found in Rose Mitchell and David Crook, “The Pinchbeck Fen Map: A Fifteenth-Century Map of the Lincolnshire Fenland,” Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 40 –50, esp. 40 – 41 and 47– 49. 10. Tony Campbell’s introduction to The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472 –1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1– 4, is a striking example of this tendency. On the continuing importance in the ﬁfteenth century of the world map as a means of obtaining an overview of the world and its component parts, see Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Pour une histoire du regard géographique: Conception et usage de la carte au XVe siècle,” Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 4 (1996): 77–103, esp. 92, and idem, “Sur l’ ‘originalité’ de la ‘géographie’ médiévale,” 132. See also Edson’s comments on the schematic map in the ﬁfteenth-century Rudimentum novitiorum in Time and Space, 14.

11. See in particular the precise and thought-provoking comments on the new instrumentality of maps in the fifteenth century by Gautier Dalché in “Pour une histoire,” esp. 100 –103. David Woodward argues that a notion of an “abstract, geometric and homogeneous space” lay at the heart of fifteenth-century mapping in “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space,” in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 83 – 87, esp. 84. Marcia Milanesi sees the change in the explicitly unitary vision of the known world developed in humanist circles under the influence of Ptolemy’s Geography; see her “La rinascita della geografia dell’Europa, 1350 –1480,” in Europa e Mediterraneo tra medioevo e prima età moderna: L’osservatorio italiano, ed. Sergio Gensini (Pisa: Pacini, 1992), 35 –59. Most recently, Nathalie Bouloux has suggested that humanist practices of textual criticism led to a new concern with geographical accuracy and the invention of geography as an independent, and important, field of study in Culture et savoirs géographiques en Italie au XIVe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), esp. 193 –235. 12. These topics have generated an enormous recent bibliography. Two particularly stimulating studies of changing conceptions of political space in Italy in the later Middle Ages are Robert Brentano, A New World in a Small Place: Church and Religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188 –1378 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), and Odile Redon, L’espace d’une cité: Sienne et le pays siennois (XIIIe–XIVe siècles) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994). See also Daniel Lord Smail’s Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). On the interesting developments of the sacred spaces of the ecclesiastical immunities of Cluny, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint, and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 156 – 83. There are useful comments on the relative importance of the idea of boundaries and frontiers in the Middle Ages in Patrick Gautier Dalché, “De la liste a la carte: Limite et frontière dans la géographie et la cartographie de l’occident médiéval,” in Castrum 4: Frontière et peuplement dans le monde méditerranéen au moyen âge (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1992), 19 –31; see also Christine Deluz, Le livre de Jehan de Mandeville: Une “géographie” au XIVe siècle (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1988), 172 –73 and 364. There is a large literature, particularly in French, on the perception and description of rural lands: see especially Mathieu Arnoux, “Perception et exploitation d’un espace forestier: La forêt de Breteuil (XIe–XVe siècles),” Médiévales 18 (1990): 17–32; Bernard Guidot, ed., Provinces, régions, terroirs au Moyen Âge: De la réalité à l’imaginaire (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993); Elisabeth Mornet, ed., Campagnes médiévales: l’homme et son espace: Études offertes à Robert Fossier (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995); and the excellent study of the expression of space in notarial documents by Monique Bourin, “Delimitation des parcelles et perception de l’espace en Bas-Languedoc aux Xe et XIe siècles,” in Campagnes médiévales: L’homme et son espace. Études offertes à Robert Fossier (Paris: Publications de la Sorbone, 1995), 73-85. See also Jean Coste, “Description et délimitation de l’espace rural dans la campagne romaine,” in Sources of Social History: Private Acts of the Late Middle Ages, ed. Paolo Brezzi and Egmont Lee (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), 185 –200, also published in Gli atti privati nel tardo medioevo: Fonti per la storia sociale, ed. Paolo Brezzi and Egmont Lee (Rome: Instituto di Studi Romani, 1984), 185 –200. Changes in ideas of quantity and scale among university-trained philosophers are explored in Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), with important consequences for our understanding of quantification and the development of a geometrical, relational understanding of the world in the later Middle Ages. Alfred W. Crosby’s The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250 –1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge

Setting the Stage

cases over time will we begin to see more precisely how the transition between medieval and Renaissance mapping took place and to appreciate more fully its roots in the profound social and cultural transformations of the later Middle Ages.

The Roles of Maps in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries The broad division of medieval map forms into world maps, portolan charts, and local and regional maps and plans provides a helpful starting place for a discussion of the roles of maps in the later Middle Ages.13 These individual traditions have in the past been seen as almost completely independent of one another, to the point that some scholars have suggested that the Middle Ages had no concept of a “map” as a category distinct from diagrams, pictures, and other representations.14 The idea that there was little cross-fertilization among medieval maps has become untenable with new discoveries and a new appreciation of the sheer numbers of medieval maps.15 Nevertheless, the categories remained sufficiently distinct in many twelfth- and thirteenth-century works that they provide a useful framework for discussion. world maps: forms Much of the early scholarship on medieval world maps focused on creating typologies, some of considerable complexity.16 More recently, the tendency has been to simplify the categories and terminology used to describe world maps and to explicate the meaning of individual maps by examining their functions within their specific contexts rather than by situating them within clearly defined families of maps. The most far-reaching revision of the typologies of medieval world maps calls for the recognition of just two basic types of map: those taking a global view of the earth and those focusing only on the oikoumene, or the inhabited world as it was conceptualized by late Roman and medieval thinkers, comprising in modern terms the regions of Europe, north Africa, and Asia, especially Asia Minor.17 A more moderate revision proposed in the first volume of The History of Cartography would reduce the number of major types to four: tripartite, zone, quadripartite, and transitional.18 The first category comprises those maps that show the inhabited part of the earth as it was conceptualized in the Middle Ages, divided implicitly or explicitly into the three regions of Europe, Africa, and Asia. A subgroup of this category is the T-O map, which gives a schematic view of the three regions and the waterways—the river Tanais or Don, the Nile, and the Mediterranean Sea— dividing them. The zone map, in contrast, takes a global view of the earth, indicating its di-

vision into five climata or zones defined by temperature, including two cold polar regions, a northern and a southern temperate zone, and a hot equatorial zone. The quadripartite category accommodates maps that combine the two previous categories, showing the tripartite division of the known world and the existence of a further landmass south of the equatorial zone. Finally, the transitional category highlights the important developments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as world maps began to incorporate material from the portolan charts and from the newly discovered maps of Ptolemy’s Geography. This classification is particularly useful in its recognition of the transitional maps as a separate and note-

University Press, 1997) includes a discussion of space, but skims too quickly over the topic to allow for a real understanding of how and why change took place. For philosophical discussions of space in the Middle Ages, see the articles in Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, eds., Raum und Raumvorstellungen im Mittelalter (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1998). For the medieval geographical imagination, especially expressed in literary sources, see Scott D. Westrem, ed., Discovering New Worlds: Essays on Medieval Exploration and Imagination (New York: Garland, 1991), and Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles, eds., Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, eds., Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), presents essays from a broad range of disciplines. 13. This is the division adopted by the two authoritative surveys of medieval maps: HC vol. 1, and von den Brincken, Kartographische Quellen. It derives from Destombes, Mappemondes A.D. 1200 –1500, xvii. 14. For a strong statement of the separateness of medieval map traditions and the lack of a medieval notion of the map, see Harvey, “Medieval Maps: An Introduction,” 283 – 85. There is a useful summary of medieval terms for maps in von den Brincken, Kartographische Quellen, 22 –23, and in Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 287– 88. 15. For a helpful, brief description of the interplay between portolan charts and world maps, see Gautier Dalché, “Un problème d’histoire culturelle,” 14. 16. Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 294 –99, gives a brief history of classiﬁcation systems for world maps; see also the discussion in Gautier Dalché, “Mappae mundi antérieures au XIIIe siècle,” 103 –9. 17. See, for example, Jörg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago mundi cartographica: Studien zur Bildlichkeit mittelalterlicher Welt- und Ökumenekarten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984), 125, and Gautier Dalché, “De la glose à la contemplation,” 703. Both authors emphasize the fundamental compatibility of the two views of the earth. The common use of the term “continents” to refer to Europe, Asia, and Africa on the maps is criticized by Benjamin Braude in “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (1997): 103 – 42, esp. 109 –10; Braude points out that, for medieval thinkers, these terms referred to “regions of one world, not separate continents” (p. 109). 18. Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 295 –99 and 343 –58.

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

worthy category and for its simplification of earlier schemes.19 It has been criticized, however, for its continued use of subcategories named for the authors of certain classical and late antique texts that, in medieval manuscripts, were often illustrated by maps (e.g., “Isidore,” “Orosius,” or “Sallust” maps). First, such nomenclature can give the misleading impression that the maps in question originated in the texts with which they are most commonly associated or were even the work of the original author.20 This false conclusion obscures the interesting and problematic early history of medieval world maps, only some of which seem to go back to late antique origins, while others were most likely inventions of the early Middle Ages.21 Second, there is abundant evidence that, although maps with certain sets of features might tend to be copied with certain texts, the associations are far from rigid or straightforward. Recent research emphasizes instead the frequency with which maps migrated from one work to another and the flexibility of medieval copyists in choosing maps to illustrate given works or in altering their cartographic models at will. The Evesham map, for example, is very similar to the maps that appear in the chronicle of Ranulf Higden, but it seems to have been produced as an independent document, rather than being copied as part of a manuscript.22 Finally, the focus on the origins of medieval maps tends to obscure the importance of the specific choice that led to the production of a given map at a given moment and for a given purpose. Even a straightforward copy of an existing map takes on a new range of meaning and a new significance from having been selected and copied under a particular set of circumstances.23 A final issue concerning the forms of world maps is the question of whether a map’s formal structure provides clues to its function. It has been argued that zone maps were typically used to convey astronomical and astrological information, while tripartite maps tended either to focus on historical, ethnographical, and spiritual meanings or (in their more schematic form) to serve as a convenient icon indicating the earth.24 In part, these associations stem from the assumption that certain map types belonged exclusively with certain texts, an idea that, as we have seen, has been called into question.25 Nevertheless, in spite of the much more fluid relationship between maps and texts that we now know to have been typical, especially of the later Middle Ages, there does seem to be some truth to a correlation between form and meaning. This is best seen in the rather extreme example of Opicino de Canistris, who turned to the zone map as the foundation on which to elaborate his spiritual cosmography because of the emphasis that this map form placed on the earth as a part of the larger system of the universe, caught at the center of a web of astral forces (fig. 2.1).26

world maps: uses and contexts The current tendency in the study of medieval world maps is to deemphasize questions of origin, descent, or 19. Edson adopted a categorization based on a combination of formal characteristics (especially the distinction between T-O and zone maps) and degree of detail. Although interesting as an attempt to emphasize the context and purpose of the maps over their formal characteristics, this system seems unlikely to be adopted more generally. See her Time and Space, 2 –9. 20. Gautier Dalché, “De la glose à la contemplation,” 701–2 and n. 27. Gautier Dalché attributes the continuation of this misleading approach to the influential catalog of medieval maps edited by Destombes, Mappemondes A.D. 1200 –1500. For Gautier Dalché’s ongoing critique of Destombes, see “De la glose à la contemplation,” 699 –702, and “Mappae mundi antérieures au XIIIe siècle,” 105 – 8, esp. 107 for the problem of attributing maps to authors. Edson discusses the problems with the term “Orosian” for a category of maps that seldom appear in conjunction with the text of Orosius’s Seven Books of History Against the Pagans in Time and Space, 33; her discussion of the complex relationships between texts of Sallust’s histories and the maps that often illustrated them is also helpful in this regard (pp. 18 –21). 21. Gautier Dalché, in “De la glose à la contemplation,” 706 – 8, suggests that the graphic T-O map was an invention of the early Middle Ages, although the concept of a tripartite division of the oikoumene was of ancient origin. On the other hand, for a helpful discussion of the possible influence of Roman cartography on Matthew Paris’s maps of Britain, see P. D. A. Harvey, “Matthew Paris’s Maps of Britain,” in Thirteenth Century England IV: Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference 1991, ed. P. R. Cross and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1992), 109 –21, esp. 111–14. 22. Gautier Dalché, “Mappae mundi antérieures au XIIIe siècle,” 107, and Barber, “Evesham World Map,” 27–28. Gautier Dalché argues in his discussion of Hugh of Saint Victor’s “Descriptio mappe mundi,” a text he sees as having been drawn from a map, that in the early twelfth century it was possible for a map to be understood as an artifact endowed with the authority normally reserved for written texts. See his La “Descriptio mappe mundi” (1988), 87–115, esp. 107 and 114 –15. Finally, a subtle and penetrating discussion of the relationship of diagrams to the texts they accompany is in Harry Bober, “An Illustrated Medieval School-Book of Bede’s ‘De Natura Rerum,’” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 19 –20 (1956 –57): 64 –97, esp. 84 and 88. 23. Thus Woodward’s “Chronological List of Major Medieval Mappaemundi, A.D. 300 –1460,” which organizes the maps by “content date,” lists Lambert of Saint-Omer’s maps under the fifth century (attributed to Martianus Capella) rather than as products of the intellectual and cultural world of the early twelfth century (for the autograph) or of the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth centuries (for the later copies); see Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 359 – 67. On the important influences that the historical context had on Lambert’s work, see Derolez, Lambertus qui librum fecit. The Peutinger map is an example of a map that has drawn attention almost purely for what it can tell us of late Roman cartography, while the circumstances of its preservation through copying, probably in the twelfth century, have been little studied. It is to be hoped that Richard Talbert’s forthcoming edition and commentary will shed light on this important issue. See also Patrick Gautier Dalché, “La trasmissione medievale e rinascimentale della Tabula Peutingeriana,” in Tabula Peutingeriana: Le antiche vie del mondo, ed. Francesco Prontera (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 43 –52, esp. 44 – 47. 24. Arentzen, in Imago mundi cartographica, 94, basing his argument on the maps of the Liber floridus. 25. See note 3. 26. Morse, “Complex Terrain,” 235 –54.

Setting the Stage

attempt to indicate something of the complexity of the social and intellectual frameworks within which maps were produced and used.28 It is important to situate twelfth- and thirteenthcentury mapmaking within a much larger interest in understanding the physical world. This interest arose in many different areas of high medieval culture, from philosophical and scientific efforts to explain the natural laws underlying the functioning of the universe, to the popularity of poetic depictions of the world and its places, to changes in descriptions of administrative and jurisdictional territories.29 The world maps from this period were influenced by these broader concerns, and one of their defining characteristics is the very diversity of the purposes they served and the contexts within which they occurred. One of the most influential contributions to the study of medieval cartography has been the idea that world maps were intended to describe time as well as space. Since the publication of two highly influential articles by von den Brincken on the close relationship between universal chronicles—those that attempted to sum up all of human history in one work—and world maps, it has been widely accepted that one function of these maps was to give an overview of the world, understood as the theater of human, and especially Christian, history.30 As a result of this parallelism between map and chronicle, it is

fig. 2.1. ZONE MAP BY OPICINO DE CANISTRIS. This transitional map, probably from the 1340s, adopts the rhumb lines from a portolan chart as a marker for the Mediterranean region of the oikoumene. The habitable zone is surrounded by the zodiac, emphasizing its temporal nature, and the legends for the zones add a spiritual interpretation to the usual geographical information. Photograph © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City (MS. Pal. Lat. 1993, fol. 9r).

classification and to look instead at function and context. A sign of the growing maturity of the field, this approach shows that the history of cartography is finding a place within the mainstream of medieval cultural history.27 Students of medieval cartography must bear in mind that world maps are multivalent, weaving together various ideas about the world to form unique artistic and cultural statements. Thus, although it is necessary to try to sort out the component threads of meaning that make up individual maps, the task must be undertaken with sensitivity to the categories available within medieval culture as well as those that modern interpreters find helpful to impose on their medieval sources. Although the following discussion will often rely on terms like “history” or “religion” to discuss the roles and functions of the maps, it should be borne in mind that a medieval audience would not have made these distinctions in this way. Indeed, I will

27. Woodward, in “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 288 –90, discusses the historiography of world maps and the growing willingness of scholars to read these documents on their own terms, rather than as failed attempts at providing geometrically accurate representations of places. See also Gautier Dalché’s comments, “Un problème d’histoire culturelle,” 6 –7. 28. There is a helpful comment on the lack of a medieval concept of “geography” in Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement de la perception et de la représentation de l’espace au XIIe siècle,” in Renovación intelectual del occidente Europeo (siglo XII) (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, Departamento de Educación y Cultura, 1998), 169 –217, esp. 169 –70. Nicolás Wey Gómez emphasizes the importance of accepting and working with the medieval understanding of the disciplines that were considered relevant to the study of place, especially astrology, in The Machine of the World: Scholastic Cosmography and the “Place” of Native People in the Early Caribbean Colonial Encounter (forthcoming). Natalia Lozovsky dedicates chapter 1 of “The Earth Is Our Book”: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400 –1000 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 6 –34, to exploring “how geographical tradition ﬁt into the system of knowledge of the time” (p. 6). 29. For a survey of the genres, including maps, that express this “passionate discovery of the reality of the world,” see Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 177. 30. See especially Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Mappa mundi und Chronographia: Studien zur Imago Mundi des abendländischen Mittelalters,” Deutsches Archiv für die Erforschung des Mittelalters 24 (1968): 118 – 86, esp. 119 –23, and idem, “‘. . . Ut Describeretur universus orbis’: Zur Universalkartographie des Mittelalters,” in Methoden in Wissenschaft und Kunst des Mittelalters, ed. Albert Zimmermann (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1970), 249 –78, esp. 249 –53. There is a brief statement of her views in her Kartographische Quellen, 32, and in Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 288 –90 and n. 22, tracing the

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

common to find, rubbing shoulders on world maps, what one author has called “landmarks of the six ages [of the world]”: ancient cities like Troy and Rome, biblical events like the Hebrews’ crossing of the Red Sea and the landing of Noah’s ark on Mount Ararat, and contemporary pilgrimage sites like Santiago de’ Compostela.31 This approach to these documents has much to recommend it and has played a central role in freeing the study of medieval maps from anachronistic expectations about their purpose and content by focusing attention on the needs and attitudes of the culture that produced them. Salvation history has, however, become overgeneralized as an explanation for the world maps, serving occasionally more to circumvent than to explore the problem of the maps’ meanings. There are two issues to bear in mind. First, the Christian tradition had a complex idea of history, eschatology, and the salvational process, and it is essential to understand how these issues are being approached in any particular map and with what specific meaning.32 Second, the assimilation of human knowledge and activity into the framework of creation and salvation did not in any way exclude the “lower” human meanings, nor was salvation history seen as detached from the physical aspects of the world.33 Within their broad function as representations of space and time, world maps could serve a wide variety of more specific rhetorical needs. One way to explore the functions of the world map in medieval society is through the multivalent meanings of the world itself in the learned culture of the time.34 Part of the curiosity about the physical world that characterized the twelfth-century Renaissance was the desire to understand the earth as a part of a system. The concern among philosophers for the machina universitatis or the machina mundi led them to focus on the system underlying the universe and the laws that governed it. The details of the earth itself (terra, both the planet and the element earth) were of less interest to them than the grand mechanism of the world (mundus). Contrasted with this interest in the machina mundi was the equally vibrant idea of contemptus mundi (renunciation of the world), which drew on a related but different definition of the “world” to contrast the ascetic life with the life of ordinary secular affairs. “Secular” recalls the term saeculum that contrasted “the world of men and of time” with the eternal world of the Christian God.35 Between these extremes were the views of historians, pilgrims (whether armchair or actual), and other travelers, for which locations and events on the earth did matter and needed to be recalled. Many of the medieval world maps that have survived do so in the company of other schematic drawings, often of a cosmological nature, in computus manuscripts and encyclopedias. A staple of monastic education in the early Middle Ages, computus was the body of knowledge necessary to allow the calculation of the dates of the move-

idea of maps as histories back to early work on the Hereford map. The theme of maps and history is also developed in Edson, Time and Space, 18 –35 and 97–144. On the close connections between time and space—both creations and both participating in homologous ways in the structure of the universe—see Danielle Lecoq, “Le temps et l’intemporel sur quelques représentations médiévales du monde au XIIe et au XIIIe siècles,” in Le temps, sa mesure et sa perception au Moyen Âge, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Caen: Paradigme, 1992), 113 –32, esp. 115. 31. Edson, Time and Space, 100. For a description of world maps as “historical aggregations or cumulative inventories of events that occur in space” and the suggestion that this approach might be adopted in modern cartography to more fruitfully represent the historical meanings of landscape, see David Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75 (1985): 510 –21, esp. 519 –20. A twelfth-century example of the world map as a framework in which information could be listed is illustrated in Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 347 (fig. 18.53). See also Edson’s proposal of a separate category for “list maps” in her classification of world maps in Time and Space, 5 – 6 and fig. 1.3. A sense of places that appeared on world maps can be gained quickly from the listing in von den Brincken, “Mappa mundi und Chronographia,” 162 – 67, and now from the published legends of the Hereford world map in Westrem, Hereford Map. See also the transcription of place-names and other names from the Henry of Mainz (or Sawley) map in Danielle Lecoq, “La mappemonde d’Henri de Mayence ou l’image du monde au XIIe siècle,” in Iconographie médiévale: Image, texte, contexte, ed. Gaston Duchet-Suchaux (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1990), 155 –207, esp. 162. For the use of the name “Sawley map,” see P. D. A. Harvey, “The Sawley Map and Other World Maps in Twelfth-Century England,” Imago Mundi 49 (1997): 33 – 42, esp. 33. 32. Danielle Lecoq explores the nontemporal meanings of maps like the Ebstorf and Psalter maps that seek to express the eternity of divine wisdom and other related concepts in “Le temps et l’intemporel,” esp. 113. 33. See the suggestive comments in Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 178 and 204 –5; the author reminds us that descriptions of the world do not become less interesting just because their primary function was to enhance the reader’s knowledge of biblical history or exegesis (p. 178). A useful comparison from a related discipline is Bernard Ribémont’s remark that the authors of medieval encyclopedias, although they certainly conceived of the world as created, were not particularly interested in exploring the final causes of the natural phenomena they studied; see his “Naturae descriptio: Expliquer la nature dans les encyclopédies du Moyen Age (XIIIe siècle),” in De Natura Rerum: Études sur les encyclopédies médiévales (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), 129 – 49, esp. 130. David Woodward comments on the juxtaposition of “spiritual” and “real” in “Medieval World Maps,” in Géographie du monde, 7– 8. Compare his lengthier treatment in “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 334 –37. It is surprising to find Edson still wondering that the collection of maps and diagrams dealing with astronomical topics in the Arnstein Bible “were thought to be religious enough to be bound with a Bible” in Time and Space, 94, especially after her extended treatment of computus and its relation to clerical culture. See Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 207 and n. 82. 34. We know little of what non-elites thought about their world in the Middle Ages. Interesting evidence of the expectation that a wider audience would have seen a world map appears in the fifteenth century in a sermon by Bernardino da Siena in which he asks his listeners to recall Italy as they have seen it “nel Lappamondo,” referring to the world map in Siena’s palazzo pubblico. Cited in Marcia Kupfer, “The Lost Wheel Map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 286 –310, esp. 288. 35. Edson, Time and Space, 62 – 63. For the term saeculum, see R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), quotation on xxii, and Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 265.

able feasts of the Christian year, especially Easter.36 Branching out from the strict calculation of Easter, many computus manuscripts compiled other materials relating to time, the heavens, and theories of the interconnections between the heavens, the earth, and man that were fundamental to medieval science and medicine. Many of the excerpts commonly associated with computus were drawn from the works of the Venerable Bede, but the collections also included classical texts and others by medieval authors on a variety of subjects—including history—connected with the idea of time broadly conceived. In addition, they frequently contained diagrams designed to summarize and complement the textual presentations, and they sometimes contained maps.37 These maps might appear as simple elements of more complex diagrams; this was a common use of the T-O maps, often labeled with the word terra, which might signify, for example, the earth at the center of a diagram explaining the effect of the moon on the tides.38 Some manuscripts also included more highly elaborated world maps containing historical as well as cosmographical information. Computus has been convincingly described as an “organizing principle in clerical education,” so that, even after calculating the date of Easter became a less universally required skill with the development of reliable tables, these texts continued to be copied, sometimes in impressively produced manuscripts.39 Knowledge of the information included in these works played a role in the formation of clerical identity and suggests the importance and familiarity that maps and associated diagrams of earthly and cosmological phenomena would have had among at least some parts of the clerical elite. Medieval encyclopedias exhibit the same tendency to bring together diverse materials around a loose common theme of the structure and history of the world. They are one of the most interesting settings in which to study medieval representations of the world, because their very heterogeneity allowed for the inclusion of all sorts of map types, from zone and tripartite world maps to regional maps and from maps as separately conceived images to tiny T-O maps within larger cosmographical diagrams. Despite the diversity of topics and materials that characterizes encyclopedias, their larger goal was generally to demonstrate the fundamental unity of the created universe through a synthesis of human knowledge.40 The maps too can be understood, as has already been noted, as different perspectives— offering different degrees of detail— on the single, complex, world system.41 The frequent appearance of maps in works designed to serve pedagogical and popularizing functions is an index of the popularity of what one scholar has called the “passionate discovery of the reality of the world” that characterized the intellectual movement known as the twelfth-century Renaissance.42 Scholars sought to understand the laws that governed the universal system or

Setting the Stage

machina universitatis through the development of reasoned theories and careful speculation about such issues as the existence of the antipodes, a habitable zone in the southern hemisphere diametrically opposite the northern habitable zone of the oikoumene. This issue in particular was controversial, because the possibility of a habitable (and possibly inhabited) zone that was completely cut off from the known world by an impassable torrid zone called into question the completeness of the evangelization of the world and the universality of the Christian message.43 The very use of speculative reason to under36. There is a summary of the technicalities of computus in Edson, Time and Space, 58–61, and see 52–96 on computus more generally. See also Arno Borst, The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer, trans. Andrew Winnard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 33– 41 and 50 –64, and Faith Wallis, “Images of Order in the Medieval Computus,” in Ideas of Order in the Middle Ages, ed. Warren Ginsberg (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1990), 45–68, esp. 45–52. Wallis argues that computus was seen “not so much [as] a science through which one studies time as an art by which one imposes a rational and human order upon time” (p. 51). 37. For a sensitive account of the ways in which a diagram might function as a “schematic prelude” for a textual discussion, highlighting the relationships among concepts, see Bober, “Medieval School-Book,” 81– 85, quotation on 83. For maps in computus manuscripts, see Edson, Time and Space, 72 –96. 38. Arentzen, Imago mundi cartographica, 90 –91, on the symbolic use of basic T-O maps. 39. Edson, Time and Space, 73, referring to Faith Wallis, “MS Oxford, St. John’s College 17: A Mediaeval Manuscript in Its Context” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1987), 610 –39. See also Valerie I. J. Flint, “World History in the Early Twelfth Century: The ‘Imago Mundi’ of Honorius Augustodunensis,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 211–38, esp. 215, reprinted in Valerie I. J. Flint, Ideas in the Medieval West: Texts and Their Contexts (London: Variorum, 1988), 211–38. 40. In the case of the twelfth-century Liber floridus, Danielle Lecoq describes this synthetic vision as a “global view of space and time” in her “La mappemonde du Liber floridus,” 9. Lecoq rightly emphasizes the beauty of the world that Lambert describes, a beauty still accessible to the modern scholar in the striking illustrations of the autograph and deriving, for a medieval audience, from the strongly symmetrical and hierarchical structure of the universe (p. 44). See also Margriet Hoogvliet on the moral interpretation provided by most encyclopedias in her “Mappae Mundi and Medieval Encyclopaedias: Image Versus Text,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1– 4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 63 –74, esp. 72–73. Flint argues that part of Honorius Augustodunensis’s agenda in writing the Imago mundi was to channel a contemporary upsurge of interest in astrology in directions that were theologically acceptable; see “World History,” esp. 223–24, 229–30, and 232–33. 41. See p. 28 and note 17. 42. Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 177. 43. On the focus on laws and a system, see Danielle Lecoq, “L’image de la terre à travers les écrits scientifiques du XIIe siècle: Une vision cosmique, une image polémique,” in L’image et la science: Actes du 115e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes (Avignon, 1990) (Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques, 1992), 15 – 37, esp. 16; see also what Lecoq says about the relative neglect of the

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

stand the world was suspect to some, moreover, because it seemed to deny the absolute power of God and to privilege a kind of natural determinism at the expense of mankind’s free will.44 The scientific or philosophical approach to the world was, then, a controversial one that needed to be justified and explained to a potentially hostile audience.45 Curiously little has been done as yet to explore the roles of the maps that frequently illustrated the arguments of such works as William of Conches’s Dragmaticon philosophiae in stating these claims. Instead, William’s attention to providing helpful visual aids is usually explained as part of a general upswing in the use of visual material to help explain complex problems; the twelfthcentury scholar’s own appreciation of the power of world maps to organize information is illustrated by one author’s choice to classify a randomly ordered list of placenames based on an imagined mappamundi.46 The idea of the earth as a point in a complex system of natural forces was developed in the thirteenth century, especially with reference to the influence of the astral bodies on the nature of earthly places. This form of astrological thought seems to have provided the impetus for Roger Bacon’s discussion of a figura or drawing showing major cities located according to their longitude and latitude.47 Bacon has in the past been credited with considerable innovations in geographical thought, most particularly in his understanding of the use of coordinates to create an accurate graphic representation of the world’s places.48 Recent research on the concepts of longitude and latitude in the Middle Ages suggests that Bacon was less of an innovator in this respect than previous scholars have thought, since he could draw on a well-established body of texts and techniques, including translations of Arabic scientific texts and handbooks on the use of the astrolabe, that explained the underlying theory and offered lists of coordinates for selected cities. Moreover, he probably knew of the idea of using the coordinates provided by Ptolemy’s Geography to create a map thanks to the fairly well-known translations of Maqa¯lah fı¯ hayat al-a¯lam (treatise on the configuration of the world) by Ibn al-

earth itself brought about by this focus on the larger system (p. 30). See more generally David C. Lindberg’s account of Thierry of Chartres and William of Conches and their interest in natural causation in The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientiﬁc Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 197–203. Janet Coleman places Thierry of Chartres’s “Tractatus de sex dierum operibus” in the context of theological interpretation, emphasizing that for Thierry “reasoning about how elements come together and create the world as we know it, is . . . not the whole abstract truth about creation but rather a limited perspective which requires further interpretation for us to understand it truly.” See her “Universal History Secundum Physicam et ad Litteram in the Twelfth Century,” in L’historiographie médiévale en Eu-

rope, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1991), 263 –75, esp. 275. On the antipodes, see Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 192 –95; Danielle Lecoq, “Audelà des limites de la terre habitée: Des îles extraordinaires aux terres antipodes (XIe–XIIIe siècles),” in Terre à découvrir, terres à parcourir: Exploration et connaissance du monde, XIIe–XIXe siècles, ed. Danielle Lecoq and Antoine Chambard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 15 – 41, esp. 28 –33; and Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 319. 44. Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science, 200 –201; Lecoq, “L’image de la terre,” 35 –37; and Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 192 –93. 45. For some of their responses to their critics, see Lecoq, “L’image de la terre,” 35 –37. 46. For the use of a mappamundi to order place-names, see Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 211. On the development in the twelfth century of complex images designed to organize and analyze material, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, “Les images classificatrices,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 147 (1989): 311– 41, esp. 312 –13, and John E. Murdoch, Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1984), 328 – 64. Barbara Obrist has studied the diagrams of winds that occupied an important place in medieval cosmology in her “Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology,” Speculum 72 (1997): 33 – 84. An important introduction to medieval diagrams is Michael Evans’s “The Geometry of the Mind,” Architectural Association Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1980): 32 –55; see also Lucy Freeman Sandler, The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library (London: H. Miller, 1983), and the discussion of Hugh of Saint Victor later in this chapter. For “list maps,” which provide a graphic framework for lists of names of peoples, see Edson, Time and Space, 5 – 6. In light of this work on visualization, it is hard to agree with David Woodward that Bacon was “unusual for the thirteenth century [in] his emphasis on the need for pictures and maps in order to visualize the geography of landscapes and places”; see David Woodward with Herbert M. Howe, “Roger Bacon on Geography and Cartography,” in Roger Bacon and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays, ed. Jeremiah Hackett (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), 199 –222, esp. 219. 47. Lindberg articulates clearly an important medieval distinction between astrology “as a set of beliefs about physical influence within the cosmos” and “astrology as the art of casting horoscopes,” in Beginnings of Western Science, 274. Wey Gómez’s study of the Columbian encounter and its intellectual background alerts us to the central role of astrology in providing meaning and context for the study of geography in scholastic thought; see Wey Gómez, Machine of the World. On the concept of “geographical determinism” in Bacon and Albert Magnus, see Woodward with Howe, “Roger Bacon on Geography,” 210 –11. On astrology and geography, see also Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Connaissance et usages géographiques des coordonnées dans le Moyen Âge latin (du Vénérable Bède à Roger Bacon),” in Science antique, science médiévale (autour d’Avranches 235), ed. Louis Callebat and O. Desbordes (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 2000), 401–36, esp. 432 –33. 48. David Woodward provides a survey of opinions about Bacon’s place in the history of geographical thought in “Roger Bacon’s Terrestrial Coordinate System,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80 (1990): 109 –22, esp. 115 –18, and in Woodward with Howe, “Roger Bacon on Geography,” 215 –16 and 220 –21. Although cautious in declaring Bacon an innovator, Woodward goes further in this direction than Gautier Dalché, who minimizes Bacon’s original contribution in his “Connaissance et usages géographiques des coordonnées,” 428 –32. An English translation of the sections of geographical interest in Roger Bacon’s “Opus maius” is available online; see Roger Bacon, “The Fourth Part of The Opus Maius: Mathematics in The Service of Theology,” trans. Herbert M. Howe (1996) . For a brief but thought provoking discussion of Bacon’s place in the development of English cartography, see Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps: A History (London: British Library, 1999), 17.

Haytham (Alhazen).49 Bacon was thus not unique in his interest in locating the places of the world accurately within a system that connected them to the heavens. The lesser-known (and unillustrated) works of William of Saint-Cloud and Gerard of Feltre shared an understanding of space as a “whole composed of a set of rigorously deﬁned points,” as did the work of the Dominican Albert Magnus.50 Far from being in itself a trigger that would revolutionize the medieval understanding of geographical space, the knowledge of Ptolemy’s use of coordinates to map the features of the world was an accepted part of medieval geographical knowledge and was enlisted to render more precise an analysis of place based on astronomical and climatological criteria. The enthusiasm for knowing the physical world, discussed in the previous sections, played a signiﬁcant role in medieval pedagogy, especially in the monastic teaching of the Carolingian and twelfth-century Renaissances.51 This was due in part to the heightened attention given in the twelfth century to the literal sense of biblical exegesis: understanding the names, places, and history described in the Bible was seen as the necessary foundation for examining other meanings (moral, Christological, or eschatological).52 One of the proponents of this form of monastic education was Hugh of Saint Victor, whose work also includes several items important for the history of cartography. Hugh was sensitive to the role that images could play in teaching and learning, and his extant works incorporate a wide range of visual aids, including tables and circular diagrams.53 According to his well-known De archa noe mystica, he incorporated a world map into the elaborate diagram of Noah’s ark that he drew to help his fellow canons explore the many meanings of this symbol of the Church and Christian salvation.54 Recent research has also attributed to him a treatise, “Descriptio mappe mundi,” that describes a detailed world map; the text is probably based on lecture notes from lessons that involved the discussion of an actual wall map.55 Although there are no extant maps or diagrams associated with either text, Hugh’s interest in maps as representations of the physical world and as tools for teaching is clear. Indeed, one recent author considers his approach in the “Descriptio mappe mundi” revolutionary in its acceptance of a map, as opposed to a written text, as an authoritative source of information about the world.56

49. For knowledge of coordinates in the Middle Ages, including the inﬂuence of Ptolemy’s Geography, see Gautier Dalché, “Connaissance et usages géographiques des coordonnées,” and esp. 414 –15 for the familiarity of these ideas by the second quarter of the twelfth century. On knowledge of Ptolemy more particularly, see Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Le souvenir de la Géographie de Ptolémée dans le monde latin médiéval (VIe–XIVe siècles),” Euphrosyne 27 (1999): 79 –106. For Bacon’s use of Ibn al-Haytham, see Gautier Dalché, “Connaissance et usages géographiques des coordonnées,” 428 –29.

Setting the Stage 50. Gautier Dalché, “Connaissance et usages géographiques des coordonnées,” 429 –34. Gautier Dalché argues in the same article (p. 434 and n. 85) that Albert did not envision drawing a map to support his geographical discussions. This is against the claims of Józef Babicz and Heribert M. Nobis, “Die Mathematisch-Geographischen und Kartographischen Ideen von Albertus Magnus und Ihre Stelle in der Geschichte der Geographie,” in Die Kölner Universität im Mittelalter: Geistige Wurzeln und Soziale Wirklichkeit, ed. Albert Zimmermann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), 97–110, esp. 103 –9. 51. Gautier Dalché, La “Descriptio mappe mundi” (1988), 122–23. For a broader view of possible pedagogical contexts for the large world maps of the thirteenth century, see Marcia Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 269–73, and for teaching the laity, see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 –1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213–20. 52. On Hugh’s place in twelfth-century exegesis, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), and idem, “The Bible in the Medieval Schools,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 197–220, esp. 216 –20. Hugh’s discussion of the organization of knowledge is available in translation: The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). See also Barbara Obrist’s comments on the relationship between literal exegesis and the “real” world in her review of Gautier Dalché’s La “Descriptio mappe mundi” (1988), in Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale Xe–XIIe siècles 34 (1991): 73. Barbara Obrist’s “Image et prophétie au XIIe siècle: Hugues de Saint-Victor et Joachim de Flore,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen-Age Temps Modernes 98 (1986): 35 – 63, esp. 39 – 41, contains a helpful discussion of Hugh’s use of images in aiding comprehension and contemplation. 53. Mary Carruthers discusses Hugh’s use of visual aids in the context of memory training; in her view, medieval thinkers privileged memory as key to learning and knowledge, so that book design and teaching aids were geared toward efﬁcient memorization of large amounts of material. This is the context in which she places the attention to visual presentation of ideas that we have noted as characteristic of this period. See her The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 93, 231, and 253 –57. See also Patrice Sicard, Diagrammes médiévaux et exégèse visuelle: Le Libellus de formation arche de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Paris: Brepols, 1993), 141–54, on the idea of “visual exegesis.” For Hugh’s use of images to support his contemplative theology, see Grover A. Zinn, “Hugh of St. Victor, Isaiah’s Vision, and De Arca Noe,” in The Church and the Arts, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Blackwell, 1992), 99 –116. 54. On Hugh’s map, see Danielle Lecoq, “La ‘Mappemonde’ du De Arca Noe Mystica de Hugues de Saint-Victor (1128 –1129),” in Géographie du monde, 9 –31. Sicard provides important context for Hugh’s work in Diagrammes médiévaux. Carruthers suggests that Hugh’s treatise described a mental picture, not one that was actually drawn; see Craft of Thought, 243 – 46, esp. 245 – 46, and also Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 269. 55. Gautier Dalché, La “Descriptio mappe mundi” (1988), 41–58, for the attribution to Hugh of Saint Victor, and 101–7, for his use of the map in teaching. See also his “Descriptio mappe mundi de Hugues de SaintVictor: Retractatio et additamenta,” in L’abbaye parisienne de SaintVictor au Moyen Age, ed. Jean Longère (Paris: Brepols, 1991), 143–79. 56. Gautier Dalché, La “Descriptio mappe mundi” (1988), 110 –11: “The contribution of the twelfth century, and especially of Hugh of Saint Victor, was to remove the examination of maps from exclusively monastic preoccupations, to give it primacy over the text, and thus to open the West to one of the intellectual conditions of its expansion” (pp. 126 –27). For the new geographical conclusions that Hugh was able to derive from his use of the map, see pp. 113 –15.

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

The views of the world expressed by the opponents of the new systematic interest in nature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can also be found expressed in maps. The world map on the floor of the cathedral of San Salvatore in Turin has been explained as a demonstration of the vanity of this earthly world—since it is quite literally trodden under foot—in the face of the hope of a future world expressed by the decorative program in the upper parts of the church.57 A more complex example of the representation of the world as the object of renunciation is provided by the twelfth-century world map once in the parish church of Chalivoy-Milon. Kupfer has argued persuasively that this map can only be understood as part of the complete program of the church’s decoration, which dramatized both the history of salvation and the social structure that privileged the monks (the church was a monastic parish) over the laity.58 The world map was located at the west end of the church, where the lay parishioners would see it as they entered, capped, in Kupfer’s reconstruction, with images of the fall of Adam and Eve and the entry of sin into the world. The map thus functioned in several coordinated ways: it was part of the overall portrayal of the historical progression from sin to salvation, expressed in the church building as movement from the west to the east; it also represented graphically the separation of the worldly life of the laity from the cloistered life of the monks, both to fortify the latter group’s prestige and to remind them of its burden and its renunciations. Finally, like the many contemporary maps illustrating the commentary on the Apocalypse of Beatus of Liebana, it presented the world as essentially the theater for apostolic, pastoral action.59 Both of these readings of maps in their monumental contexts reiterate the importance of the setting in determining meaning, while also alerting us to the potential range of meanings of any single artifact. As we have already seen in the context of the small symbolic T-O maps, world maps could also serve political functions in the Middle Ages. The court of the Plantagenet kings of England in the later twelfth century provides a rich example of the interlocking roles of geography and cartography in the construction of royal power. The imperial aims of the Plantagenets, who were expanding their power in Ireland and France, coupled with the strong interest in classical and courtly literature at their court, resulted in a climate of active interest in geography and maps.60 The artifacts that arose from or were influenced by this milieu range from illustrations in manuscripts of works like the “Roman d’Alexandre” (a widely distributed romance detailing the exploits of Alexander the Great, an obvious model for would-be emperors) to the description in a poem by Baudri of Bourgueil of a world map decorating the floor of the chamber of the Countess Adèle of Blois.61 This map is generally thought to have been a purely literary conceit, designed to glorify the military triumphs of Adèle’s family line and

to praise her broad knowledge of the cosmos and its workings, but it also demonstrates the power of the map as a symbol of rulership and knowledge and suggests the familiarity of such a symbol to the poem’s audience.62 The political uses of maps seem to have been particularly highly developed in thirteenth-century England, although examples like al-Idrı¯sı¯’s “Nuzhat al-mushta¯q ﬁkhtira¯q al-a¯fa¯q” (also known as the Book of Roger), written for Roger II of Sicily in the twelfth century, and the lost silver world map associated with it suggest that these expressions of royal power and knowledge were employed elsewhere as well.63 Nor was the use of the map as a symbol of humility foreign to political purposes. A world map decorated Henry III’s bedchamber in Westminster Palace as part of a program designed to promote

57. Ernst Kitzinger, “World Map and Fortune’s Wheel: A Medieval Mosaic Floor in Turin,” in The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West: Selected Studies by Ernst Kitzinger, ed. W. Eugene Kleinbauer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 327–56, esp. 353 –55. See also Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 275 –76. 58. Marcia Kupfer, “The Lost Mappamundi at Chalivoy-Milon,” Speculum 66 (1991): 540 –71, esp. 565 –71. 59. Kupfer, “Lost Mappamundi,” 566 and 569. For a list of maps illustrating Beatus’s Apocalypse commentary, see Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 360; note that, although Beatus is listed under the eighth century, many of the manuscripts date from the late eleventh or twelfth century. For another example of maps (here based on maps from the Beatus commentary) as church decoration, see Serafín Moralejo, “El mapa de la diáspora apostólica en San Pedro de Rocas: Notas para su interpretación y filiación en la tradición cartográfica de los ‘Beatos,’” Compostellanum: Revista de la Archidiocesis de Santiago de Compostela 31 (1986): 315 – 40. 60. Nathalie Bouloux, “Les usages de la géographie à la cour des Plantagenêts dans la seconde moitié du XIIe siècle,” Médiévales 24 (1993): 131– 48; see especially the world map as symbol of royal power and the idea that a king should possess geographical knowledge of the regions he ruled, pp. 144 – 48; on the relations of clerics to royal administration and geographical writing, see pp. 136 – 43. See also Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146 –1223 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). David J. Corner suggests a Welsh origin for the strong interest in topography in twelfth- and thirteenth-century English writers from Giraldus Cambrensis to Matthew Paris; see his “English Cartography in the Thirteenth Century: The Intellectual Context,” Bulletin of the Society of University Cartographers 17 (1984): 65 –73. 61. For the Roman d’Alexandre and other romances with geographical content, see Bouloux, “Les usages de la géographie,” 137–39; Bouloux sees geography as a topic of considerable interest to the audiences of romances. See also Alan Deyermond, “Building a World: Geography and Cosmology in Castilian Literature of the Early Thirteenth Century,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (1996): 141–59, esp. 146 –53. 62. Bouloux, “Les usages de la géographie,” 145, n. 53; Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 277; and Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 213 –20. 63. For al-Idrı¯sı¯ ’s role at Roger’s court and his geographical works, see S. Maqbul Ahmad, “Cartography of al-Sharı¯f al-Idrı¯sı¯,” in HC 2.1: 156 –74, esp. 158 – 60. Like Henry II, Roger “wished that he should accurately know the details of his land and master them with a definite knowledge” (p. 159 and n. 26). A book on the Ebstorf map that I have not been able to consult is Jürgen Wilke, Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2001).

Setting the Stage

the virtues of a Christian kingship, especially charity and the controlled use of power.64 At a more local scale, a recent interpretation of the Hereford map emphasizes its role in the ecclesiastical politics of canonization, the enforcement of ecclesiastical rights against the lay aristocracy, and relations between royal and episcopal power.65 According to this view, the map catered in many of its details to aristocratic lay pilgrims, joining to its political message the equally important function of providing entertainment and moral improvement: its representations of animals and monstrous races engage the popular aristocratic spirituality embodied in the bestiaries, while at the same time providing a kind of geographical entertainment familiar from contemporary romances.66 In conclusion, the surviving examples of world maps, along with other texts, images, and references to maps, bear witness to the passionate interest in the real world described by Gautier Dalché.67 The variety of functions that these maps could play reflects the multifarious meanings of the world in medieval culture, as the maps served to describe, analyze, summarize, and create knowledge and perceptions about the fundamental spaces of human existence. These were works destined for both elite and somewhat more popular audiences—including pilgrims, parishioners, and consumers of romances—to whom they helped provide visual, intellectual, and imaginative access to the larger world. As we have seen, the sensitivity of recent scholarship to the specific contexts in which maps appeared and the ways in which they were used has given us new insights into the complexity and subtlety of the potential meanings of medieval world maps, although much remains to be uncovered about the perception and representation of space in this fertile period. portolan charts Treatments of medieval mapmaking still occasionally imply that the portolan charts—remarkably accurate charts of the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black seas with part of the Atlantic coast of Europe—were an aberration on the medieval scene.68 This view has recently become even less sustainable with the suggestion that the later thirteenth-century date most commonly proposed for their origins be pushed back by a hundred years.69 Geographically accurate and intended—at least in part— for the purpose of route finding, the portolan charts reflected a different set of assumptions and expectations about the purpose of a map than did contemporary world maps: nevertheless, room must be found in our view of medieval cartography for these fascinating and problematic inventions. Much of the history of the portolan charts belongs in the later part of this chapter, because most of the extant

examples come from the fourteenth century and later, as does the first clear evidence of their impact on other map forms.70 It is worth pausing, nonetheless, to consider Another example of royal patronage of geography is Gervase of Tilbury’s “Otia imperialia” (1211), written for the German Emperor Otto IV; Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002). The text includes a reference to an accompanying map; see Edson, Time and Space, 132. The Ebstorf map (now lost) draws in part on this text, although the relationship between the two works remains debatable. The map has been interpreted as, in part, a political document associated with the reign of Otto the Child, Duke of Brunswick, because the place-names focus heavily on his family’s possessions; see Armin Wolf, “News on the Ebstorf Map: Date, Origin, Authorship,” in Géographie du monde, 51– 68, esp. 53 – 61. 64. A painted world map also decorated the great hall at Winchester Castle, here in company with an image of fortune’s wheel, recalling, like the floor of San Salvatore in Turin, the transitoriness of earthly power; see Kupfer, “Medieval World Maps,” 277–79. 65. Flint, “Hereford Map.” For criticism of her identification of the map’s author, see Westrem, Hereford Map, xxiii and n. 23. The map of Europe contained in a manuscript of works by Giraldus Cambrensis (Dublin, National Library of Ireland, MS. 700) has also been interpreted as a statement about ecclesiastical politics, here the centrality of Rome to the functioning of the English church; see Thomas O’Loughlin, “An Early Thirteenth-Century Map in Dublin: A Window into the World of Giraldus Cambrensis,” Imago Mundi 51 (1999): 24 –38, esp. 28–31. 66. On pilgrimage and the literary context of the Hereford map, see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “Reading the World: The Hereford Mappa Mundi,” Parergon n.s. 9, no. 1 (1991): 117–35, esp. 132 –35. Valerie Flint developed these ideas in a talk entitled “Maps and the Laity: The Hereford Mappa Mundi,” at the conference Maps from the Middle Ages, University of Minnesota, November 14, 1998. 67. Gautier Dalché, “Le renouvellement,” 177. 68. Scott Westrem comments that the “‘familiarity’ to the modern eye of maps used by navigators . . . may be deceptive, causing us to see them only as ‘precursors’ of the ‘realistic’ cartography of today, thus distracting us from some of their essential medieval qualities”; see Hereford Map, xxxviii n. 60. Even Campbell refers to portolan charts as “precocious in their precision,” although elsewhere he describes them as “a necessary if specialized element of medieval life”; see “Portolan Charts,” 371 and 446. 69. Campbell, in “Portolan Charts,” provides a reliable survey of these maps; on their origins and methods of compilation, see pp. 380 –90. More recently, and on the basis of new evidence, Patrick Gautier Dalché argues for a twelfth-century date in his Carte marine et portulan au XIIe siècle: Le Liber de existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostri mediterranei (Pise, circa 1200) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1995), 1–37. For further discussion, see later in this chapter. Gautier Dalché also offers further evidence for the existence in the twelfth century of portolans—written sailing directions, as opposed to the maps conventionally called portolan charts in English—in his “D’une technique à une culture: Carte nautique et portulan au XIIe et au XIIIe siècle,” in L’uomo e il mare nella civiltà occidentale: Da Ulisse a Cristoforo Colombo (Genoa: Società Ligure di Storia Patria, 1992), 283 –312, esp. 287–97. On the complex terminology of these maps, which Gautier Dalché prefers to call cartes marines, see Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 375, and Gautier Dalché, Carte marine, x–xi. 70. The earliest surviving dated chart is from 1311; two undated charts, the so-called Carte Pisane and the Cortona chart, are often thought to be earlier, dating perhaps from the end of the thirteenth century; see Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 404. Textual references to charts

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

what the twelfth- and thirteenth-century evidence can tell us about the reception of the geographical knowledge represented by these charts. The very earliest evidence that we have of the existence of both portolans and portolan charts stems, not surprisingly, from the intersection between learned culture and the practices of Mediterranean trade and seafaring. In the case of written sailing directions, the first traces appear not in local sources, but in the chronicles of northern European crusaders and pilgrims, for whom Mediterranean navigation was a foreign world and who borrowed from portolans as a helpful framework for writing about unknown coasts and seas.71 In contrast, the “Liber de existencia riveriarum et forma maris nostri Mediterranei,” the first known work to be based in part on what may have been a portolan chart, was an entirely Italian undertaking, but, like the works just mentioned, the product of a mixture of information and ideas from both learned and “practical” knowledge spheres. The text we have indicates that the author began by creating a map, which he later supplemented with the text in response to a demand for more historical and learned material by a member of the local clergy.72 Both of these examples give early evidence of an interdependence of learned and “practical” cultures and of the cross-fertilization of ideas from cultural communities usually taken as distinct in the Middle Ages.73 This creative interaction of types of knowledge has been seen as key in Renaissance developments, while, conversely, the separation of medieval knowledge communities has been seen as a limitation on creativity and innovation.74 Spheres of knowledge did in fact remain quite distinct, but these examples suggest several settings in which contact could occur: the intensely self-conscious world of the nascent Italian communes, heavily influenced by merchant culture and open to any means of expressing civic consciousness; and the Crusades, with their mass movement of northerners out of their habitual intellectual and physical territories into a strange new Mediterranean world. As far as we now know, the interdependence of map, portolan, and learned geographical text that underlies the “Liber” was not replicated until the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, although new discoveries (like the “Liber” itself) have been frequent enough in recent years to justify a healthy skepticism about the extent of our knowledge in these areas.75 Nevertheless, the examples that do exist suggest that in certain circumstances fruitful exchanges could and did occur. regional maps Compared with the numbers of extant world maps, relatively few maps of smaller areas—regions, cities, estates, or routes—survive from the high Middle Ages. Once again, however, a number of new examples have recently come to light, suggesting the possibility that our percep-

tion of this type of medieval cartography may yet be dramatically altered by further discoveries.76 It remains true, however, that many functions accomplished in other predate the extant examples: the earliest and most famous records the use in 1270 of a chart by the crew of a ship bound for Damietta to try to calm the fears of King Louis IX of France and his fellow crusaders during a storm. See Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 439; Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Les savoirs géographiques en Méditerranée chrétienne (XIIIe s.),” Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 2 (1994): 75 –99, esp. 83 – 84; and idem, “D’une technique à une culture,” 307– 8, discuss some of the more problematic aspects of this episode. 71. Gautier Dalché, “D’une technique à une culture,” 287–96, esp. 296, on the novelty of the experience of the crusade for writers and participants and the emphasis on the voyage itself as a key part of the undertaking. 72. Gautier Dalché, Carte marine, 7–16. See the review by Tony Campbell in Imago Mundi 49 (1997): 184; Campbell is skeptical about Gautier Dalché’s identification of this map as a portolan chart or protoportolan chart. 73. This evidence is corroborated by the available information on the early use and ownership of portolan charts. In addition to pilots and merchants, as we might anticipate, notaries were relatively strongly represented among owners of these charts. Patrick Gautier Dalché suggests that they used them to aid in drawing up contracts involving far-flung trading ventures that required a specific and accurate understanding of Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Atlantic coastal geography. He is also concerned to note the mixed evidence for the actual nature of shipboard usage of these charts. See his “L’usage des cartes marines aux XIVe et XVe siècles,” in Spazi, tempi, misure e percorsi nell’Europa del bassomedioevo (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1996), 97–128, esp. 109 and 113 –24, respectively. Compare Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 439 – 44, where the author states that “the evidence that portolan charts were used on board ship is overwhelming,” but who is similarly cautious about the role of the charts in navigation (p. 439). There are also interesting connections between the role of portolan charts as markers of participation in a community of men who gained their livelihood in connection with the sea, an element of display that has something in common with the later importance of maps as prints in the more highly commercialized world of the sixteenth century. See Woodward, Maps as Prints, 2 –5 and 75 –102, and Gautier Dalché, “D’une technique à une culture,” 311. 74. For boundaries between medieval communities of knowledge, see Gautier Dalché, “Un problème d’histoire culturelle,” 12. For ideas of cross-fertilization from the Renaissance itself, see the example of Benedetto Cotrugli, who explained the desirability for merchants of learning both the liberal arts and practical disciplines in his “Della mercatura et del mercante perfetto” of 1458 (cited in Gautier Dalché, “L’usage des cartes marines,” 111). 75. For other examples, see the articles by Gautier Dalché mentioned in note 111, and Bouloux, Culture. For Gautier Dalché, the contact between portolans and portolan charts and the learned world would have occurred early and been relatively extensive; see his “L’usage des cartes marines,” 109. 76. Harvey surveys the field in his “Local and Regional Cartography,” discussing the numbers and familiarity of these maps (pp. 464 – 65) and the possibility of further discoveries (pp. 486 – 87). See also his The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), and, more recently, the helpful book by Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 8 and 12 –18, esp. 12 for increasing numbers of maps generally in the twelfth century and the first local maps of England. Von den Brincken, Kartographische Quellen, 42 – 46, offers a discussion of categories using a different terminology than that adopted here.

periods by means of a map (the description of landed possessions, for example) were most often handled in the Middle Ages through written lists and descriptions. The Domesday Book in England and countless inventories of the lands of monasteries were purely textual documents, while boundaries were typically indicated in charters by such written means as listing the names of the holders of neighboring parcels.77 The few known exceptions come from England, including an early thirteenth-century sketch map of the divisions of a meadow, in which the drawing replaces a textual description of the sizes of the portions (ﬁg. 2.2).78 Somewhat more common were the maps of routes, regions, and cities that depicted graphically the relationships usually described in writing. These maps can tell us a great deal about the representation and meaning of space in medieval society.79 The principal types of regional and local maps in the Middle Ages were itinerary maps, maps of regions like England or Palestine, city plans, and, especially from the very late Middle Ages, maps of disputed lands or boundaries of properties. Most of these maps appear to have belonged to separate traditions, although the extensive corpus of maps in Matthew Paris’s chronicles, combining as it does multiple map types, suggests the degree to which a graphically inclined author might be familiar with and able to deploy images from all the known categories of maps, in addition to other types of drawings and diagrams.80 Written itineraries were well known in the Middle Ages and were apparently used both as travelers’ aids and for armchair travel, often for the purpose of either actual or mental pilgrimage.81 Only two maps structured as itineraries survive, the more elaborate of which is the Peutinger map. A twelfth- or early thirteenth-century copy of a Late Antique original, the map has usually been studied for what it can tell us of ancient cartography or of the interest in the ancient world on the part of the ﬁfteenth-century

fig. 2.2. THE DIVISIONS OF A MEADOW, BEFORE 1208. From a cartulary, this map shows the “length and breadth” of the parcels. Size of the original: 9.1 17 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library, London (MS. Court of Arches Ff. 291, fol. 58v).

Setting the Stage

German humanists who rediscovered it. It is, however, extremely important to remember the commitment of time and resources involved in producing the medieval copy: the question then arises of what this map meant to the society that found the human and financial resources to copy it. It has been plausibly explained in the context of the strong interest in the classical world that we have already seen influencing the toponyms of later medieval world maps; however, more research should be done to elucidate the importance and the influence of this map.82 77. On notaries’ representation of space, see Coste, “Description et délimitation de l’espace rural,” esp. 198 –200; Monique Bourin, “La géographie locale du notaire languedocien (Xe–XIIIe siècle),” in Espace vécu, mesuré, imaginé: Numéro en l’honneur de Christiane Deluz, ed. Christine Bousquet-Labouérie (Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1997), 33 – 42; and idem, “Delimitation des parcelles.” Robert Brentano’s discussions of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian disputes and wills are less specific about boundary clauses but extremely helpful for their evocation of the ways in which lands were discussed, experienced, and imagined, as are his important chapters on the changing definitions of diocesan boundaries; see New World, 64 –142 and 276 –78. On the geographical organization of the Carolingian polyptichs, see Gautier Dalché, La “Descriptio mappe mundi” (1988), 123. For a discussion of English cartularies, in which the documents were often organized topographically and, on one occasion, with the indication that they belonged to the northern or eastern part of Gloucestershire, see David Walker, “The Organization of Material in Medieval Cartularies,” in The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 132 –50, esp. 140 and 142. 78. Reproduced and discussed, with other early English examples, in Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 13 –14 and fig. 2.6. 79. See the bibliography in note 12. 80. Harvey notes the connection between Paris’s “general interest in diagrammatic representation” and the exuberant creativity of his map production; this connection between the impulse to draw maps and the solidly established tradition of drawing diagrams to explain relationships among concepts deserves more study. See Harvey, “Matthew Paris’s Maps,” quotation on 121. On diagrams, see later in this chapter. 81. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 495 –98, esp. 495, and the evidence for Matthew Paris’s use of a written itinerary for his draft map of the Holy Land (pp. 495 –96). There is a helpful brief discussion of the practicalities of medieval wayfinding in Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 142 – 45, which downplays the use of any planning aid. For an example of a pilgrims’ guide, see William Melczer, trans., The Pilgrims’ Guide to Santiago de Compostela (New York: Italica Press, 1993). For the crusade itineraries of Richard I and Philip II in Roger of Howden’s chronicle, see Bouloux, “Usages de la géographie,” 140 – 43, with comments on the relationship between the itineraries and English crusading strategy (p. 143), and Gautier Dalché, “D’une technique à une culture,” 287–97, for their relationship with portolans. 82. For the ancient map, see O. A. W. Dilke, “Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman Empires,” in HC 1: 234 –57, esp. 238 – 42. Among the many facsimiles, see Ekkehard Weber, ed., Tabula Peutingeriana: Codex Vindobonensis 324 (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1976), with a helpful introduction. Pascal Arnaud calls for attention to the map as a medieval artifact in his “Images et représentations dans la cartographie du bas Moyen Âge,” in Spazi, tempi, misure e percorsi nell’Europa del bassomedioevo (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo,

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

The other significant extant example of an itinerary map is the one that appears in various redactions in manuscripts of Paris’s “Chronica majora.”83 The map shows the route from England to Apulia, marking each day’s journey and prominent topographic features like mountains and rivers. Suited to its location in a chronicle, the map serves a historical purpose in demonstrating the route of a well-known contemporary diplomatic expedition, Richard of Cornwall’s expedition to Sicily in 1253 as the claimant to the crown, although the map contains information drawn from multiple journeys and routes.84 In addition to these surviving examples of itinerary maps, the significance of the itinerary— especially the written or narrated itinerary—is demonstrated by the frequency with which itineraries served as at least one source for other types of maps. For example, some of the information on the Hereford world map was based on an itinerary that may show a route familiar to English traders in France.85 Even more substantial is the role played by itineraries in the creation of regional maps. These interconnections are especially striking in the rich cartographic production of Matthew Paris, although, as we will see when we turn to earlier maps of Britain, his work is far from unique in this respect. Paris created a number of regional maps of England and Palestine, as well as two historical maps representing features of early Britain. In at least three of these maps, he drew heavily on itineraries and routes. Of the historical maps, one is a sketch showing the location of four preRoman roads in Britain. The map of the seven AngloSaxon kingdoms, on the other hand, demonstrates how closely maps could be linked with another important medieval genre, the diagram (fig. 2.3). This map is designed as a circular diagram (rota) laid out with petal-shaped divisions, a highly schematic presentation common in school texts and often intended to aid in memorization; however, the kingdoms fall in roughly the proper geographical locations, justifying our use of the term “map,” even though, as Paris noted, the oblong shape of the island has been compressed into a circle to fit within the conventions of the diagrammatic tradition.86 It is possible to describe the sources and creation of Paris’s maps of England in considerable detail, an approach very welcome in the study of medieval cartography, thanks to a study by Harvey.87 According to his reconstruction, Paris began by adopting the outline of the island from a world map, probably of Roman origin. He then drew on an itinerary from Dover to the Scottish border to develop his representation of the interior, filling in extra place-names around this core. His subsequent revisions of the map reflect his discoveries of new sources, providing the river network, for example, and improvements in the coastline. Collectively, these maps demon-

1996), 129 –53, esp. 129 –30. Harvey notes the map’s medieval incarnation only briefly in “Local and Regional Cartography,” 495. For the antiquarian interests of the copyists, see Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Mappe del cielo e della terra: L’orientamento nel basso medioevo,” also in Spazi, tempi, misure e percorsi, 81–96, esp. 85 – 86. 83. On the physical form of these maps with the suggestion that Paris’s map was originally designed as a freestanding folding map like the Peutinger map rather than as an illustration for the chronicle, see Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Berkeley: University of California Press in collaboration with Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 1987), 326 –32. 84. Delano-Smith and Kain explain the itinerary maps as compilations of everything that Matthew Paris knew about the well-traveled routes from England to Sicily in English Maps, 150 –52. On the uses of itinerary maps, compare their comments on the limited utility of John Ogilby’s strip-maps in the seventeenth century and on his possible debt to Matthew Paris in originating this type of map, pp. 168 –70. Edson sees Paris’s itinerary as a compilation of travelers’ reports; unfortunately, although she presents his work in a section on maps in historical works, she does not explore the ways in which these maps relate to and enhance the meaning of the Chronicle; Time and Space, 118 –25, travelers’ reports on 122. See also Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 495 –96. On the larger graphic context of Paris’s work, see Lewis, Art of Matthew Paris, esp. 321–76 on his cartography and 323 – 64 on the itinerary maps with good black and white reproductions (figs. 204 –12). Lewis discusses the evidence for associating this map with Richard of Cornwall and the plurality of routes through northern Italy (suggesting a broader geographical purpose for the map than simply recording one expedition), 323 –24 and 340 – 42, respectively. For the geographical detail of the map, see for example 338. On Matthew Paris more generally, the standard treatment is Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). 85. For example, the Hereford map incorporates an itinerary through France and possibly one in Germany. Harvey, Mappa Mundi, 50 –53, reporting the work of G. R. Crone, “New Light on the Hereford Map,” Geographical Journal 131 (1965): 447– 62, esp. 451–56. On Matthew Paris’s use of an itinerary in creating his maps of England, see DelanoSmith and Kain, English Maps, 45 – 46. Paris’s map of Palestine draws on the kind of information about the length of the journey from city to city that would normally be found in an itinerary as an indication of scale for the map. See Edson, Time and Space, 121, and Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 495 –98, in the context of a larger discussion of the relationship between itineraries and the idea of a consistent scale. 86. Diagrams were heavily used in medieval teaching to show analytical relationships and as an aid to memorization. The best introductions to the variety and use of these images are Evans, “Geometry of the Mind,” 32 –55, and Bober, “Medieval School-Book.” Carruthers has worked with these images in her study of memory and the patterns of medieval thought, especially in Book of Memory, 248 –57; see also Madeline H. Caviness, “Images of Divine Order and the Third Mode of Seeing,” Gesta 22 (1983): 99 –120. A beautiful example of a late medieval psalter illustrated with many such diagrams is Sandler, Psalter of Robert de Lisle. A good starting point in the large literature on scientific diagrams is Obrist, “Wind Diagrams,” and her bibliography. Murdoch, in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, provides a helpful range of illustrations. On Matthew Paris’s diagrammatic maps, see Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 16 –17 and figs. 2.9 and 2.10, and Edson, Time and Space, 123 –25 and fig. 6.8. 87. Harvey, “Matthew Paris’s Maps,” 111–21; Harvey’s findings are summarized in Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 45 – 46 and figs. 2.27–2.33, which allow for a convenient comparison of Matthew Paris’s maps with other twelfth- and thirteenth-century maps.

Setting the Stage

fig. 2.3. DIAGRAMMATIC MAP OF THE ANGLO-SAXON KINGDOMS OF BRITAIN BY MATTHEW PARIS. The text accompanying the map indicates that it is meant to give the names of the kingdoms and their location in terms of the car-

dinal points, but that it does not respect the oblong shape of Britain. Diameter of the map: 12.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BL (Cotton MS. Julius D.VII., fols. 49v–50r).

strate how powerful a process the compilation of geographical information from various sources could be and how central a role itineraries and world maps could play in the elaboration of regional maps. Although Britain was shown on a few world maps in a surprising degree of detail, it was more usually highly simplified owing to its awkward position at the margins of Europe in the narrow encircling ocean typical of the mappaemundi.88 The first extant maps to present Britain either alone or as the main focus of attention demonstrate a concern to describe the relationship of the British Isles to one another and to the continent more accurately than these simplified representations allowed. Works on the topography and Norman conquest of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis form the context for a schematic map showing the relative positions of Britain, Ireland, and the Orkneys.89 Another manuscript of his works on Ireland contains a map in which (reading from the top down) Rome, France, Flanders, Britain, Wales, and Ireland are aligned vertically down the page as in an itinerary (fig. 2.4). O’Loughlin has argued that this schematization of the ge-

ographical forms is meant to emphasize the ecclesiastical connections between Rome and the British Isles, simultaneously reflecting the actual routes traveled by English ecclesiastics and demonstrating graphically that the seemingly marginal position of the islands was illusory compared with the closeness of its contacts with the center of Latin Christendom.90 88. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 40 – 48, esp. 40. 89. Giraldus did not necessarily play a role in the creation of this map, which may well have been added by the scribe who copied the manuscript ca. 1200; see Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 15 and fig. 2.7. On Giraldus and his historical works, see Bartlett, Gerald of Wales; for the cartographic thought of the twelfth-century English court, see note 60. 90. O’Loughlin, “Early Thirteenth-Century Map,” 28 –31, and Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 15 –16. O’Loughlin suggests that the map’s author was Giraldus himself or at least someone closely associated with him (pp. 32 –33); for his highly suggestive comments on the influence of both itineraries and world maps on the form of this regional map, see pp. 29 –32. The argument that the alignment on the map of Rome and the British Isles signified the close ecclesiastical connections between the two places is convincing. The author’s further

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

tribes of Israel (fig. 2.5). Richard used images in exegesis specifically because he, like Hugh of Saint Victor before him, believed that the higher levels of spiritual interpretation needed to rest on a firm literal and historical foundation, which his plans and maps helped provide. This concern for the visual understanding of complex textual descriptions also led Richard to include a number of ground plans of the temple described in Ezekiel 40 – 48.93 Richard may well have drawn his inspiration for his map of Canaan from the schematic maps of Israel that appeared in the commentaries of Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi), one of the most influential European Jewish exegetes (fig. 2.6). These maps are very similar to Richard’s (they may indeed be the source of Richard’s), but they were designed to show the limits of the Holy Land, within which, in Jewish thought, God’s commandments were binding.94 Matthew Paris’s maps of Palestine, in contrast to the maps discussed previously, are best described as maps not so much of the Holy Land as of the Crusader kingdom, especially since a plan of the city of Acre, the principal port of the kingdom, dominates the coastline.95 In many ways they continue the itinerary from England to Sicily

fig. 2.4. MAP OF EUROPE. The map is located in a manuscript from ca. 1200 of Giraldus Cambrensis’s works on the topography of Ireland. It aligns Ireland with Rome. Size of the original: ca. 21.5 17.1 cm. Photograph courtesy of the National Library of Ireland, Dublin (MS. 700, fol. 48r).

Other maps of selected regions include Lambert of Saint-Omer’s map of Europe (early twelfth century), which pays special attention to Flanders; Guido of Pisa’s map of Italy; Matthew Paris’s “world map,” which focuses on Europe almost exclusively and places Italy at center stage (thirteenth century); and the so-called “Jerome” map of Asia. The latter map, which appears in a twelfth-century French manuscript of Saint Jerome’s works, may have been based on an ancient model, while the two maps of Europe may either likewise have ancient roots or have been developed as details of world maps.91 Aside from Britain, Palestine was the region most frequently represented during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although the maps fall into distinct categories. The previously mentioned twelfth-century map of Asia in Saint Jerome’s “De situ et nominibus locorum hebraicorum liber” shares a folio with a map of Palestine that shows the topography and toponymy of the Bible.92 A related concern for the knowledge of Holy Land topography led Richard of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century exegete, to include in his commentary on Ezekiel a map of Canaan that shows the division of the land among the

comment that the map would have facilitated appeals to Rome by making the distances seem insignificant surely posits too naïve an understanding of European geography among churchmen who had extensive anecdotal experience of such trips; see pp. 28 –31. 91. Harvey, Medieval Maps, 71. For the “affinity” between world maps and regional maps and itineraries, see Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 292. On Lambert’s local interests, see Derolez, Lambertus qui librum fecit, 472, and Lecoq, “La mappemonde du Liber floridus,” 32. On the maps associated with Saint Jerome’s “Liber locorum” in London (BL, Add. MS. 10049), and for Guido of Pisa, see Edson, Time and Space, 26 –30, fig. 2.3, and 117–18. For the mapping of Africa, see Francesc Relaño, The Shaping of Africa: Cosmographic Discourse and Cartographic Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 92. Edson, Time and Space, 27–30; Edson comments that, although the map has been thought of as a straightforward close copy of an ancient original, the coincidence of this map’s copying (and, one might add, that of Jerome’s text as well) with the Crusades deserves more study (p. 30). 93. On the plans, see Walter Cahn, “Architecture and Exegesis: Richard of St.-Victor’s Ezekiel Commentary and Its Illustrations,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 53 – 68, esp. 58 –59. A version of the map of Canaan in an early thirteenth-century English manuscript is reproduced and briefly discussed in Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 18 and fig. 2.12. On Richard as an exegete, see Cahn, “Architecture,” 55 –56, and Smalley, Study of the Bible, 106 –11. 94. Catherine Delano-Smith and Mayer I. Gruber, “Rashi’s Legacy: Maps of the Holy Land,” Map Collector 59 (1992): 30 –35, esp. 30 – 32. More images of the maps from Rashi’s commentaries may be found in E. Wajntraub and G. Wajntraub, Hebrew Maps of the Holy Land (Vienna: Brüder Hollinek, 1992), especially the two thirteenth-century examples, 2 –5 (W.1 and W.2). See Cahn, “Architecture,” 67– 68, for the evidence that Richard may have borrowed his map from a commentary by Rashi. 95. Lewis, Art of Matthew Paris, 357.

Setting the Stage

fig. 2.6. MAP OF CANAAN FROM A COMMENTARY ON THE PENTATEUCH BY SOLOMON BEN ISAAC (RASHI), CA. 1233. This map shows the Exodus and the boundaries of the land of Canaan. Photograph courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich (Cod. Heb. 5, fol. 140).

fig. 2.5. DIAGRAM OF THE DIVISION OF THE PROMISED LAND FROM RICHARD OF SAINT VICTOR, “IN EZECHIELEM.” The drawing illustrates Ezekiel 45, in which the land of Canaan is divided among the tribes of the Israelites; the center portion is the land reserved for the Levites and the Temple. The Mediterranean is at the bottom of the drawing, east at the top. Photograph courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Bodley MS. 494, fol. 166v).

(Otranto in Apulia was a common point of embarkation for Acre). Harvey has suggested that the maps of England and the Holy Land might be seen as enlargements of the end points of the itinerary.96 Paris’s goal in creating the maps seems to have been to provide a “visualization of all the important political and military sites mentioned in his chronicles of the Crusades.”97 The city plans from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries generally showed famous monuments in elevation within a schematized, usually circular, plan of the city’s walls.98 Most common were plans of Jerusalem: the popularity of the so-called situs maps provides striking testimony of the impact of the crusades on the Latin Christian imagination (ﬁg. 2.7).99 Ancient Rome, however, is also represented by one bird’s-eye view from the twelfth century, showing seven monuments and topographic features with a highly stylized ring of walls. The main exceptions to this pattern are, again, the maps of Matthew Paris, which present a much less idealized image of crusader Acre, and a plan of

Venice. The latter map exists only in fourteenth-century copies in the works of Paolino Minorita, but these copies are generally agreed to derive from an early twelfthcentury original. The plan is remarkable for its accuracy and for the portrayal of the principal waterways; given that Venice was not founded until the seventh century, this is one case in which Roman origins can be ruled out.100 Finally, drawings in plan of the heavenly Jerusalem appeared in a number of contexts, especially the Apocalypse commentaries by Beatus. These images give us insights into the ideal vision of a city and, like the maps of Canaan already mentioned, provided a visual referent for the reader of the Apocalypse.101 96. Harvey, “Matthew Paris’s Maps,” 121; Lewis, in Art of Matthew Paris, 325 –26, sees a close connection between the itinerary maps and the map of Palestine, to the point of noting that the itinerary “should be more accurately regarded as an itinerary from London to Acre, meant to serve as a political sketch or diagram encompassing most of the known world within Matthew’s purview ca. 1250 –1255” (p. 326). 97. Lewis, Art of Matthew Paris, 326. 98. On city plans, see Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 473 –78, and Pascal Arnaud, “Les villes des cartographes: vignettes urbaines et réseaux urbains dans les mappemondes de l’occident médiéval,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen Âge Temps Modernes 96 (1984): 537– 602. 99. Von den Brincken, Kartographische Quellen, 45 – 46, and Arnaud, “Les villes des cartographes,” 561–72. See also the reproduction and commentary on one such plan in Kenneth Nebenzahl, Maps of the Holy Land: Images of Terra Sancta through Two Millennia (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 32. 100. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 478 and n. 50. 101. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 11; the authors note the diverse ways in which the illuminators of these manuscripts represented a city, ranging from plan to elevation to a drawing of a church.

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

fig. 2.7. PLAN OF JERUSALEM, 1140s. The crusading context is emphasized by an indication of the place where the crusaders entered the city. The plan indicates the major buildings, streets, and gates; the shape of the walls is more accurate than on later plans, where an idealized circular form was preferred. Photograph courtesy of the Médiathèque Municipale, Cambrai (MS. 466, fol. 1r).

The last category of local maps from this period comprises the very few sketches of water systems and smallish tracts of land, which would become considerably more widespread in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries. From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there are two extant plans of water systems and two sketch maps of lands and their boundaries. All of these examples are English, and most show clearly how closely linked early topographical mapping was with the textual diagrams that helped articulate relationships among concepts.102 The least diagrammatic is the mid-twelfth-century plan of the monastic complex at Canterbury cathedral. The artist showed the buildings in elevation but drew the course of the underground water system in plan. Associated with the large plan is a smaller diagram showing the route of the water from springs located well beyond the monastery. The purpose of these maps is not entirely clear, but they were probably intended to glorify the reign of the

prior under whom the work was carried out by offering what has been termed “a spectacle of his construction programme.”103 A second water system, for Waltham Abbey in Hertfordshire, was carefully recorded in the abbey’s cartulary in multiple ways: a narrative of the work undertaken, a description of the water system, the accompanying diagram, and a collection of the charters that granted permission for the pipes to pass underground through various owners’ property. The author of the written description of the system referred to the plan, recalling in particular its importance for keeping alive the knowledge of the springs and the underground pipes.104 The drawing closely resembles logic and other diagrams: Harvey speculates that the idea of using a philosophical tool to describe a water system may owe something to Matthew Paris’s influence at the nearby abbey of Saint Albans.105 The connection between the earliest examples of practical mapping and cartularies—the record books of monasteries and other institutions—seems an important and natural one.106 Cartularies, like these maps, were devoted to keeping records about space, usually the boundaries of parcels of lands, but also including, as we have seen in the case of the map from Waltham Abbey, the memory of a complex and buried system of water pipes. We have already noted the early map showing the divisions of a meadow, located again in a cartulary, where the drawing replaces a textual description of the boundaries. The final example of a local map from before the fourteenth century is the plan of Wildmore Fen from the psalter of Kirkstead Abbey. Less specifically focused on rights than a monastery’s cartularies, psalters seem nonetheless to have been common places to record information important to the house that owned them, thus the 102. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 470 –71, on connections with diagrams. The earliest extant map from the Low Countries dates from 1307 and shows a similar emphasis on organizing text to reflect the spatial situation being described (p. 470 and fig. 20.6). Compare the Rashi maps of the Holy Land, which similarly deploy text geographically to express routes and relationships among places. See Delano-Smith and Gruber, “Rashi’s Legacy,” 30 –32. 103. William Urry, “Canterbury, Kent, circa 1153 x 1161,” in LMP, 43 –58, quotation on 50, and Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 467– 69. See also the recent study of the psalter into which these maps were inserted: Margaret Gibson, T. A. Heslop, and Richard W. Pfaff, eds., The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1992), including a detailed discussion of the archaeology of the water system by Francis Woodman, “The Waterworks Drawings of the Eadwine Psalter,” 168 –77. 104. P. D. A. Harvey, “Wormley, Hertfordshire, 1220 x 1230,” in LMP, 59 –70, esp. 64. Harvey publishes the narration of the work and the description of the water system (pp. 65 –70). 105. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 470 caption to fig. 20.5. 106. On maps designed by “thinkers” and “doers” and the “practical use” of maps, see Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 2.

Setting the Stage

inclusion of the plans of Canterbury’s water system in the Eadwine Psalter.107 Like the map of the water system at Waltham Abbey, the Wildmore Fen map provides both a narrative of a dispute over grazing rights and the map to accompany it. In a different style than the former, the Wildmore Fen map shows an equally strong affinity with textual diagrams and, indeed, with such diagrammatic maps as the Rashi maps of the Holy Land.108 In conclusion, few local maps have been preserved from (and probably few existed in) the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when textual and verbal descriptions of lands and boundaries were the norm. Those images that we do have suggest strongly that they grew out of the same effort to make complex texts easier to grasp and memorize that generated the lively tradition of textual diagrams in philosophical, theological, and scientific works. More specifically, these early maps deployed many of the same graphic techniques and conventions as the diagrams. The location of many of these maps in cartularies and psalters indicates their status as records of important projects and settlements that influenced the well-being of the recording institution and that might call for attention from successive generations to preserve and protect. Of regional mapping more generally it is fair to say that, although these smaller-scale maps may have been relatively few in number and confined to separate traditions, there were enough available to inspire an unusually graphically minded person like Paris to compile an impressive array of map types in his chronicles. It is also clear that quite accurate plans could be created (as in the case of the plan of Venice), but that most maps were made to aid in understanding, not primarily to represent space in a geometrically correct way. As Delano-Smith and Gruber point out, “a diagram is the most appropriate style for any map used in explanation,” a dictum with which medieval cartographers would have agreed wholeheartedly.109

The Fourteenth Century The fourteenth century witnessed several profoundly important developments in expectations about the content of maps, in the uses of maps and other representations of territory in administrative settings, and in broader attitudes toward space and its representation. Many of these changes are ﬁrst apparent in Italy, but there are signs of their impact on other parts of Europe as well. In some cases the changes lie primarily in the number and increasingly widespread use of certain map types, like local maps, which began in this period to be made in increasingly large numbers and in some other parts of Europe outside England. Other developments have been traced in users’ attitudes toward their maps, especially concerning the authority of geographical information. Although tidy

chronological divisions are obviously artificial, there were enough changes and developments in European cartography in the fourteenth century to make it worthwhile to give this period special attention. transitional maps Of these developments, the best known to modern scholarship, although still too little studied, were the hybrid map forms that combined the representation of the Mediterranean coastlines derived from portolan charts with the image of the world as a whole of the mappaemundi. These transitional maps are important evidence of the process of change in the geographical worldview.110 Clearly a map was still expected to portray the overall structure of the known world, while the adoption of the image of the Mediterranean and Black seas from the portolan charts shows that the makers of these maps had an appreciation for the spatial accuracy offered by these newer cartographic forms. These images further suggest that the two map forms were in no way considered incompatible. Rather, in the same way that the various types of world map were understood as aspects of a larger whole, portolan charts and world maps were seen as coordinating views of the same reality.111 Examples of transitional maps stemming from the Mediterranean ambit, or by mapmakers familiar with portolan charts, adopt the Mediterranean and Black sea outlines into larger world map frameworks without apparent hesitation. An exception to this easy cohabitation of images is the fragmentary Aslake world map (fig. 2.8). This map was closely related to the thirteenth-century English family of world maps, and especially to the 107. See Urry, “Canterbury, Kent,” 48 – 49, on the severe cropping that the maps underwent in being placed in the psalter. 108. H. E. Hallam, “Wildmore Fen, Lincolnshire, 1224 x 1249,” in LMP, 71– 81, with the text describing the dispute on 79 – 81. 109. Delano-Smith and Gruber, “Rashi’s Legacy,” 32. 110. For the terminology and a discussion of the importance of these maps, see Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 296 –99. See also Gautier Dalché’s comments on the power of the world map to incorporate portolan charts in his “Un problème d’histoire culturelle,” 14; and Arnaud, “Images et représentations,” 148, on the spread of transitional maps. 111. Patrick Gautier Dalché argues that Marino Sanudo, who appended a large collection of maps (including a transitional world map and maps based on portolan charts) to his plea for a new crusade, did not distinguish among the various map types, treating them all as equally adapted to showing the reader the places and strategic relationships that he wished to discuss, in his “Remarques sur les défauts supposés, et sur l’efficace certaine de l’image du monde au XIVe siècle,” in La géographie au Moyen Âge: Espaces pensés, espaces vécus, espaces rêvés (Paris: Société de Langue et de Littérature Médiévales d’Oc et d’Oïl, 1998), 43 –55. On Marino Sanudo, see note 115 in this chapter and Antony Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

fig. 2.8. DETAIL OF THE ASLAKE WORLD MAP, FOURTEENTH CENTURY. The map belongs to the family of English world maps, but it also includes place-names, shown

here, drawn from the portolan charts of the Mediterranean. Size of the detail: ca. 22.6 22.6 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BL (Add. MS. 63841 A).

Psalter map.112 The mapmaker must, however, have used a portolan chart as a model for the surviving section of the Mediterranean coast, because the place-names, along with their positioning at right angles to the coast, replicate quite exactly those on surviving portolan charts. Instead of adopting the layout of the Mediterranean fully in his own map, the English artist (who was probably less familiar with portolan charts than his Italian and Catalan contemporaries) has reduced and reshaped the new in-

formation to ﬁt his world map, in an attempt to “harmonise as much of the new information as possible with the traditional world view.”113 112. Peter Barber, “Old Encounters New: The Aslake World Map,” in Géographie du monde, 69 – 88, esp. 76 – 82. 113. Barber, “Old Encounters New,” 84 – 88, esp. 87. See Gautier Dalché, “Remarques,” 44 – 45, for a trenchant reminder of the limited utility of phrases like “the traditional world view,” however necessary they may be as linguistic shorthand.

Setting the Stage

Both the examples of the smooth incorporation of the portolan chart with the world map and its more tentative acceptance in the Aslake world map indicate that, in spite of regional limitations of access to these map forms, mapmakers were eager to adapt new cartographic information to their own purposes when it came their way. The readiness of even a hesitant northern mapmaker to adopt a radically new depiction of space suggests that, in the fourteenth century, the idea was becoming fairly widely accepted that world maps could and should contain at least some detailed topographic information in addition to the historical and toponymic information presented by earlier world maps. changes in local and regional mapping A second major area of innovation in the fourteenth century, at least in certain parts of Europe, was in local mapping. These changes range from experimentation with map forms to the increasing use of maps in governmental and legal contexts. Although England and the Low Countries in particular participated in these developments, northern Italy was the most fertile seedbed for such experimentation. As we saw in the case of Matthew Paris, one individual’s works can sometimes serve as an index of the range of cartographic material available at a given place and time. The works of two northern Italian authors can fulﬁll this role, illustrating the richness of the cartographic record in that region in the ﬁrst decades of the fourteenth century. Paolino Minorita, a historian, and Opicino de Canistris, a religious writer, both compiled impressive collections of maps and related artifacts, which they deployed in their works with considerable sophistication. Neither was a professional cartographer (at a time and place in which the profession was beginning to develop); each was, however, aware of the power of maps to convey unique information and to add to the explanatory power of written works.114 Paolino Minorita’s historical works contain a number of maps and plans made by the workshop of the Venetian chartmaker Pietro Vesconte, many of which appear both in Paolino’s chronicles and in the crusade proposals of his contemporary, Marino Sanudo.115 In addition to this shared group of maps, however, Paolino’s works include other cartographic works of differing origins and styles. They thus provide us with a sense of the range of models available and of the author’s principles of selection that led him beyond a single coherent group of maps to include others that served different purposes. Paolino was also the author of a much-studied discussion of the necessary role of geography in explicating history.116 The maps stemming from the Vesconte workshop include one of the earliest surviving transitional world

maps, maps of Palestine and of the eastern Mediterranean, and plans of Antioch, Acre, and Jerusalem.117 The reasons why the interests of the crusading propagandist and the historian would overlap in the Holy Land are clear and recall the cartography of Matthew Paris, much of which was motivated by English crusading activities and contacts with the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem.118 In general, the regional maps are based on the coastal outlines provided by the portolan charts, with extra details added of the inland areas.119 Paolino’s other major area of cartographic interest— for which he provided maps drawn from sources other than the Vesconte workshop—was Italy. We have already noted the plan of Venice, which may have been based on a twelfth-century model.120 There is also a full-page plan of Rome that contains considerable detail of the city’s monuments and topography and that may have been drawn from an illustration of the popular tour book “Mirabilia 114. Pietro Vesconte, the Venetian chartmaker whose works appear in Paolino Minorita’s works, among others, has been described as the first professional cartographer. See Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 314. 115. On Paolino’s place (and that of Marino Sanudo) in the geographical culture of fourteenth-century Italy, see Bouloux, Culture, 45 – 68. On Paolino as historian, see Isabelle Heullant-Donat, “Entrer dans l’histoire: Paolino da Venezia et les prologues de ses chroniques universelles,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Moyen Âge 105 (1993): 381– 442; the author provides a convenient introduction to Paolino’s life and works and a brief description of the manuscripts containing Paolino’s historical works (pp. 426 – 42). See also Alberto Ghinato, Fr. Paolino da Venezia O. F. M., vescovo di Pozzuoli († 1344) (Rome, 1951). The complex relationship between the illustrations in Paolino’s works and those of Marino Sanudo is studied by Bernhard Degenhart and Annegrit Schmitt in “Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto: Zwei Literaten des 14. Jahrhunderts in ihrer Wirkung auf Buchillustrierung und Kartographie in Venedig, Avignon und Neapel,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 14 (1973): 1–137, 60 – 87 specifically on the maps; this is the fundamental study of the various manuscripts. I speak rather loosely here of the maps in Paolino’s works; Degenhart and Schmitt provide a table giving the specifics of which maps appear in which manuscripts (p. 105). For Marino Sanudo’s crusade project, a recent study is Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land. 116. On the prologue to Paolino Minorita’s “De mapa mundi,” see Bouloux, Culture, 58 –59. 117. The plans of the Middle Eastern cities carry forward the increasing concern for depicting the topography that we saw in Matthew Paris’s productions. They indicate streets, the outline of the city walls, and the major monuments in careful relation to one another. See Degenhart and Schmitt, “Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto,” 76 – 81. 118. See note 95. 119. Degenhart and Schmitt, “Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto,” 76 – 81. On other regional maps of the Holy Land, see Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 473 –76, and Gautier Dalché, “Savoirs géographiques,” 89 –91 and n. 4, for a sketch map of the Holy Land not included in Harvey’s survey. 120. For the maps of Italy in general, see Degenhardt and Schmitt, “Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto,” 81– 87, and Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 480 – 81. For Venice, see Harvey, History of Topographical Maps, 76 –78.

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

urbis Romae.”121 Finally, he included remarkable maps of Italy that indicate relief as well as the peninsula’s hydrography. The outlines derive from portolan charts, but the detail of the interior must have been drawn from regional maps now lost; in addition, like Vesconte’s map of the Holy Land, these maps are based on a grid, here not drawn in but marked along the margins of the page.122 Paolino’s works therefore suggest several conclusions about early fourteenth-century cartography in Italy. First, the maps clearly speak to two major interests: the Holy Land, with its now defunct crusader state (Acre, the last major center held by the Christians, fell to Muslim forces in 1291), and the Italian peninsula, seen as a geographic whole in Paolino’s map, with regional interests represented by detailed studies of the lower Po and Venice and the plan of Rome to underscore the prestige and cultural weight of the ancient capital. Second, Paolino had a number of diverse types of maps upon which to draw for his project. Third and finally, he shared with Matthew Paris and other medieval cartographers an easy appreciation of the ways in which an assortment of maps, even of different origins and taking different points of view, could be coordinated into a larger picture of a region.123 If we turn to our second author and artist, Opicino de Canistris, we find a similar range of maps in the service of a very different project. Opicino was not writing history, with its well-known attention to the loci (places) in which historical events took place. Instead, he worked from the equally familiar idea of the created world as God’s book to develop an elaborate system for understanding and recognizing sin in the individual via an analysis of the places of his life as represented on maps.124 For our purposes, however, what is most important is the range of maps that he deployed. Roughly speaking, he structured the images in his two major manuscripts around two map types, zone maps and portolan charts.125 In addition, he drew several versions of regional maps of Lombardy and the Po valley (fig. 2.9) and a number of plans of the city of Pavia.126 Opicino’s basic outline of Pavia’s walls and the orientation of the city with respect to the Ticino River, which flows along its southern border, are remarkably accurate, even by modern standards.127 Several of his unfinished drawings, however, insert this accurate depiction of the walls into a schematized circular framework that allows him to connect the actual Pavia with its ideal counterpart.128 A similar mixture of the real and the ideal informs a contemporary plan of Milan, in which the circular walls contrast with the specific detail of the bridges over the many rivers of the surrounding territory (fig. 2.10).129 Opicino was a priest and had trained earlier in his career as a manuscript illuminator: nothing in his writings suggests that he compiled original maps himself. Indeed, the only direct references that he made to his knowledge

of maps emphasized the novelty and excitement of his initial encounter with portolan charts.130 It seems quite clear, however, that Opicino was familiar with a variety of map forms and their uses, that his thought was sensitive to geography and to the depiction of space, and that he believed that maps of all sorts were effective means of 121. Harvey, History of Topographical Maps, 72. 122. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 481. Bouloux, in Culture, 67, describes this as “the first ‘modern’ map of Italy” and sees it as the one map in Paolino’s work that is fully independent of the text. 123. Bouloux, Culture, 68. 124. Morse, “Complex Terrain,” 186 n. 42, for Opicino’s use of the idea of the world as a book. On his thought more generally, see pp. 169 –232; Victoria Morse, “Seeing and Believing: The Problem of Idolatry in the Thought of Opicino de Canistris,” in Orthodoxie, Christianisme, Histoire Orthodoxy, Christianity, History, ed. Susanna Elm, Éric Rebillard, and Antonella Romano (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 163 –76; and Catherine Harding, “Opening to God: The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 61 (1998): 18 –39. A useful brief introduction to Opicino’s life and works is H.-J. Becker, “Canistris, Opicino de,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960 –), 18:116 –19. See also Denis Hüe, “Tracé, écart: Le sens de la carte chez Opicinus de Canistris,” in Terres médiévales, ed. Bernard Ribémont (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1993), 129 –58. Of Opicino’s two autograph manuscripts, which are the main sources for his use of and thought about maps, one (BAV, Pal. Lat. 1993) has been partially published in Richard Georg Salomon, Opicinus de Canistris: Weltbild und Bekenntnisse eines Avignonesischen Klerikers des 14. Jahrhunderts, vols. 1A and 1B (text and plates) (London: The Warburg Institute, 1936), pls. 1–37. The best reproduction of a selection of plates from the second manuscript (BAV, Vat. Lat. 6435) is in Paolo Marconi, “Opicinus de Canistris: Un contributo medioevale all’arte della memoria,” Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 4 (1977): 3 –36. 125. Morse, “Complex Terrain,” 235 –54 on Opicino’s use of zone maps in the Pal. Lat. 1993. His use of portolan charts in Vat. Lat. 6435 is discussed on 169 –232. Bouloux comments on the diffusion of the zone map as an image of world in learned works in Culture, 39 – 42. 126. Opicino’s local maps and plans are surveyed by Pierluigi Tozzi in a series of insightful and sympathetic works: Opicino e Pavia (Pavia: Libreria d’Arte Cardano, 1990); “Il mundus Papie in Opicino,” Geographia Antiqua 1 (1992): 167–74; with Massimiliano David, “Opicino de Canistris e Galvano Fiamma: L’immagine della città e del territorio nel Trecento lombardo,” in La pittura in Lombardia: Il Trecento (Milan: Electa, 1993), 339 – 61; and La città e il mondo in Opicino de Canistris (1296 –1350 ca.) (Varzi: Guardamagna Editori, 1996). 127. Tozzi, Città e il mondo, 46 – 47 and 89. 128. BAV, Pal. Lat. 1993, fols. 12r, 27r, and 27v, reproduced in Tozzi, Città e il mondo, figs. 33 –35. 129. Tozzi and David, “Opicino de Canistris e Galvano Fiamma,” 352 –57. David illustrates in this article a previously unpublished map of Italy and what he describes as the “first map of Roman Milan” from Galvano Fiamma’s “Cronica extravagans de antiquitatibus” and his “Chronicum maius,” respectively. The maps appear in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, cod. A275 inf., fol. 51v and fol. 93v. See also Alessandro Rovetta, “Un codice poco noto di Galvano Fiamma e l’immaginario urbano trecentesco milanese,” Arte Lombarda 2 – 4 (1993): 72 –78. 130. Bouloux, Culture, 94 –95, although her remark that “Opicinus de Canestris’s [sic] entire system for reading the world is based on his astonishment at the shape of the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines” overemphasizes Opicino’s naïveté (p. 95).

Setting the Stage

fig. 2.9. MAP OF LOMBARDY BY OPICINO DE CANISTRIS, 1330s OR 1340s. This map illustrates Opicino’s technique of overlaying a matrix of spiritual interpretations over a geographical map. Here he indicated the city of Pavia at the center with a tiny symbol that nonetheless captures the real outlines of the city’s walls and marked the city’s territory around it. He drew the course of the rivers Ticino and Po very

accurately in red and wrote the names of major geographical features in their proper positions. Finally, the map is surrounded with an idealizing circular frame that includes the symbols of the Evangelists. Photograph © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City (MS. Pal. Lat. 1993, fol. 3r).

communicating with his contemporaries. I have argued at length elsewhere that he believed that maps were important because the very schematization of the image of the world that they proposed bridged the gap between the materialistic human imagination and man’s higher powers of reason.131 As such, maps, for Opicino, were a potential answer to the spiritual problems of his time and ﬁtting tools for a priest concerned with analyzing and combating unbelief. Together, the cartographic works of Paolino Minorita and Opicino de Canistris help orient us to the complex and varied world of early fourteenth-century Italian cartography.132 It was a world strongly marked graphically by the portolan charts and also seriously concerned with exploring the ways in which maps could help contemporaries to know and to understand their world—past,

present, or to come.133 Two further aspects of this knowledge deserve our attention: the changes in the geographical thought of the later fourteenth century attributable to the early Italian humanists, and the governmental and

131. Morse, “Seeing and Believing,” 170 –76. I explore the geographical nature of his thought in another of his works in my introduction to Opicino’s Book in Praise of Pavia, trans. William North and Victoria Morse (New York: Italica Press, forthcoming). 132. For further examples and discussion of Italian cartography, see Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 478 – 82, and Annalina Levi and Mario Levi, “The Medieval Map of Rome in the Ambrosian Library’s Manuscript of Solinus (C 246 Inf.),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 118 (1974): 567–94. 133. Bouloux, in Culture, 106, points out the degree to which portolan charts and portolans became part of the “mental equipment” of fourteenth-century writers like Giovanni Boccaccio and Petrarch.

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

fig. 2.10. PLAN OF MILAN BY PETRUS DE GUIOLDIS FROM GALVANO FIAMMA’S “CHRONICLE EXTRAVAGANS,” FOURTEENTH CENTURY. The plan stylizes the walls of the city, while giving the distances between the gates and towers of the outer wall. The depiction of the surrounding territory focuses on the natural and manmade waterways and the bridges that crossed them. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (Codice ambr. A 275 inf., fol. 46v).

jurisdictional knowledge that maps were increasingly called upon to convey. In an exemplary study, Bouloux traced the ways in which Italian scholars, and especially Petrarch, developed new methods for the study of geography. To a large extent Petrarch’s innovation was to apply the methods of textual criticism to places: their proper location in space became the subject of rigorous study, aided by texts and also by maps, understood as reliable sources of information about the physical world.134 Bouloux points to the development of geography as a ﬁeld of study and to the increasing tendency to alphabetize place-names in geographical dictionaries and other studies as two factors that helped deracinate places from their conventional contexts, opening them up to analysis and using the map in a new way as a tool.135 Thus for Bouloux the innovations of the fourteenth century were above all those of the

move toward textual criticism, a géographie de cabinet that led not to sterility but to new ways of conceptualizing and valorizing space.136 If we turn now to the mapping of jurisdictions in the same period, we find an equally rich and creative environment. A particularly thought-provoking example of ways in which cartography found a place in a legal and administrative setting is provided by the jurist Bartolo da Sassoferrato.137 Writing on the settlement of disputes over properties bordering on rivers, where erosion and the changing course of the river added to the problems of determining boundaries, Bartolo took the unusual step of recommending drawing diagrams of the areas in question. That he himself felt this to be a novel suggestion is demonstrated by his introductory account of a dream that inspired him and of his own reservations about undertaking to explain matters concerning the law by means of diagrams or drawings.138 In his dream, he was fortified by the idea that he, like Christ and the saints, should do what was right in spite of mockery, while his Christ-like interlocutor provided him with the tools for creating his drawings. Bartolo relied on the invocation of Christ to authorize and legitimate his adoption of a novel means of communication, a pattern that we see repeated in the works of Bertrand Boysset (writing ca. 1400) on surveying. The surveyor in Boysset’s text similarly received his tools from Jesus, underscoring for the reader the validity of his novel attempt to record in writing what had previously merely been a practical art not enjoying the “dignity of a true science.”139 Although Bartolo’s innovation did not, as far as we know, bear cartographic fruit until the fifteenth century, when his works became stan-

134. Bouloux, Culture, 106. Opicino’s work also shows a clear sense that maps provide a true representation of the physical world; that is what allows him to draw the conclusions he does from his maps. See Morse, “Complex Terrain,” 133 and 150. 135. Bouloux, Culture, 223 –35. Compare Gautier Dalché, “Pour une histoire,” 77–79 and 90. 136. Bouloux, Culture, 273. 137. On Bartolo and diagrams, see François de Dainville, “Cartes et contestations au XVe siècle,” Imago Mundi 24 (1970): 99 –121, esp. 118 –21. On the evidence his works offer for contemporary society, see Anna Toole Sheedy, Bartolus on Social Conditions in the Fourteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), esp. 185ff. An interesting comparison in his thought about visual issues is Osvaldo Cavallar, Susanne Degenring, and Julius Kirshner, eds., A Grammar of Signs: Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s Tract on Insignia and Coats of Arms (Berkeley, Calif.: Robbins Collection Publication, 1994). 138. Dainville, “Cartes et contestations,” 118. 139. On Boysset, see Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Bertrand Boysset et la science,” in Église et culture en France méridionale (XIIe –XIVe siècle) (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 2000), 261–85, quotation on 276. Compare the comments by Alain Guerreau in “Remarques sur l’arpentage selon Bertrand Boysset (Arles, vers 1400 –1410),” in Campagnes médiévales, l’homme et son espace: Études offertes à Robert Fossier, ed. Elisabeth Mornet (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995), 87–102, esp. 89–90.

dard legal texts throughout Europe and when maps became more commonly used in property disputes, his inspiration to turn to diagrammatic maps to assist his arguments is clearly at home among the other mapmaking experiments of fourteenth-century Italy.140 Similarly, if we are to understand the transformations that eventually led (in the ﬁfteenth and especially the sixteenth century) to the use of maps in governmental administration, the origins of many of the changes must be sought in this earlier period. In the last years of the thirteenth century and in the early fourteenth century, at least in some areas of Italy, profound transformations took place in the perception and description of units of jurisdiction. Studies of the Diocese of Rieti and the territory of the commune of Siena underscore the importance of this period in reshaping the ways in which contemporaries imagined and expressed the governmental spaces they inhabited.141 Although these changes were brought about and communicated primarily through changes in the written documentation, it is nonetheless to this period that we must look if we are to understand the fundamental changes that took place at the end of the Middle Ages in the nature of people’s relationships to their environment and how those changes led eventually to the use of maps in government and administration.142 In the case of Siena, a conjunction of factors in the early fourteenth century led to the production of one extant map, the plan of the newly founded city of Talamone, a now-lost world map in the palazzo pubblico, and a number of detailed views of cities and the countryside.143 These artifacts should be understood within the context of an increasing interest in knowing and controlling the countryside and subject communities, using the techniques of art, land measurement, and new forms of documentation in the vernacular. In Redon’s words, “the painter, the surveyor, and the notary contributed to the creation of the tools of a modern territorial state.”144 The control of newly conquered territory and the layout of new towns were especially important aspects of Siena’s marshaling of these cognitive resources. The measured survey of the lands of the new town of Paganico is probably attributable to the involvement of a Master Giannino, who was also responsible for establishing the teaching of mathematics and geometry in Siena.145 The conjunction of the city’s interest in fostering the study of mathematics— essential in a city renowned for its commercial and especially its banking activities—and the development of new techniques for exercising control over the countryside suggests important connections between personnel, economic and political culture, and the tools of governance.146 The fact that a plan resulted from the contemporary foundation at Talamone suggests the potential relationships between these governmental changes and the development of administrative cartography.

Setting the Stage

Outside Italy, the cartographic picture is less rich in the fourteenth century, but it shows a number of similar characteristics. Although England may have experienced a cartographic downturn after its brilliance in the thirteenth century, a variety of maps, including an increasing number of local plans, were produced there.147 Several of these appear to have had an administrative function. The Gough map of Britain, although the circumstances of its creation are poorly documented, depicts a network of routes, marked with distances, that probably served some aspect of either the secular or the ecclesiastical government.148 Likewise, the map of Sherwood Forest was probably made for a forest warden, showing the forest’s boundary and streams.149 The map of the property of the monastery of Saint Augustine’s, Canterbury, and the related plan of the chancel of the monastery church are of a different and less im-

140. Dainville, “Cartes et contestations,” 117–21. On Bartolo in sixteenth-century Germany, see Fritz Hellwig, “Tyberiade und Augenschein: Zur forensischen Kartographie im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Europarecht, Energierecht, Wirtschaftsrecht: Festschrift für Bodo Börner zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Jürgen F. Baur, Peter-Christian Müller-Graff, and Manfred Zuleeg (Cologne: Carl Heymanns, 1992), 805 –34. 141. Brentano, New World, esp. 81–141, and Redon, L’espace d’une cité. 142. For administrative mapping, see chapter 35 in this volume and John Marino, “Administrative Mapping in the Italian States,” in Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5 –25. Marino dates the appearance in Italy of maps as “a normal administrative way of looking at the world” from the third quarter of the sixteenth century (p. 5). 143. For the plan of Talamone, see Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 488, 491, and ﬁg. 20.27. Kupfer reconstructs the world map and its setting in “Lost Wheel Map.” Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s views of the Sienese countryside are well known: see, for example, Randolph Starn, Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Palazzo Pubblico, Siena (New York: George Braziller, 1994). On civic art in Siena and, in particular, a painting showing one of the subject towns, see Diana Norman, “‘The Glorious Deeds of the Commune’: Civic Patronage of Art,” in Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280 –1400, vol. 1: Interpretative Essays, ed. Diana Norman (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 1995), 133 –53, esp. 136 – 40. 144. Redon, L’espace d’une cité, 234 and 226. The period in question is 1280 –1320. Compare David Friedman’s comment that the layout of the new towns owed a great deal to idealized images of the city in his Florentine New Towns: Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1988), 201–3. 145. Redon, L’espace d’une cité, 170. 146. Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s debt to a master of geometry suggests that the impact of such teachers on the visual culture of the fourteenth century may be worth a more extended examination. See Dainville, “Cartes et contestations,” 118. 147. For the stagnation of English cartography, see Barber, “Evesham World Map,” 29. 148. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 19 –20 and 47– 48. 149. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 20. For other local plans, see LMP, 83 –146, and Mitchell and Crook, “The Pinchbeck Fen Map,” 40 –50.

The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society: Twelfth to Fourteenth Century

mediately practical nature. Thomas of Elmham, the chronicler and artist who composed the history of Saint Augustine’s in which these maps are found, shared with Matthew Paris a high degree of interest in recording aspects of his history in visual form. The map of the lands of the monastery should be seen in part as a historical map, because it records the legendary allocation of land following the path of a running deer. Thomas also recorded the appearance of the monastery’s charters in remarkable detail (they have been called handmade “facsimiles”) in an effort to authenticate the community’s claims to its lands and rights.150 Finally, to move from local mapping to world maps, the Evesham map has been described as “striking because of the topicality of its perspectives and allusions”: the maker of the map was more concerned than were earlier creators of world maps with making statements about the place and standing of England in the later fourteenth century.151 On the continent, relatively few maps survive from the fourteenth century. The oldest plan from the Low Countries dates from 1307 and is a textual diagram with the exception of two gables drawn in elevation.152 A map in the cartulary of the University of Paris has been described as the earliest attempt to map an administrative boundary. Prepared during a dispute between the French and Picard “nations” at the University in 1357, the map shows the boundary between the two regions and explores the role of the river Meuse as the boundary marker.153 Delano-Smith and Kain described the maps of fourteenth-century England as increasingly prepared with practical ends in mind.154 Although this does not account satisfactorily for Thomas of Elmham’s historical maps, for the Evesham map’s political ideology, or even for the series of illustrations showing the positions of the clergy during processions—with their tonsured heads shown in plan—it does capture the real novelty of later medieval cartography, which is its increasing focus on depicting small areas, whether as records in disputes, as memorials, or as other forms of working documents.155 Maps were increasingly part, not just of learned culture, but of the work of governing and managing Europe’s towns and institutions. The role that the centralized monarchies would play in developing this tendency would become clearer in the ﬁfteenth century, but in the fourteenth century Italy, England, France, and the Low Countries already showed a deep appreciation of the demonstrative and argumentative qualities of maps.156

Conclusion We do not yet fully appreciate the range of small, but incremental, changes in multiple areas of endeavor— astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, art practice and organization, jurisdiction and law, rhetoric, and mercantile

life, to name only a few—that led at least some Europeans of the late fifteenth century to represent their world (whether actively as mapmakers or passively as consumers of maps) in a way that emphasized the uniformity of physical space. It is a grave mistake to think that other views of the world disappeared: T-O maps remained, as convenient for the printer as they had been for the scribe, and the familiar circular form of the “medieval” world map persisted as an appropriate framework for representations of various sections or details of the world. The portolan chart, of course, continued its reign as the most accurate known type of map, lapsing into the steady-state conservatism of a fully successful technology, but remaining at the center of a vigorous trade until the sixteenth century.157 From hindsight, we know that the future of European cartography lay elsewhere: but the fifteenth century must have appeared to contemporary eyes—at least to selected and well-placed contemporaries—as primarily a period of proliferation, of both map types and individual copies of maps. From a Europe-wide perspective, maps had already begun to appear in a host of different contexts and circumstances, providing help in governing, litigating, and navigating. Regionally, of course, the view would depend on where you stood: in England, northern Italy, and Holland maps would have been quite common, while they were less so in Spain or southern France. These regional distinctions, their causes, and the reasons behind their eventual decline as limiting factors on the knowledge and use of maps in daily practical and intellectual life will be the subjects of later chapters. Here we should conclude by looking backward to the rich and complex world of late medieval cartography, to its growing ability to seem relevant to a host of projects and societal needs and to capture the imaginations of a range of people. Saint Bernardino da Siena appealed to the world map hanging in the palazzo pubblico of Siena during a sermon, and he did so presumably with confidence that his audience knew what it was and could visualize it, at least in its rough outlines.158 This casual appeal to the shape of the world shows a sensibility deeply marked by the im150. See Alfred Hiatt, “The Cartographic Imagination of Thomas Elmham,” Speculum 75 (2000): 859 – 86. 151. Barber, “Evesham World Map,” 13, 19 –24, and quotation on 29. 152. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 470, 485, and fig. 20.6. 153. Gautier Dalché, “De la liste a la carte,” 27, and Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography,” 485 and fig. 20.22. 154. Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 19. 155. For the processions, Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 20; these authors do see the map as practical. 156. Gautier Dalché, “De la liste a la carte,” 28. 157. See chapter 7 in this volume. 158. Kupfer, “Lost Wheel Map,” 288.

pulse to map. The forms that mapping took would remain highly diverse (and by modern standards perhaps idiosyncratic) for some time to come, before the paring down that would take place with the triumph of the geometrical approach to space. But a richness of vision and the ability to accommodate multiple approaches to space in one mental universe pull the twelfth through the

Setting the Stage

ﬁfteenth century together in ways that are still not fully appreciated. Far from a uniﬁed project, the mapmaking and map use of the late medieval and early Renaissance period reveals itself as abundant and chaotic growth as yet unpruned into the chaste mathematical topiary of seventeenth-century cartography.

THE HISTORY OF RENAISSANCE CARTOGRAPHY: INTERPRETIVE ESSAYS

3 • Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650 Denis E. Cosgrove

tronomy, Chicago; Beinecke for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven; and MnU for Special Collections and Rare Books, Wilson Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 1. For a discussion of the origins and meanings of kosmos, see M. R. Wright, Cosmology in Antiquity (London: Routledge, 1995). Plato’s Timaeus represented the fullest account of the origins of the ancient Greek cosmos. 2. Matthew H. Edney, “Cartography without ‘Progress’: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical Development of Mapmaking,” Cartographica 30, nos. 2 and 3 (1993): 54 – 68, and David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 5 –24. 3. W. P. D. Wightman, “Science and the Renaissance,” History of Science 3 (1964): 1–19. 4. The earliest illustrated publication of the text was Erhard Ratdolt’s 1482 Venice printing with a woodcut world map. 5. On the complex evolution of meanings of cosmography in Italian scholarship, see Marica Milanesi, “Geography and Cosmography in Italy from XV to XVII Century,” Memorie della Società Astronomica Italiana 65 (1994): 443 – 68. 6. Milanesi, “Geography and Cosmography”; Antoine De Smet, “Les géographes de la Renaissance et la cosmographie,” in L’univers à la Renaissance: Microcosme et macrocosme (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles; Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1970), 13 –29; Frank Lestringant, “The Crisis of Cosmography at the End of the Renaissance,” in Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance, ed. Philippe Desan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 153 –79; idem, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. David Fausett (Cambridge: Polity; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la terre: Aspects du savoir géographique à la Renaissance (Lyons: ENS, 2003), 33 – 63; and Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 7. Ptolemy’s Almagest contained limited discussion of cosmology, confined to offering reasons for the earth’s immobility in the first chapter. However, Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses had far greater influence on medieval and Renaissance cosmological science in its treatment of the question of the distances between the planets. For a comprehensive discussion of the cosmological thought that lay behind cosmographic writing and mapping, see Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200 –1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Organization of the hierarchy of representation— cosmography, geography, and chorography—is a sixteenth-century idea initiated by Peter Apian and only loosely based on the Ptolemaic corpus of writings. See Peter van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici: The Production of Globes in the Low Countries (Utrecht: HES, 1993), 33 –35, and the comments in Monique Pelletier, “Les géographes et l’histoire, de la Renaissance au siècle des Lumières,” in Apologie pour la géographie: Mélanges offerts à Alice Saunier-Seïté, ed. Jean-Robert Pitte (Paris: Société de Géographie, 1997), 145 –56.

Cosmography as a Renaissance Project Graphic images are powerful tools for making visible the idea of an ordered creation comprising heavens and earth that Greek philosophers called Kosmo~.1 In the Renaissance images played an important role in remapping medieval natural philosophy. Renaissance cosmography might be regarded as a “mode,” or a historically specific set of social and technical relations that determine representational practices.2 The social and technical relations of Renaissance cosmography converged around a growing apprehension of terrestrial, celestial, and representational space as absolute and capable of intellectual mastery.3 Drawing on medieval precedents, the practices through which such understanding and mastery were probed evolved significantly between 1450 and 1650. Pomponius Mela’s first-century a.d. Latin treatise on world geography, Cosmographia; sive, De situ orbis, printed in Milan in 1471, introduced cosmography into Western scholarship.4 Jacopo Angeli’s choice of Cosmographia as the title for his 1406 Latin translation of Claudius Ptolemy’s Gewgraich; uvhvghsi~ (Guide to geography) ensured the significance, if not the clarity, of the term.5 Angeli’s choice was logical: Ptolemy’s text explained how the Aristotelian cosmos—both corruptible, elemental mundus and incorruptible, ethereal caelo— could be mathematically coordinated. Angeli was also responding to Ptolemy’s definition of geography: as both mathematical mapping and a description of lands, seas, and places on the earth’s surface. Humanist elaboration and dissemination of Jacopo Angeli’s work repositioned cosmography during the fifteenth century. But his linguistic fusion of geographical mapping and cosmography introduced a continuing tension within Renaissance cosmography, apparent in its graphic presentation.6 If Ptolemy’s Geography thus opens the story of Renaissance cosmography, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687), which finally dissolved the cosmic system described in Ptolemy’s Almagest, signals its closure.7 In the intervening years cosAbbreviations used in this chapter include: Adler for the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, Webster Institute for the History of As-

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

mography was matter for humanists and scholastics, navigators and chartmakers, painters and architects, princes and mechanicals. It ﬂourished as a ﬁeld of enquiry and speculation in an age that predated modern distinctions between art and science, and in which the pictorial image attained greater social presence: technically through print and ideologically through religious iconoclasm.8 Softening disciplinary boundaries today perhaps encourages a sympathetic understanding of the achievements and failures of Renaissance cosmography.

Definitions, Meanings, and Uses of a Changing Cosmography In his 1570 Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid, written when cosmography’s star was at its zenith, the Englishman John Dee defined it as “the whole and perfect description of the heauenly, and also elementall parte of the world, and their homologall application, and mutuall collation necessarie.” It “matcheth Heauen, and the Earth, in one frame, and aptly applieth parts Correspondent.”9 It is “homologall application,” or formal and structural correspondence, between celestial and elemental spheres that defined cosmography’s fundamental hypothesis. Unity of celestial and terrestrial spheres was a geometrical-mathematical thesis founded on the coincidence of their principal circles (which is why Dee includes cosmography in his list of mathematical practices). This underpins the modern dictionary definition of cosmography as “the science which describes and maps the general features of the universe (both the heavens and the earth).” But “the meaning of cosmography, geography, chorography, and topography fluctuated from author to author: their oscillations affect even Ptolemy’s revered text.”10 Thus a secondary meaning of cosmography is “a description or representation of the universe or of the earth in its general features.”11 In his detailed study of the Western cosmological tradition, Brague defines cosmography as follows: “the drawing or description (graphein) of the world as it appears at a given moment, with regard to its structure, its possible division into levels, regions, and so on. This description may, indeed should, take into account the static or dynamic relationships between the various elements that make up the world: distances, proportions, etc., as well as influences, reactions, and so forth. It implies the attempt to uncover the laws that govern those relationships. It is therefore a generalized geography that, thumbing its nose at etymology, does not deal only with the earth, but with all the visible universe.”12 The dual usage is present in Peter Apian’s Cosmographicus liber, where cosmography refers to mathematical description of both cosmos and earth through their relation as established by spherical projection and relates to the four elements that compose

the sublunary sphere. But cosmography also deals specifically with the terrestrial globe understood mathematically through lines of latitude and longitude—the key cartographic innovation of the early Renaissance—which permit accurate location of places on a spherical earth. The distinction is illustrated in Apian’s woodcut illustrations of cosmography (fig. 3.1): the left image shows earth and cosmos as separately seen by a disembodied eye, indicating projection of the circles; the right image shows a self-standing earthly globe whose geography of lands and seas is contained within a graticule of cosmographic circles and meridian lines. The secondary meaning of cosmography is apparent in the common designation of printed world maps (and occasionally chorographic maps, too) as “cosmographies,” suggesting their composition according to mathematical principles. In this chapter I concentrate principally on representations of cosmography’s primary meaning, but make occasional reference to world maps where mathematical geography is explicit.13 Cosmography’s methods combined description with measured demonstration of the homologies of heavens and earth, using both mathematically accurate mappings and written narratives. The geometric elegance of the armillary sphere or the world system diagram obscured long-recognized empirical imperfections such as the ec8. For a discussion of this point, see Wightman, “Science and the Renaissance.” Grant discusses the distinct roles of natural philosophy or cosmology and astronomy, which he claims endured throughout the period of the Renaissance. Cosmology, Grant argues, sought “to describe the nature of the heavens and the causes of its various motions . . . to explain the nature of the celestial substance, that is, to determine whether it is incorruptible and indivisible; whether it is equally perfect throughout its extent, or differentially so; whether its properties are similar to matter in the terrestrial region; what causes it to move, and so on” (Grant, Planets, 37). By contrast, astronomy concerned the prediction and determination of planetary and stellar positions, and its principal instruments were geometry and mathematics. Cosmologists were rarely competent in technical astronomy, and their remit included the earth as the corruptible planetary sphere. On the intimacy of connections between scientific inquiry and art in the Galilean controversy of the early seventeenth century, see Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 9. John Dee, The Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570), intro. Allen G. Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), biii. 10. Fiorani, Marvel of Maps, 98. My discussion here draws significantly upon Fiorani’s work. 11. Current definitions taken from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., 20 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). 12. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 3. 13. Fiorani, Marvel of Maps, 100: “Apian’s definitions were still very popular at the end of the sixteenth century and authors and mapmakers such as Sebastian Münster, Giacomo Gastaldi, Girolamo Ruscelli, and Egnazio Danti adopted them almost verbatim.”

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

both its ornamental unity and the marvelous detail that navigation was making increasingly apparent to Europeans.18 The diverging demands of description and demonstration, faith and reason, authority and experience, unity and diversity challenged and eventually marginalized cosmography as a respectable endeavor in early modern Europe, to be replaced by distinct sciences of geography and astronomy. Cosmography’s principles of a unitary creation and a providential order survived, however, through the seventeenth century, largely within the rhetorical dispositio of decorative globes and maps, in pious publications and emblemata, in the arts, and in imaginative literature.19 Understanding the philosophical,

fig. 3.1. PETER APIAN’S COSMOGRAPHY. Size of the original: ca. 20.3 15.2 cm. Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut, 1524), fol. 2. Photograph courtesy of MnU.

centricities of celestial rotation and the uneven distribution of earth and water.14 Such disruptions remained the subject of scholastic debate, illustrated in diagrams appended to natural philosophies.15 As oceanic navigation, celestial observation, and circulation of standardized data increased cosmography’s empirical content, the inadequacy of simple descriptors became increasingly apparent. Fifteenth-century humanists challenged the scholastic defense of natural philosophy’s “right to explain natural phenomena according to the laws of nature without recourse to theological arguments,” blurring boundaries between reason and faith as distinct epistemologies of the material and super-celestial worlds, respectively.16 Cosmography was opened to theological contention in an age of reformation when “philosophical arguments were increasingly used to conﬁrm religious doctrines, above all the immortality of the soul.”17 Dee wrote at a time of growing expectation that articulation of the world machine be demonstrated experientially and described in

14. Grant, Planets, appendix I, “Catalogue of Questions on Medieval Cosmology 1200 –1687,” 681–741, lists four hundred such questions from sixty-seven treatises by fifty-two authors across the five centuries, of whom he places twenty-three in the Renaissance. The questions are collected into four groups corresponding to the regions covered: the world as a whole; the celestial region; celestial and terrestrial regions; and the terrestrial or sublunar region. They are further grouped into nineteen topics. A flavor of the questions is given by the following, with one selected from each group: “Whether there is eternal motion”; “Whether or not celestial bodies act on the sublunar world”; “Whether fire exists in the vicinity of the Moon”; and “How can the generation of mountains be reconciled with the spherical figure of the earth?” On the specific problem of the irregular distribution of earth and water, see Grant, Planets, 630 –37. 15. For example, illustrations from printings of Albert Magnus, De meteoris (Venice, 1494 –95; Venice, 1498), show the elemental sphere, with cycles and ecliptic, employing conventional symbols for earth, water, air, and fire. These symbols also had conventional color coding, discussed by a number of Renaissance thinkers including Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Girolamo Cardano. Fire was red or golden-yellow, air white or blue-gray, water green, and earth black or ash. The images differ in placing the sphere of earth within that of water. The eccentric location in the Venice edition of 1494 –95 was a response to the delicate problem of coordinating the nonsymmetrical geographical distribution of lands and seas with the theoretical simplicity of concentric elemental spheres. The Venice edition of 1498 shows concentric placement. The two traditions, of eccentric and concentric mappings of the spheres, recur in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century illustrations of the geocentric cosmos. 16. Jill Kraye, “The Philosophy of the Italian Renaissance,” in Routledge History of Renaissance Philosophy, vol. 4, The Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Rationalism, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: Routledge, 1993), 16 – 69, esp. 16. 17. Kraye, “Philosophy of the Italian Renaissance,” 37. 18. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 19. In classical rhetoric, dispositio is the structuring and arrangement of an argument. On the meaning and significance of rhetoric in humanism and Renaissance writing, see Brian Vickers, “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 715 – 45. Giuseppe Rosaccio, a late sixteenth-century mapmaker and writer of popular cosmographies, makes an explicit connection between cosmography and the rhetorical ars memoria: “The study and knowledge of this most noble science gives to every man the faculty of being able to speak from memory, as if reading a book, the whole discourse of the earth.” Giuseppe Rosaccio, Il mondo e sue parti cioe

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

social, and technical relations of Renaissance cosmography helps us grasp these changing representational practices. theological and philosophical relations In promising accurate description through latitude and longitude coordinates founded on “mutuall collation” of astronomical and terrestrial geometry, Ptolemy’s texts brought the world map within the scope of philosophical debates surrounding Aristotelian natural philosophy that “in all essentials” his work presupposed.20 The Geography’s reception also has to be placed in the context of a renaissance of Greek scholarship in the Latin West, stimulated by the Council of Florence and Byzantine scholars after 1453, as well as the context of Hebrew learning diffusing from Spain after 1492. The Geography found a mid-fifteenth-century audience within such humanist circles as Georg von Peuerbach’s in Nuremberg or Leon Battista Alberti’s and Marsilio Ficino’s in Florence. There, both scholastic Aristotelianism and Thomas Aquinas’s duality of faith and reason were subjected to demands that natural philosophy be reconciled with Christian doctrine and that vulgar Latin and sterile logic be leavened by classical rhetoric. Aristotle’s Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, and Meteorology, available in Europe since about 1200, remained cosmology’s foundational texts. More familiar were popular commentaries on this corpus, such as Albert Magnus’s De caelo et mundo and above all Johannes de Sacrobosco’s Sphaera, the dominant text for teaching natural philosophy over four centuries after 1250.21 Consistent with the Physics, Sacrobosco described a geocentric world machine filled with matter: elemental in the sublunar spheres where linear motion prevailed and ethereal in celestial realms characterized by uniform circular motion. The eternal nature of Aristotle’s cosmos and his argument in On the Soul for the materiality and mortality of the soul had long raised questions for Christians. To these Plato’s Timaeus, translated in full, alongside other Platonic and Neoplatonic texts by Ficino between 1463 and 1484, offered a response. Plato’s account of creation seemed consonant with Genesis, while Neoplatonic ascent of the soul through the spheres to harmony with the divine implied the soul’s immortality.22 Platonism became popular among Protestant and Catholic reformers in the early sixteenth century and long remained so among the former. Protestant concentration on salvation by faith, its emphasis on textual exegesis of the biblical scheme of redemption, and the belief, significantly enriched by oceanic discovery, that divine providence was revealed also in nature reinforced the theological significance of cosmological questions and thus of cosmography during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The most radical challenge to Aristotle’s cosmology came from the first-century b.c. Roman poet Lucretius. His De rerum natura posited a universe composed of atoms as the fundamental units of matter, without origin or end but constantly mutating in form. Revived interest in Lucretius is apparent from the late fifteenth century, for example, in the Medicean court. It provided a foundation for Neostoic cosmology in the following century, closely connected to studies of Seneca’s Quaestiones naturales Europa, Affrica, Asia, et America (Verona: Francesco dalle Donne and Scipione Vargano, 1596), preface. For a more detailed discussion of Rosaccio, see note 88. The common use of the theater metaphor in both memory art and cosmography is discussed by Ann Blair in The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 153 –79, although she does not suggest that the cosmographic map or atlas was ever used mnemonically. 20. Norriss S. Hetherington, ed., Encyclopedia of Cosmology: Historical, Philosophical, and Scientific Foundations of Modern Cosmology (New York: Garland, 1993), 71. 21. On the importance of Sacrobosco in the age of print, see J. A. Bennett and Domenico Bertolani Meli, Astronomy Books in the Whipple Museum, 1478 –1600 (Cambridge: Whipple Museum of the History of Science, 1994). See Grant, Planets, 14 –16, on the significance of Aristotle’s De caelo for natural philosophy. On Renaissance natural philosophy more generally, see the essays by William A. Wallace, “Traditional Natural Philosophy,” Alfonso Ingegno, “The New Philosophy of Nature,” and Brian B. Copenhaver, “Astrology and Magic,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 201–35 (esp. 225 –31), 236 – 63, and 264 –300, respectively; Kraye, “Philosophy of the Italian Renaissance”; Stuart Brown, “Renaissance Philosophy Outside Italy,” in Routledge History of Renaissance Philosophy, vol. 4, The Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Rationalism, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: Routledge, 1993), 70 –103; and various entries in Hetherington, Encyclopedia. The classic study of the medieval world system, from which Edward Grant’s work proceeds, is Pierre Duhem, Le système du monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, 10 vols. (Paris: A. Hermann, 1913 –59); vol. 10 is devoted to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. See also Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934 –58), esp. vols. 4 –7, for various references to natural philosophers’ writings. Some of the key texts are translated and reproduced in Maria Boas Hall, ed., Nature and Nature’s Laws: Documents of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Walker, 1970). On the implications of the theory of the spheres for globemaking in the period under discussion here, see Elly Dekker, “The Phenomena: An Introduction to Globes and Spheres,” in Globes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Globes and Armillary Spheres in the National Maritime Museum, by Elly Dekker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press and the National Maritime Museum, 1999), 3 –12, esp. 4 – 8. 22. On Ficino’s work and the significance of the corpus hermeticum, see Copenhaver, “Astrology and Magic,” 280 ff. See also Thorndike, History of Magic, 4:562 –73; Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone: Mostra di manoscritti stampe e documenti, 17 maggio–16 giugno 1984, catalogo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1984); Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life, trans. Carolyn Jackson and June Allen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976); Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Renaissance Platonism,” in Facets of the Renaissance, ed. William H. Werkmeister (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1959), 87–107; and Frances Amelia Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

fig. 3.2. PIERRE D’AILLY’S COSMOGRAPHIC MAP. This diagram of the elemental sphere (with water sphere eccentric to land sphere) is a model of the clear illustration of cosmographic principles in early printed texts. D’Ailly’s was the cosmographic work that Columbus is known to have consulted in his preparations for westward Atlantic navigation. Size of the original: ca. 23 23 cm. Pierre d’Ailly, Imago mundi et tractatus alii (Louvain: Johann de Paderborn, 1483), 5. Photograph courtesy of MnU.

and Cicero’s De natura deorum. Neostoics rejected the distinction between elemental and celestial spheres for a single, continuous medium stretching from earth to the farthest stars. They believed that, in a continuous cycle of rarefaction and condensation, terrestrial waters rose into air and were heated by ethereal fire before condensing and returning to the surface. They regarded planets themselves as self-moving intelligences composed of fiery ether.23 These ideas gained acceptance among Galileo’s circle in the early seventeenth-century debate over heliocentricity, and the frequent appearance of epigrams from Cicero and Seneca on world maps in the decades following Ortelius’s Typus orbis terrarum (1570) may indicate support for such theories among mapmakers. Observed irregularities in planetary size and circular motion would raise further questions about the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos. Copernicus’s radical reconfiguration of the geocentric image and the competing world system descriptions that followed grew out of debates over the numbers and location of spheres necessary to maintain the Aristotelian hypothesis of cosmic perfection. In the elemental world, the obvious failure of the water sphere to encompass fully that of earth and the irregular distribution of these two elements were also pon-

dered. Here too, the medieval response leaned toward eccentricity: protrusion of the earthly sphere through that of water offered a possible solution, illustrated in Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi,24 where terra is shown cutting the circumference of aqua (fig. 3.2). This theory may account for the characteristic circularity of the single continent illustrated on fifteenth-century mappaemundi such as those of Andreas Walsperger (1448), Giovanni Leardo (1452/53), and Fra Mauro (1457/59).25 Oceanic discovery between Vasco da Gama’s rounding the Cape of Good Hope and Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation would utterly transform the known distribution of these two elements, revealing a larger, more watery, and more geographically diverse globe than Aristotle had theorized or Ptolemy had described. In response, cosmography tackled the problem of maintaining the balance and symmetry of the Aristotelian elements while mapping an increasingly asymmetrical globe. The graticule of latitude and longitude replaced the simple geometry of continent and ocean as the sign of order on globes and world maps. But the empirical uncertainty of coordinates rendered their appearance as much rhetorical as scientific, while the shadow of the previous vision remained in such elements as Magellanica, the vast austral continent that balanced the expanded scale of northern hemisphere landmasses on seventeenth-century maps.26 social relations Cosmography was embedded in the Renaissance social world; in Dee’s terms, it was necessary “for due manuring of the earth, for Nauigation, for the Alteration of mans body: being, whole, Sicke, wounded, or brused.”27 In addition to navigation and medicine, cosmography was vital for social order: fixing phenomena in space and events in time. In Iberia, cosmography’s value in navigation was primary, and cosmographers were drawn from diverse social and national backgrounds. Applied mathematical 23. Reeves, Painting the Heavens, 58 – 64. 24. René Faille and Pierre-Jean Mairesse, Pierre d’Ailly et l’image du monde au XVe siècle (Cambrai: La Médiathèque Municipale, 1992). D’Ailly’s world map is reproduced in Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472 –1700, 4th ed. (Riverside, Conn.: Early World, 2001), 11 (no. 12). 25. Walsperger’s 1448 map is in Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Pal. Lat. 1362B); see the facsimile Weltkarte des Andreas Walsperger (Zurich: Belser AG, 1981). Leardo’s map is in the collections of the American Geographical Society; see John Kirtland Wright, The Leardo Map of the World, 1452 or 1453, in the Collections of the American Geographical Society (New York: American Geographical Society, 1928). On the Fra Mauro map, see note 50. 26. On the continued desire for global geographic symmetry, see Kirsten A. Seaver, “Norumbega and Harmonia Mundi in SixteenthCentury Cartography,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 34 –58. 27. Dee, Mathematicall Praeface, biii.

knowledge was crucial for Atlantic navigation.28 Cosmographers’ plotting of routes, training of navigators, and updating of charts expanded throughout the sixteenth century as they became “the custodians of most of the new knowledge relating to navigation and exploration.”29 The cosmographers of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville included mapmakers such as Diogo Ribeiro and writers of cosmographic texts: Alonso de Santa Cruz’s “Islario general de todas las islas del mundo por Alonso de Santa Cruz, cosmographo mayor de Carlos I de España” (1542) or Pedro de Medina’s Arte de nauegar (1545), for example.30 Portuguese cosmographers included the mapmakers Diogo Homem and Bartolomeu Velho and the author of “Esmeraldo de situ orbis” (1505 – 8), Duarte Pacheco Pereira.31 The early paradigm for their cosmographic atlases is the Catalan atlas (1375).32 As France and England entered oceanic competition, navigators as well as chart and instrumentmakers such as Guillaume Le Testu and John Dee himself promoted cosmography as an imperial science. Galenic medicine emphasized the importance of celestial influences on the human body as microcosm, mediated through the sublunar spheres of fire and air; hence the human figure marked for bloodletting that accompanies tidal and calendrical diagrams on the first sheet of the Catalan atlas. In Italy and Germany the study of Aristotle was propaedeutic to the practice of medicine, so that many cosmographers had trained or practiced as physicians, among them Girolamo Fracastoro, Oronce Fine, and Sebastian Münster. Anatomy theaters at Padua and Leiden were designed as cosmic maps; the corpse was displayed at the center of tiered observation spaces arranged in concentric circles, an architectural expression of its microcosmic nature.33 And in both texts and images Caesare Caesariano and the doctors Jean Bodin and Robert Fludd used cosmography to map the health of whole nations according to climatic zones and zodiacal locations.34 In the courts of Europe, where a prince’s health embodied that of the realm, cosmographers such as Sebastiano Leandro, Oronce Fine, Giacomo Gastaldi, André Thevet, and Egnazio Danti described and mapped a changing world and collected, ordered, and sought to reconcile with received hypotheses new facts converging from across the globe. Their skills in constructing and manipulating calendar tables and ephemerides enabled them to cast nativities and forecast the conjunctions, eclipses, and comets.35 Such tables had long been critical for the complex calculation of mobile feasts such as Easter and for the long-anticipated calendar reform, finally achieved in 1582.36 More locally, cosmographers applied the Geography’s principles to pictorial maps of states and provinces connecting chorography to global mapping,37 as indicated by Egnazio Danti’s cosmographic suites at Florence and Rome or Antonio Campi’s use of

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays 28. Luís de Albuquerque, “Portuguese Navigation: Its Historical Development,” in Circa 1491: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 35 –39, esp. 38. 29. Pedro de Medina, A Navigator’s Universe: The Libro de Cosmographía of 1538, trans. and intro. Ursula Lamb (Chicago: Published for the Newberry Library by the University of Chicago Press, 1972), 12. 30. Ursula Lamb, Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), and Manuel García Miranda, La contribution de l’Espagne au progrès de la cosmographie et de ses techniques, 1508 –1624 (Paris: Université de Paris, 1964). Spain’s most prolific cosmographers were Alonso de Santa Cruz and Pedro de Medina. Santa Cruz, in his “Historia universal,” completed in 1536, and in “Islario general,” defined the three-part hierarchy of cosmography, geography, and chorography. See Mariano Cuesta Domingo, Alonso de Santa Cruz y su obra cosmográfica, 2 vols. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investgaciones Cientificos, Instituto “Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo,” 1983 – 84), and Alonso de Santa Cruz, Islario general de todas las islas del mundo, 2 vols., ed. Antonio Blázquez y DelgadoAguilera (Madrid: Imprenta del Patronato de Huérfanos de Intendencia é Intervención Militares, 1918). See also chapter 40 in this volume. 31. On Pacheco Pereira’s “Esmeraldo de situ orbis” and Portuguese cosmography more generally, see Joaquim Barradas de Carvalho, A la recherche de la spécificité de la renaissance portugaise, 2 vols. (Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Centre Culturel Portugais, 1983), and Armando Cortesaõ and A. Teixeira da Mota, Portugaliae monumenta cartographica, 6 vols. (Lisbon, 1960; reprinted with an introduction and supplement by Alfredo Pinheiro Marques, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa de Moeda, 1987). 32. Abraham Cresques, El Atlas Catalán (Barcelona: Diáfora, 1975). 33. Giovanna Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna,” Past and Present 117 (1987): 50 – 106; Jan C. C. Rupp, “Matters of Life and Death: The Social and Cultural Conditions of the Rise of Anatomical Theatres, with Special Reference to Seventeenth Century Holland,” History of Science 28 (1990): 263 – 87. The title page to Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543) shows such an arrangement. See also Denis E. Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representations in Sixteenth-Century Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 232 –35. 34. Ceasare Caesariano’s diagrams relating climatic zones to the health of nations appeared in his Italian translation of Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura libri dece, trans. Caesare Caesariano (Como: G. da Ponte, 1521). Caesariano’s illustrations of the armillary sphere and world machine are based on Sacrobosco’s text, and the work also includes two widely reproduced maps of the male body as microcosm. 35. On natural philosophy and science as cultural capital within the courtly economy of Renaissance Europe, see Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996), 333 –76, 395 – 406. See also David Buisseret, ed., Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and James R. Akerman, ed., Cartography and Statecraft: Studies in Governmental Mapmaking in Modern Europe and Its Colonies, Monograph 52, Cartographica 35, nos. 3 and 4 (1998). 36. Evelyn Edson, “World Maps and Easter Tables: Medieval Maps in Context,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 25 – 42. 37. In the preface to William Cuningham, The Cosmographical Glasse, Conteinyng the Pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie or Nauigation (London: Ioan Daij, 1559), A.iiij., Cuningham claims that this role is second only to cosmography’s value for the defense of the realm and in warfare, as, he says, Alexander the Great had recognized, being “accustomed to haue the Mappe and Carte of the Country, by his Cosmographers set out.”

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

Apian’s cosmographic diagrams on his 1583 map of Cremona. Among southern German humanists, cosmography played a significant role in regional and national consciousness. The small panel landscapes developed by artists such as Albrecht Altdorfer, Jan van Eyck, and Joachim Patinir were described as cosmographies and regarded as a more adequate format than written text for describing the universe. Albrecht Dürer claimed that “the measurement of the earth, the waters, and the stars has come to be understood through painting.”38 technical relations Printing had significant impacts on Renaissance cosmography. It made more accessible both ancient texts such as the Geography and more contemporary works such as Albert Magnus’s De caelo et mundo or d’Ailly’s Imago mundi, and above all Sacrobosco’s Sphaera. Easily reproduced in consistent form, these could more readily be criticized and updated. Geometrical relations between celestial and terrestrial spheres could be illustrated and alternative hypotheses on the number and rotation of the former disseminated and compared across simple woodcut diagrams (fig. 3.3). Printed texts could also prolong the life of outmoded representations.39 With Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 introduction of globe gores showing 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude to accompany the cosmographic text, the secondary meaning of cosmography as a description of the whole earth was reinforced.40 To the mathematical and descriptive parts of the written cosmography was added a third: the printed map of the world. Printing Ptolemy’s tabulae or Regiomontanus’s ephemerides not only guaranteed the consistency of numerical data between copies, freeing scholars of the need to recalculate for themselves; it also placed a premium on quantification. This was critical for coordinating and plotting the avalanche of information about terrestrial and celestial phenomena that descended on Renaissance Europe. The vast, variegated world illustrated in such encyclopedias and atlases as Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (1493), Sebastian Münster’s Cosmography (1544), or Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570) was so much altered by the new technology that “the walled libraries of the age of scribes may be related to the closed cosmos envisaged by generations of philosophers.”41 Improved observation of heavens and earth depended on changes in the technologies of vision and representation, especially from about 1600. Copernican heliocentrism had been an outcome of traditional forms of astronomical reasoning rather than new observation. Even Tycho Brahe’s and Johannes Kepler’s more attentive observations were based upon conventional instruments. It was Galileo’s use of the newly invented telescope that

radically challenged the perfection of the Aristotelian celestial spaces, revealing corrugations on the lunar sphere, moons revolving around Jupiter, and imperfections on the surface of the sun.42 On the elemental globe, the unity of cosmography, accepted and repeated by both seamen and scholars, “remained a pious wish as long as portolan charts and the world maps pursued parallel and concurrent developments.”43 Ptolemaic mapping established meridians and oikoumene (the inhabited world) independent of astronomical measure, challenging graphically the unity of heavens and earth. The appearance of celestial circles, rhumb lines, and graticule on late mappaemundi and the joint publication of Ptolemaic and maritime world maps by Waldseemüller, Francesco Rosselli, and others indicate how technical developments exacerbated the problems of illustrating cosmographic unity.44 But while cartographic projection and oceanic discovery transformed Europe’s image of continents and oceans, actual survey techniques on land and sea were not revolutionized until the measurement of terrestrial meridian arcs, accurate longitudinal ﬁxing at sea, and widespread use of triangulation in the eighteenth century.

History and Geography of Renaissance Cosmography Philosophical, social, and technical relations produced a history and geography of cosmography in Renaissance Europe. Simplifying both, I organize cosmography’s history into six broad periods marked by the appearance of key texts. Its geography is more complex, with overlapping divisions between the Mediterranean, Iberia, and northern Europe; mercantile and territorial; and Catholic and Protestant states. I discuss these and the relations between cosmographic texts and diagrams before focusing on cosmographic images as such. history of cosmography The works whose appearance helps shape a summary history of Renaissance cosmography are Francesco 38. Quoted in Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 46. 39. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 2:510. 40. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 28 –31 (nos. 26 and 27). 41. Eisenstein, Printing Press, 2:518. 42. Albert Van Helden, “The Invention of the Telescope,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2d ser., 67, pt. 4 (1977): 3 – 67. 43. Lestringant, “Crisis of Cosmography,” 163. 44. David Woodward, “Maps and the Rationalization of Geographic Space,” in Circa 1491: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 83 – 87.

fig. 3.3. THE THREE BASIC COSMOGRAPHIC MAPS DERIVED FROM SACROBOSCO’S SPHAERA MUNDI. The three left columns are woodcut illustrations taken from incunable editions of Sacrobosco’s text; column 4 contains three illustrations from Oronce Fine’s La theorique des cielz (1528), and column 5 a cosmos from Barthélemy de Chasseneuz’s Catalogus gloriae mundi (1576) and an armillary from Giovanni Paolo Gallucci’s Theatrum mundi (1588) to show how the basic diagrams could be elaborated. Row One: Aristotelian cosmos of four elements, seven planetary spheres, the fixed stars, and the primum mobile. Variations occur in the representation of elemental space surrounding a black-inked central earth. In a they are named, in b conventional symbols and a tripartite division of earth appear, in c they are not differentiated. Fine’s terraqueous sphere (d) suggests a cartographic distribution of land and sea, while Chasseneuz (e) replaces this with a zonal map of earth. The planetary spheres are either named or indicated by their conventional astrological symbols. The ninth heaven is often used to show the zodiac symbols. Fine closes his cosmos with a firm double line around the fixed stars, while, by adding a ninth, crystalline sphere between the fixed stars and the primum mobile and the immobile emperium beyond, Chasseneuz offers the maximum number of circles to which the Aristotelian cosmos could evolve. Peter Apian’s influential cosmos map also stretched to ten spheres, but he left the outer boundary of the tenth open. Chasseneuz closes it and divides the images horizontally into elemental and celestial regions, with a landscape view of the richness of the created world, while four angels surround the cosmos to indicate the super-celestial world. Row Two: Armillary diagrams in Sacrobosco are relatively standard in their contents, with a central earth—which may indicate tripartite division of the continents (f) or habitability (g) or remain undifferentiated (h)—the five great circles (horizon, tropic, and polar circles), colures, axis (which in g, unusually, shows both global and celestial axes), and zodiacal band. Greater variation is apparent in the associated images relating to motion. In f the hand of God appears from the cloud of unknowing (illustrated by the conventional symbol also used for elemental air) to hold the axis of sphaera mundi; in g the cosmos is turned on its axis by angelic hands (but, unusually, the angels appear to turn the axis of the terrestrial globe, apparently challenging Aristotelian laws on its mobility), while in h the figures of Urania, a seated Astronomia holding armillary and astrolabe, and Ptolemy dressed as an Eastern sage examine the sphere, sun, moon, and stars by instrument and book. This basic image was elaborated by later

cosmographers, for example in printings of d’Ailly’s text and most notably by Oronce Fine, who replaces Ptolemy with himself (see fig. 3.12). Fine uses the basic image of the armillary for his “meteoroscope,” illustrating the use of terrestrial latitude and longitude to make astronomical observations (i), while Gallucci uses the armillary for an observationally accurate map of the constellations (j). Row Three: Mappaemundi. Cosmography’s fundamental principle of homology between the celestial and elemental spheres (a predictable consequence of geocentrism) is revealed through the inscription on the latter of the same elements of axis and great circles seen in the former. From these derived the received image of five zones (two frigid, two temperate, and a single tropical zone). Only the temperate zones were regarded as inhabitable, and only the northern hemisphere was known to be inhabited. The Sacroboscan diagrams (k, l, m) illustrate this through labeling and indicating the known oikoumene of the northern habitable zone by means of either a landscape view of cultivated lands, waters, and cities or a crude map of Ptolemy’s oikoumene with three continents and the location of Jerusalem indicated by a cross; m elaborates this by numbering seven climata of the habitable zone. Fine’s world map in n treats the elemental sphere rather differently, indicating earth and water by means of a circular mappamundi with a circumnavigated Africa and the zone of fire by means of a conventional outer circle of flames, but follows Aristotelian meteorology by dividing air into three regions: lower, median, and upper, differentiated by the relative admixture of heat and moisture, thus determining the phenomena that appear within the zone (see plate 1). Johannes de Sacrobosco, Sphaera mundi (Venice: F. Renner, 1478) for a; (Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 1482) for b and f; (Leipzig: Martin Landsberg, 1494) for g, l, and m; (Paris: Johannes Higman for Wolfgang Hopyl, 1494) for c and k; and (Paris: Henrici Stephani, 1507) for h. Oronce Fine, La theorique des cielz (Paris, 1528) for d, i, and n. Barthélemy de Chasseneuz, Catalogus gloriae mundi . . . (Venice: Vincentij Valgrisij, 1576) for e. Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, Theatrum mundi, et temporis . . . (Venice: I. B. Somascum, 1588), 7, for j. Photographs courtesy of MnU (a); Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, New Haven (b and f ); Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (c); BL (d, i, and n); © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (e); University College London (UCL) Library Services, Special Collections (g, h, l, and m); Adler (j); and Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C. (k).

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

Berlinghieri’s Septe giornate della geographia (1482), Martin Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae introdvctio (1507), Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544), Gerardus Mercator’s definition of cosmography (1569) for his posthumously published Atlas sive Cosmographicæ meditationes de fabrica mvndi et fabricati figvra (1595), and Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica (1617). Before 1482 Cosmography’s principal new concern in the immediate aftermath of Jacopo Angeli’s translation of Ptolemy lay in realizing the promise of a mathematically secure foundation for geographical mapping. This was not straightforward. No maps dating to their author had survived for Ptolemy’s tables of locations.45 Indeed, the work did not need to be accompanied by actual maps, for the value of the numerical coordinate system lay precisely in the consistency and mobility of the spatial information it offered. The locations themselves lacked accord with modern names, necessitating philological research. Also, portolan charts and navigation records covered a larger space than the ancient oikoumene, challenging classical authority. In his “Imago mundi” (1410), d’Ailly already proposed corrections to Ptolemy’s locations and projections. By the 1430s, in German monasteries and universities scholars were using refinements in sundials and the newly discovered magnetic declinations to plot Ptolemy’s tables onto mathematical projections of the sphere.46 Based on geometrical principles and illustrating the whole sphere of earth, the resulting two-dimensional images of the terrestrial surface were titled cosmographies. A group of cosmographers at the monastery of Klosterneuburg produced the earliest known graphic renderings of the tabulae, although no original copies of their work remain. The “cosmographia septem climatum” was a semicircular hemispheric map, while the “nova cosmographia” was a circular rendering of the world. These advances were disseminated by Nicolaus Germanus, Georg von Peuerbach, and Pius II (Enea Silvio de’ Piccolomini) into humanist centers in Nuremberg, Venice, Florence, and Rome. Mathematical descriptions of ancient places and events and their connection to the contemporary world attracted humanist interest in renewal and demonstrated the modern relevance of the ancient Greek principle of eusunopton—visible, harmonious form.47 That humanist concern with Ptolemy was more than antiquarian is apparent in the use of the appellation cosmography by mid-century in works that applied his coordinate system to contemporary data rather than simply to reproductions of the original tabulae. In this, Peuerbach’s precocious pupil, Regiomontanus, was significant in collating astronomically determined coordinates for locations across Europe, necessary for accurate use of his

Ephemerides, which calculated astronomical positions for the years 1475 to 1506. Regiomontanus completed Peuerbach’s Epitome of the Almagest (1462) and crafted new instruments for astronomical observation. He printed Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum (1474) with its widely reproduced diagrams reconciling observed planetary movements with the circularity of the Aristotelian spheres (fig. 3.4), so simplified in Sacrobosco’s diagrams.48 Regiomontanus criticized Jacopo Angeli’s mistranslation of the title of Ptolemy’s Geography, of which he planned his own translation, but retained “cosmography” for Ptolemy’s work in his own list of mathematical works to be printed. Regiomontanus died in Rome in 1476, probably working on calendar reform, but his observational, mathematical, and philological work in relating the celestial and elemental spheres echoed through cosmography for over half a century: in Copernicus’s theory and in Apian’s illustrations of comets, for example.49 In Venice, the most sophisticated early Renaissance Italian cosmography was Fra Mauro’s 1459 mappamundi for Afonso V of Portugal. Fra Mauro acknowledged the intellectual significance of Ptolemaic cosmography and in his map commented on advances in cosmography, but avoided using projection. Ptolemy’s tabulae did not cover the geographical space for which Fra Mauro had information but no coordinate tables. Fra Mauro’s is thus a descriptive cosmography—pictorial and textual but not mathematical. It collates and illustrates the world’s variety from the vantage point of Europe’s premier mercantile city.50 The various meanings of cosmography coalesce in this remarkable mappamundi. The texts elements of the map reveal Fra Mauro’s use of the most up-to-date sources, while the landscapes in blue and gold that cover its surface give the earth a jewel-like uniformity that reflects the cosmographic vision. How45. O. A. W. Dilke and eds., “The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy,” and idem, “Cartography in the Byzantine Empire,” in HC 1:177–200 and 258 –75, esp. 266 –74. 46. Dana Bennett Durand, The Vienna-Klosterneuburg Map Corpus of the Fifteenth Century: A Study in the Transition from Medieval to Modern Science (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1952), and Ernst Zinner, Regiomontanus: His Life and Work, trans. Ezra Brown (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990), 16 –17. 47. The idea of renewal was fundamental to the Renaissance humanists’ project of using ancient texts in the service of a modern polity based on the moral and political principles they felt had underpinned the classical world. On the classical principle of eusunopton, see Lestringant, “Crisis of Cosmography,” 166 – 67. 48. Zinner, Regiomontanus, and Lucien Gallois, Les géographes allemands de la Renaissance (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890), 1–11. 49. Zinner, Regiomontanus. 50. For discussions of the Fra Mauro map, see David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in HC 1:286 –370, esp. 314 –18; Peter Whitfield, The Image of the World: 20 Centuries of World Maps (London: British Library, 1994), 32 –33; J. A. J. de Villiers, “Famous Maps in the British Museum,” Geographical Journal 44 (1914): 168 – 84; and pp. 315 –17 in this volume.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

fig. 3.4. ILLUSTRATING PLANETARY MOVEMENT AND ORBS. According to Aristotle’s cosmography and the physical principles that underlay it, each planet in a geocentric cosmos revolved within an orb of ether, an incorruptible substance equivalent in the celestial sphere to the four elements of the corruptible sphere. The principle of plenitude determined that there could be no space between these orbs, and each was generally believed to be enclosed within a crystalline sphere. Observed variation in the distances of the planets from earth produced major problems in seeking to sustain the principles of circularity, equivalence in the width of the orbs, and plenitude in their exact fit that are indicated by world system diagrams in Sacrobosco, for example. Gerard of Cremona’s Theorica planetarum, an important thirteenth-century contribution to the debate regularly bound with Sacrobosco’s Sphaera, was discussed in Georg von Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum and illustrated by Regiomontanus. The diameter of the world machine was generally accepted to be some forty thou-

sand earth radii. The theory of Copernicus had the effect of either pushing this size virtually to infinity or breaking the principle of plenitude by leaving gaps between the spheres. While his own illustrations do not indicate this, it is suggested in the Copernican diagrams of Johannes Prätorius (left) and Michael Maestlin (in Georg Joachim Rheticus, De libris revolutionum Nicolai Copernici narratio prima, 1596) by gaps between the concentric planetary orbs. Kepler’s illustration (right) of the proportions and intervals of the celestial orbs following Copernicus’s measurements reveal their overlap and thus the impossibility of either their crystalline nature or their concentricity. Johannes Prätorius, Compendosia enarratio hypothesium Nicolai Copernici (1594), photograph courtesy of the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg (MS. 814, fol. 92v), and Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Erasmi Kempferi, 1621), pl. IV, photograph courtesy of the Beinecke.

ever, the cosmographic argument is made separately, in four circles outside terrestrial space that occupy the corners of the work. These illustrate and explain respectively the elemental and celestial spheres, the division of the elements, the poles and great circles that unify celestial and terrestrial globes, and the terrestrial paradise.

exercises and items of beauty. In Florence, cosmography was drawn into the realm of Platonic studies. Francesco Berlinghieri, a member of Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy, titled his Italian poetic rendering of Ptolemy Le septe giornate della geographia, and it was accompanied by ﬁne copperplates of the original tabulae.51 Berlinghieri places the work within the tradition of narrative and descriptive geography inherited from Herodotus and

1482 –1507 Manuscript copies of the Geography and mappings of the tabulae were prized in Italian courts as philological

51. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 9 (no. 9).

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

Strabo.52 This confused the connection with cosmography but suited the humanist commitment to style and rhetoric over scholastic logic. Marsilio Ficino, concurrently translating Plato’s cosmological text the Timaeus, wrote a dedicatory preface for Berlinghieri. Unlike the Klosterneuburg and Fra Mauro cosmographies, Regiomontanus’s and Berlinghieri’s work appeared in print. The seventy-ﬁve manuscript copies of Ptolemy’s Geography probably circulating by 1475 compares with an estimated one thousand printed copies in existence by 1500. Many contained cartographic renderings of modern coordinates based on Regiomontanus’s tables as well as the conventional tabulae.53 Regiomontanus’s 1471 Nuremberg project to publish a library of ancient astronomical and cosmographic texts was posthumously pursued in Nuremberg and Venice by Erhard Ratdolt and Aldus Manutius, who pioneered the reproduction of woodcut and copper illustrations of mathematical diagrams and maps. These largely reproduced manuscript illustrations from Sacrobosco’s Sphaera, Macrobius’s In somnium Scipionis, and d’Ailly’s Imago mundi but with increasing sophistication.54 Regiomontanus had used different colored inks to mark feast days and golden numbers. In 1493 a group of Nuremberg scholars, mathematicians, and artists coordinated by humanist-publisher Hartmann Schedel published the Liber chronicarum. Drawing on established conventions for illustrating the spheres, the book opens with images of the Genesis narrative, day by day. These construct a Christianized Aristotelian cosmos, extending to the super-celestial angelic ranks. Schedel’s image of the cosmos is succeeded by a landscape of Eden and a woodcut map of the Ptolemaic oikoumene.55 With its map of “Germania” and northern Europe and its textual reference to Martin Behaim (whose terrestrial globe, manufactured for Nuremburg merchants in the same year, contained information drawn from Portuguese cosmographers and navigators) and to the discovery of islands in the Ocean Sea (a cosmographic term for the Atlantic), this chronicle may properly be regarded as a humanist cosmography. Its emphasis is narrative and description rather than mathematical geography and astronomy. Gregor Reisch’s instructional text of 1503, Margarita philosophica, also historicized cosmographic materials according to biblical authority.56 1507–1544 Such humanist works were not cosmographies in the emerging sense of a universal map or, increasingly after the hemispheric division of the world at Tordesillas, a globe or world map to which text was subordinate. Dawning recognition of America’s continental scale and, after the 1522 return of Magellan’s remaining circumnavigators, of the true dimensions of the terrestrial sphere

stimulated interest in cosmography among princes, merchants, and scholars. Cosmography’s favored vehicles became globes and world maps on a global projection, generally accompanied by an explanatory and descriptive text, either separately published or printed on the map itself. Mapping new data graphically and textually was becoming a major stimulus to cosmography. In 1508, Amerigo Vespucci was nominated pilot major at Spain’s Casa de la Contratación, its first official cosmographer, a position of vital geopolitical and economic significance. Cosmographic globes and coordinate tables were central to debates over the extension of the papal line to the eastern hemisphere during the 1520s. Vespucci’s own narratives of the four Columbian voyages were reproduced in Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 Cosmographiae introdvctio, written to accompany a map of the whole world “both in the Solid and Projected on the Plane”: Vniversalis cosmographia secvndvm Ptholomæi: Traditionem et Americi Vespvcii aliorv qve lvstrationes.57 Waldseemüller’s map, technical handbook, and geographical description established a model for sixteenth-century cosmography. Johannes Schöner published similar texts to

52. On Berlinghieri’s interpretation of cosmography, see Milanesi, “Geography and Cosmography,” 445, and De Smet, “Géographes de la Renaissance,” 18. 53. Cecil H. Clough, “The New World and the Italian Renaissance,” in The European Outthrust and Encounter, the First Phase c. 1400 – c. 1700: Essays in Tribute to David Beers Quinn on His 85th Birthday, ed. Cecil H. Clough and P. E. H. Hair (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994), 291–328, esp. 296. 54. A significant number of the cosmographic texts that appeared in print before 1500 are reproduced in microfiche in Lotte Hellinga, ed., Incunabula: The Printing Revolution in Europe, 1455 –1500 (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1991–); see also the accompanying guide, unit 3: “The Image of the World: Geography and Cosmography” (especially the commentary on printed cosmographic texts by Denis E. Cosgrove, 13 –19). 55. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 18 –19 (no. 19). 56. Margarita philosophica covered all seven liberal arts, touching on cosmography in various sections throughout the vast work and drawing on printings of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera for his images of the ecliptic and the rotundity of the earth. Republished regularly until 1599, Reisch’s text and images were enormously influential for later cosmographic works. 57. Cosmographiae introdvctio cvm qvibvsdam geometriae ac astronomiae principiis ad eam rem necessariis, 1507; facsimile, in English, Martin Waldseemüller, The Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in Facsimilie, ed. Charles George Herbermann (1907; reprinted Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1969). Waldseemüller’s title continues: “Vniuersalis Cosmographi[a]e descriptio tam in solido q[uam] plano, eis etiam insertis qu[a]e Ptholom[a]eo ignota a nuperis reperta sunt.” On the intellectual context of Waldseemüller’s project, see Hildegard Binder Johnson, Carta Marina: World Geography in Strassburg, 1525 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963). The world map is reproduced as figure 9.9 and in Shirley, Mapping of the World, 30 –31 (no. 26).

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

accompany terrestrial globes in 1515, 1523, and 1533.58 Globe pairs describing heavens and earth separately, sometimes accompanied by a third, the armillary sphere that modeled their cosmographic relationship, were being produced in increasing numbers. As Hans Holbein’s famous portrait The Ambassadors (1533) records, possession of such costly items signified the social status of cosmographic knowledge.59 Navigation was making Ptolemy’s mapping techniques ever more vital for plotting global information at the same time as it eroded the authority of his image of lands and seas. To read the emerging picture, the user must understand the geometric principles through which the great circles, colures, axis, poles, and horizon of the celestial sphere are inscribed onto the terrestrial surface.60 In fact, only 62 of Waldseemüller’s 165 pages are devoted to this mathematical cosmography; the text is dominated by Vespucci’s reports. Nonetheless, both mathematical cosmography (closely aligned to the science of optics) and navigators’ reports shared a common emphasis on autopsy, seeing for oneself and ensuring the accuracy of sight by technical instrumentation. This was becoming an important criterion of cosmographic truth. The scale of the globe and the cosmographer’s role as recorder of others’ discoveries denied him the possibility of personal autopsy. He relied on the veracity of individual reports and his own capacity to connect these narratively and to secure them through the geometry of the map. In the early decades of the new century, the monopoly in cosmographic teaching enjoyed by Sacrobosco’s Sphaera was being challenged by new summaries of cosmography as the significance of geography and navigation increased in prominence to rival that of astronomy and the educational significance of distinct terrestrial and celestial globes gained importance at the cost of the armillary sphere.61 Peter Apian’s Isagoge in typum cosmographicum seu mappam mundi of 1521 and Declaratio: Et usus typi cosmographici of 1522, forerunners to his immensely successful Cosmographicus liber of 1524, coincided with the first circumnavigation. Apian, cosmographer to the emperor Charles V, produced a treatment of mathematical cosmography that was more popular than original and fuller than Waldseemüller’s. It included instruction on celestial observation and the practicalities of spatial survey and delineation intended to clarify the accompanying world map. The text was edited in 1529 by Gemma Frisius, and by 1609 had passed through thirty-three editions in five languages.62 Despite their titles, Gemma’s own De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae of 1530 (itself reprinted in ten editions over the following half century) and Oronce Fine’s Protomathesis (1532) focus on terrestrial space.63 Part of Gemma’s title, “usu globi ab eodem editi,” indicates the continued role of the cosmographic text as an aid to understanding the

graphic representation of space in globes and world maps. The descriptive cosmography that succeeded the mathematical sections of these works expanded to accommodate new geographical knowledge while increasing dissonance with the geometrical symmetries of the Aristotelian climata zones threatened to undermine the intellectual coherence of the work. Cosmography’s graphic emphasis and the enlarging scope it was seeking to accommodate are revealed in popular panel cosmographies or world landscape paintings. Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Issus (1529), for example, maps the eastern Mediterranean, Sinai, Red Sea, and Nile from a viewpoint high above the earth, witness to its infinite distances and even the curving horizon of the globe. Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen’s drawings of the conquest of Tunis for Charles V, turned into tapestries by Willem de Pannemaker in 1554, incorporate similar perspectives on the western Mediterranean.64 In the 1560s 58. Luculentissima quaeda¯ terrae totius descriptio: Cum multis utilissimis cosmographiae iniciis. . . . See De Smet, “Géographes de la Renaissance,” 21. 59. John David North, The Ambassadors’ Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (London: Hambledon and London, 2002), and Jardine, Worldly Goods, 305 – 6 and 425 –36. See figure 6.1. 60. On the connections between reading the geographical map (whose principles were mathematical in Ptolemy’s definition) and looking at the chorographic image (in whose making Ptolemy emphasized the importance of pictorial skills), see Eileen Reeves, “Reading Maps,” Word and Image 9 (1993): 51– 65. 61. Dekker, “Introduction to Globes and Spheres,” 6. 62. Apian’s cosmographic publishing career began in 1521 with Isagoge, a textual description of how to transfer the globe onto a flat sheet. It contains an outline of cosmography, but it was Cosmographicus liber (Landshut, 1524) that established his significance as a cosmographer. His student Gemma Frisius contributed to the 1529 edition, Petri Apiani Cosmographia, per Gemmam Phrysium, apud louanienses medicum ac mathematicum insignem, restituta (Antwerp: Arnoldo Berckmano). On the continued significance of Apian’s handbook into the early seventeenth century, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. 133 –39. For basic biographical and bibliographic information on a significant number of the principal cosmographers of the midsixteenth century, see Robert W. Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps: Bio-Bibliographies of the Cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 (Chicago: For the Newberry Library by Speculum Orbis Press, 1993); Apian is discussed on pages 49 – 63. Biographical information on the many cosmographers connected with the Roman Catholic Church can be found in The Catholic Encyclopedia. 63. Oronce Fine, Orontii Finei Delphinatis, liberalivm disciplinarivm professoris regii, Protomathesis, four parts: De arimetica, De geometria, De cosmographia, and De solaribus horologiis (Paris: Gerardi Morrhij and Ioannis Petri, 1532); idem, De mundi sphaera, sive Cosmographia (Paris, 1542). Oronce Fine’s 1513 edition of Sacrobosco, Mu[n]dialis sphere opusculu[m], had appeared in 1516, containing thirty-two woodcuts taken from Venetian incunabulae. See Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century, 168 –90. 64. Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 125 –30, and Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton,

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 3.5. SEBASTIAN MÜNSTER’S WORLD SYSTEM OF 1550. Münster’s Cosmography, like Schedel’s chronicle sixty years earlier, included illustrations by many artists, including Hans Holbein. Its relatively brief discussion of theoreticalmathematical cosmography was illustrated with simple diagrams. Münster’s synthesis of the world system appears in this title page illustration, a unique circular image, itself owing something to the structure of Schedel’s universe, set within a square frame whose upper corners are occupied by angels and its lower ones by anthropomorphic monsters. Arcs divide the circle to give the impression of a three-dimensional globe; three divisions illustrate the elements: land and air together composing a central landscape, positioned between water and fire, while the heavens are represented by images of sun and moon against a background of the starry firmament. The Creator is placed against a source of divine light within the billowing cloud of unknowing. This image owes nothing to mathematical or theoretical cosmography; it is connected much more closely to southern German panel landscape cosmographies and to traditions of biblical representation of space and its pictorial composition, for example Hans Lufft’s 1534 image of the Pancreator overseeing his cosmos, with a central Eden landscape, which appears in Heinrich Steiner’s German Bible published in Augsburg, 1535. Size of the original: 11.2 15.6 cm. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographei; oder, Beschreibung aller Länder . . . (Basel: Apud Henrichum Petri, 1550), title page. Photograph courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

and 1570s, Peter Bruegel the Elder would revive this tradition of detailing the richness of the material world in jewel-like images, capturing more coherently than published cosmographies the combination of ornament and harmony that underpinned the idea of cosmos.65 1544 –1569 Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia: Beschreibu[n]g aller Lender of 1544, structured like Schedel’s or Reisch’s works as a historical narrative, appeared a year after Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica, and Niccolò

Tartaglia’s first vernacular translation of Euclid’s Elements.66 Cosmos was becoming a key trope for scientific observation and description of natural phenomena from the scale of the human microcosm to elemental and celestial globes. Münster was a Lutheran doctor, Hebrew scholar, active astronomer, and publisher of a Latin version of the Geography. More a humanist encyclopedia than an explanatory adjunct to globe or map, the Cosmography demonstrates in words and pictures the universal majesty of God’s creation, indicated by its title page illustration and the mirabilia that fill it (fig. 3.5). Eusunopton is conveyed by the typus, or world machine diagram, but Münster’s mathematical exposition, simply formulated in standard definitions at the beginning of the work, hardly counterbalances the “thousands of profuse pages that contain the many-hued descriptions of countries, regions, towns, and islands.”67 Münster’s strong geographical focus is shared by Rembertus Dodonaeus’s contemporary but less commercially successful work.68 The printed cosmography was facing competition from collections of firsthand exploration and discovery narratives such as Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s three-volume Navigazioni et viaggi (from 1550). Like Apian’s handbook, Münster’s work was translated into and published in the major European languages. The first cosmography composed in English was William Cuningham’s Cosmographical Glasse of 1559, while in France Guillaume Postel’s Livre des merveilles du monde was published in 1553. Guillaume Le Testu’s unpublished “Cosmographie universelle” was completed in 1556. The expanding volume of materials returned from “new worlds,” however, challenged European cosmographers with the increasingly impossible task of reconciling their synoptic Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion, 2000), 82 –115. See also plate 22. 65. Walter S. Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth”: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 66. Kim H. Veltman, “The Emergence of Scientific Literature and Quantification, 1520 –1560,” , discusses the significance of these works in the quantification of knowledge and the evolution of a scientific culture at this time. On the impacts of Vesalius’s work, see Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). On Münster, see Sebastian Münster, Cosmographiae uniuersalis lib. VI. (Basel: Henrichvm Petri, 1550); Manfred Büttner and Karl Heinz Burmeister, “Sebastian Münster, 1488 –1552,” in Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies, ed. Thomas Walter Freeman, Marguerita Oughton, and Philippe Pinchemel (London: Mansell, 1977–), 3:99 –106; Karl Heinz Burmeister, Sebastian Münster: Eine Bibliographie (Wiesbaden: Guido Pressler, 1964); and Besse, Les grandeurs de la terre, 151–57. 67. Lestringant, “Crisis of Cosmography,” 156. 68. Rembertus Dodonaeus, Cosmographica in astronomiam et geographiam isogoge, completed 1546 and published in Antwerp by I. Loei in 1548.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

glance with the globe’s promiscuous diversity and exotic otherness. As Postel’s title Des merveilles du monde implies, such reports accentuated descriptive cosmography’s appeal to a fascination with the strange and marvelous inherited from Pliny, among others. The ﬂorid decoration of his 1578 world map (known from the 1621 edition), complete with rotating scales, perfectly conveys cosmography’s attempt to marry marvels and mathematics.69 Heliocentricity, which Copernicus saw as a way of maintaining the cosmological principle of uniformity in circular motion, offered the most radical challenge to the Ptolemaic cosmos. Copernicus’s text was illustrated by a simple diagram of nine spheres, centered upon the sun and locating the earth with its circling moon on the third circle. Familiarity with his ideas among mathematical cosmographers a decade prior to publication of De revolutionibus is apparent in the 1532 Typvs cosmographicvs vniversalis by Sebastian Münster, in which the angels normally shown turning the spheres rotate the earthly globe.70 But the complexity of Copernicus’s system offered little improvement over Ptolemy so that the arguments for heliocentricity convinced no more than a handful of sixteenth-century thinkers, most following the supernova of 1572.71 1569 –1620 By the late sixteenth century, both the synthetic ambitions of cosmographic publications and the countervailing pressures of observation were undermining the project’s integrity. Theological division also had an impact on cosmography. Tridentine Catholicism favored Aristotelianism and elevated cautious investigation over speculative natural philosophy. This alone may have made Platonism more attractive among Protestant thinkers. Both camps had long since abandoned the scholastic separation of faith and reason and required natural philosophy to submit to religious doctrine.72 Thus, the cosmographic concept of a providentially ordered and harmonious world machine, especially when connected to Neostoicism or to Neoplatonic ideas of the soul’s ascent toward divine love, could offer a retreat from religious strife and a possible point of doctrinal resolution.73 But if pietism’s disengagement from the excesses of both sides of the doctrinal divide into more private belief favored images of harmony, the unrelenting ﬂow of observational data into the cosmographer’s study from navigation and systematic celestial observation undermined synopsis. In 1569, Gerardus Mercator, humanist and philosopher as much as mathematician, who had been charged with heresy in 1544, outlined his program for a multivolume cosmography: a synthesis of knowledge seeking to reconcile the observational sciences and biblical knowledge. Its volumes would cover creation of the universe (totius mundi fabrica), as-

tronomy, geography, and the history of states (geneologicon). His attempt to harmonize the gospels (Evangelicae historiae quadriparta Monas) was published in 1592, an element in Mercator’s vast but uncompleted cosmographic project: Atlas sive Cosmographicæ.74 As Mercator’s 69. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Postel’s map is reproduced as figure 47.6 (detail, fig. 3.18), and in Shirley, Mapping of the World, 166 – 67 (no. 144). 70. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 74 –75 (no. 67). 71. Hetherington, Encyclopedia, 92 –99 (“Copernican Revolution”), with bibliography, and Víctor Navarro Brotóns, “The Reception of Copernicus in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Case of Diego de Zúñiga,” Isis 86 (1995): 52 –78. 72. This is apparent in the writings of Bodin (Blair, Theater of Nature, 143– 46) and the Jewish cosmographer David Gans (André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David Gans [1541–1613] and His Times [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], esp. 95–165). For an example of the use of a cosmographic image for purely polemical religious purposes, see Frank Lestringant, “Une cartographie iconoclaste: ‘La mappe-monde nouvelle papistique’ de Pierre Eskrich et Jean-Baptiste Trento (1566 –1567),” in Géographie du monde au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance, ed. Monique Pelletier (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1989), 99 –120. William B. Ashworth, “Light of Reason, Light of Nature: Catholic and Protestant Metaphors of Scientific Knowledge,” Science in Context 3 (1989): 89–107. 73. The desire for an irenic religious resolution to the great theological divide at the turn of the seventeenth century is well attested. The concept of harmony central to cosmography and the Neoplatonic idea of ascent and mediation between earth and heaven seem to have made this very attractive to cosmographers and geographers, including Mercator, Ortelius, and Hondius. For a history of this idea, see Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye. On Mercator and Ortelius, see Giorgio Mangani, “Abraham Ortelius and the Hermetic Meaning of the Cordiform Projection,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 59 – 83, and idem, Il “mondo” di Abramo Ortelio: Misticismo, geografia e collezionismo nel Rinascimento dei Paesi Bassi (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1998). On Mercator’s attachment to such ideas, see Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002), 50 –51 and 149 –50. On Bodin, see Blair, Theater of Nature, 147– 48. The Venetian Accademia della Fama, which was active in these years and whose members included cosmographers Giacomo Gastaldi and Livio Sanuto, had as its motto “I fly to Heaven to rest in God.” Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 114 –22. Such ascent could imply the existence of a single, continuous medium between earth and the planets as indicated by Neostoicism. Also, the rhumb line or loxodrome, which Mercator’s projection reconciles with the great circle route on the map, describes a spiral that becomes infinite about the pole. A common literary conceit at the turn of the seventeenth century connected the loxodrome (or cursus obliquus) to a spiral ascent of the soul, “poised between the straight furrow of bestiality [elemental motion] and the ceaseless revolutions described by the angels [celestial motion].” Reeves, “Reading Maps,” 53. 74. Gerardus Mercator, Atlas sive Cosmographicæ meditationes de fabrica mvndi et fabricati figvra (Duisburg: Clivorvm, 1595); in English, Atlas or a Geographicke Description of the Regions, Countries and Kingdomes of the World, through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, 2 vols., trans. Henry Hexham (Amsterdam: Henry Hondius and Iohn Iohnson, 1636). Lestringant, in Mapping the Renaissance World, 6, uses Mercator’s phrase “cosmographical meditation” to refer to this genre of works by geographer-theologians. On Mercator, see Marcel Watelet, ed., Gérard Mercator cosmographe: Le temps et l’espace (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator Paribas, 1994), and Crane, Mercator.

work suggests, cosmographic unity was evasive, possible, if at all, only through separation of its parts. Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum of 1570 had already shown an alternative route: a collection of geographic maps with no reference to the celestial spheres, which were regarded as the province of astronomy. Traditional cosmographies continued to be produced, such as Urbano Monte’s “Trattato universale descrittione et sito de tutte le terre sin qui conosciuto” (1590), although its conservatism probably accounted for its remaining in manuscript rather than reaching the press.75 Faced with the publishing success of Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570) and collections of discovery reports such as Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589) or Theodor de Bry’s America (1596), conventional cosmography was increasingly vulnerable. Both the scope of its claims and the contradictions increasingly revealed by actual observations of celestial and terrestrial space rendered cosmographic unity impossible to sustain across a detailed textual exposition such as Mercator’s. Thus André Thevet’s Cosmographie vniverselle of 1575 claims eyewitness veracity for phenomena well beyond the scope of its author’s travels, seeking to secure his claims by allocating often entirely arbitrary locational coordinates to every phenomenon.76 Such actions vitiated cosmography’s claim that creation’s diversity could be captured within the mathematically secure grid of the world machine. At the scholarly level, cosmography was beginning to peel apart. At the English universities between 1580 and 1620, geographical description of the earth was becoming distinguished from cosmography as “the study of the globe and its relations with the heavens as a whole.”77 The late sixteenth century also witnessed a growing dispute over the structure of the world machine itself. In 1573 Valentinus Naiboda’s sequence of comparative systems set Copernicus’s image alongside Ptolemy’s cosmos and Martianus Capella’s geocentric map with Mercury and Venus circling the sun.78 In his 1576 world system, Thomas Digges expanded the width of the earth’s orb to contain both the elements and the lunar path. Digges’s notation, if not his drawing, embraced the full implication of heliocentrism by combining fixed stars and the empyrean.79 To accommodate the distances and speeds of planetary revolution in a heliocentric cosmos, the scale of the world machine must be stretched almost to infinity and a huge void opened between planets and stars, undermining Aristotle’s principle of plenitude, which disallowed empty space. Heliocentrism also breaks the contiguity and ultimately the very existence of the Ptolemaic spheres, as two 1590s illustrations and Johannes Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum (1596), which claimed to show the true size of the celestial orbs and the intervals, made absolutely apparent. Kepler reflects the mathematical shift in natural philosophy away from the Euclidian

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

geometry appropriate to a fixed and finite cosmos and toward the Archimedian mathematics appropriate to studying motion and attraction between bodies in infinite space. Tycho Brahe’s 1588 alternative world system diagram maintained geocentricity by revolving the inner planets around the sun, while Nicolaus Reimers printed a similar diagram in his Fundamentum astronomicum of the same year. In Helisaeus Röslin’s De opere Dei creationis . . . (1597), five systems were illustrated, allowing immediate visual comparison. By 1600, Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonian models were familiar alternative images of the cosmos promoting broad and intense interest in the world machine among educated Europeans, reflected in its popularity as an artistic and literary theme in metaphysical poetry—sacred and secular—and in painting, drama, and masques (fig. 3.6).80 As astronomy separated scientifically from geography, the cosmographic claim would be sustained graphically or in religious text whose scientific concerns were subordinate to their doctrinal concerns. After 1620 By 1620, new optical instruments such as the telescope and microscope were generating volumes of new astronomical observations and revealing previously invisible structures within elemental matter. Autopsy’s claims over other forms of authority and those of experience or experiment over rhetoric were ever more powerfully asserted. Such advances intensified rather than removed the questions of verifying observation that had always faced cosmography. The longitude problem remained unsolved, while the phenomena revealed by optical instruments could be made public only by means of graphic images. Questions of vision and the veracity of images underlay the dispute between Kepler and Robert Fludd over the latter’s metaphysical maps in his history of the macrocosm and the 75. Urbano Monte, Descrizione del mondo sin qui conosciuto, ed. Maurizio Ampollini (Lecco: Periplo, 1994). 76. Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, and chapter 47 in this volume. 77. Lesley B. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580 –1620 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 98 –110, quotation on 18, and W. R. Laird, “Archimedes among the Humanists,” Isis 82 (1991): 629 –38. 78. Naiboda (or Nabodus) published his diagrams in a commentary on Martianus Capella’s widely studied fifth-century De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii libri novem. The work, titled Primarum de coelo et terra institutionum quotidianarumque mundi revolutionum, libri tres, was published in Venice in 1573. See S. K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1977), 58 –59. 79. A selection of Digges’s A Perfect Description of the Celestial Orbs text is reproduced in Hall, Nature and Nature’s Laws, 19 –34. 80. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943); Reeves, “Reading Maps,” 52 –55; and idem, Painting the Heavens.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

fig. 3.6. THE COMPETING WORLD SYSTEMS. By the third decade of the seventeenth century, Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonean images (left to right) of the cosmos were regularly compared. Many texts illustrated all three in simple “scientific” style, characterized by a graphic economy of clean compass lines, points, and astronomic notation and an ab-

sence of decorative iconography. This aided immediate visual comparison of the systems. Helisaeus Röslin, De opere Dei creationis . . . (Frankfurt: Andræ Wecheli, Claudium Marnium, and Joannem Aubrium, 1597), 51 and 55. Photographs courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

microcosm, Utriusque cosmi maioris (1617–26) (fig. 3.7).81 Celestial phenomena, such as the lunar craters mapped by Galileo and Jupiter’s moons observed by Galileo, might further challenge faith in the perfection and harmony of an Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos, but they by no means swept it away. Jesuit astronomers such as Christoph Scheiner, Christoph Clavius, and Giovanni Battista Riccioli used the new instruments to map celestial phenomena within the conventional Ptolemaic frame, while revelations of lunar corrugations fueled debates over Mary’s immaculate conception (fig. 3.8).82 Galileo’s sunspot images of 1613, traced by the lens directly onto paper, lent support to the idea that mechanization of the image might guarantee its truth.83 In all ways, therefore, image making, still socially disparaged as the work of mechanicians, assumed an increasingly significant role within natural philosophy.84 In this context in the seventeenth century, cosmography, while still employed as a title for works that proclaimed the structural unity of terrestrial and celestial space, as a scientific project gave way to the technically distinct disciplines of geography and astronomy. Cosmography remained a common title on globes, world maps, and atlases, climaxing in elaborate works by Jodocus Hondius, Joan Blaeu, and Vincenzo Coronelli for absolute sovereigns who often styled themselves masters of two spheres. These works, which frequently contained brief summaries of mathematical cosmography, were decorated with globe images and emblems drawn from the repertoire of Renaissance cosmography, rendering them pictorial equivalents of Baroque Wunderkammern (fig. 3.9). Louis XIV’s life and reign were scripted through the discourse of cosmography and realized in the architecture, gardens, and decoration of Versailles. N. Jaugeon’s Carte generale contenante les mondes coeleste

81. Robert S. Westman, “Nature, Art, and Psyche: Jung, Pauli, and the Kepler-Fludd Polemic,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 177–229. 82. Robert S. Westman, “Two Cultures or One? A Second Look at Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution,” Isis 85 (1994): 79 –115. See also Reeves, Painting the Heavens. 83. Francesco Panese, “Sur les traces des taches solaires de Galilée: Disciplines scientifiques et disciplines du regard au XVIIe siècle,” Equinoxe: Revue des Sciences Humaines 18 (1997): 103 –23, and Mary G. Winkler and Albert Van Helden, “Representing the Heavens: Galileo and Visual Astronomy,” Isis 83 (1992): 195 –217, esp. 211. Martin Kemp, in The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 169 – 212, discusses anamorphic images such as Christopher Scheiner’s pantograph or those illustrated by Athanasius Kircher in his Ars magna lucis et vmbrae (Rome: Sumptibus Hermanni Scheus, 1646) and their claims to mimesis. 84. E. G. R. Taylor, The Mathematical Practitioners of Tudor & Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954; reprinted London: For the Institute of Navigation at Cambridge University Press, 1967). Stephen Andrew Johnston, in “Mathematical Practitioners and Instruments in Elizabethan England,” Annals of Science 48 (1991): 319– 44, warns against too neat a distinction between artisan mechanicals and courtly scientists in the use of and attitudes toward instrumentation, arguing that the practitioners served a significant mediating role between “gentlemen and artificers, between patrons and craftsmen,” although he points out that such knowledge was confined to urban culture and “would have had little impact on the illiterate majority in the rural population or the labouring poor” (pp. 327 and 342). On the connections between the practitioners and religion, see G. J. R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also Pamela O. Long, “Power, Patronage, and the Authorship of Ars: From Mechanical Know-How to Mechanical Knowledge in the Last Scribal Age,” Isis 88 (1997): 1– 41, and the discussion by Cormack, in Charting an Empire, 24 –27, referencing the relevant literature. Popular cosmographies such as Apian’s drew upon a tradition of mathematical texts by practitioners, available since the late fifteenth century, especially in Italy, e.g., Luca Pacioli, Somma di aritmetica,

fig. 3.7. ROBERT FLUDD’S COSMOGRAPHY. Size of the original: ca. 33.7 30.5 cm. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atqve technica historia, in duo volumina secundum cosmi

differentiam diuisa (Oppenheim: Johann Theodor de Bry, 1617). Photograph courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

Continued faith in the cosmographic principle underpinned Neoplatonic attempts to synthesize knowledge according to a Christianized metaphysics within the Aristotelian geocentric system. Both the Protestant physician Robert Fludd and the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher published lavishly illustrated works on macrocosmmicrocosm relations, journeys through the spheres, the underground world, and planetary inﬂuence on terrestrial geography.86 The scale and graphic complexity of these works reﬂect the challenge of containing within a single

fig. 3.8. JESUIT COSMOGRAPHIC ICONOGRAPHY. The image is a contribution to the seventeenth-century debate over the competing world systems, yet gestures back to Santritter and de Sanctis’s 1488 frontispiece to Sacrobosco (see a later reproduction in fig. 3.3h) and Fine’s reworking of it (see fig. 3.12). Here, Astraea, adorned with stars, holds the armillary in her left hand while with her right she presents a pair of scales to the hundred-eyed Argus, who in turn holds a telescope into which light streams from a sun supported by cherubim among the circumsolar planets. The scales weigh the systems of Copernicus and Riccioli, tipping in favor of the latter, while a seated Ptolemy, his own system now abandoned at Astraea’s feet, proclaims, “I am extolled and simultaneously improved.” Below the tetragrammaton, the hand of God indicates “number, measure, weight,” while various cosmic phenomena, having newly emerged from the shadows of scientific obscurity by means of the telescope, are held aloft by angels: Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons and colorations, lunar craters, and a comet. The image typifies Jesuit cosmographic iconography, stretched between rigorous observation and obedience to theological convention. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens, 2 vols. (Bologna: Victorij Benatij, 1651), frontispiece. Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

terrestre et civile (1688) used the royal face to illustrate the sun in a cartouche of seasons at the very center of his elaborate map.85 Tommaso Campanella, whose City of the Sun exempliﬁes a utopian genre of cosmological texts, cast Louis’s birth horoscope.

geometria, proporzione e proporzionalità (Venice: Paganinus de Paganinis, 1494); Francesco Feliciano, Libro di arithmetica [e] geometria speculatiua [e] praticale . . . Scala grimaldelli (Venice: Frãcesco di Allesandro Bindoni and Mapheo Pasini, 1518); Cosimo Bartoli, Del modo di misvrare le distantie, le superficie, i corpi, le piante, le prouincie, le prospettiue, & tutte le altre cose terrene, che possono occorrere a gli huomini, secondo le uere regole d’Euclide, & de gli altri piu lodati scrittori (Venice: Francesco Franceschi Sanese, 1564); and Silvio Belli, Libro del misurar con la vista . . . (Venice: Domenico de’ Nicolini, 1565). The place of such works in fifteenth-century Italian culture is discussed in Stillman Drake and I. E. Drabkin, comps. and trans., Mechanics in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Selections from Tartaglia, Benedetti, Guido Ubaldo, & Galileo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Bartoli’s title especially indicates the scope of such practical mathematics and of the mechanical arts to which they were applied. Similar texts were published in England after Henry Billingsley’s translation of Euclid into English in 1570, for which John Dee’s Mathematicall Praeface was written, defining and classifying the mathematical arts. 85. Monique Pelletier, “Les globes de Marly, chefs-d’œuvre de Coronelli,” Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale 47 (1993): 46 –51. See also Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Thierry Mariage, The World of André le Nôtre, trans. Graham Larkin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 27– 46, which lists the relevant seventeenth-century French cosmographical literature; Denis E. Cosgrove, “Global Illumination and Enlightenment in the Geographies of Vincenzo Coronelli and Athanasius Kircher,” in Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 33 – 66; and idem, Apollo’s Eye, 166 –75. For Jaugeon’s map, see Shirley, Mapping of the World, 535 and 540 – 41 (no. 538), and Whitfield, Image of the World, 97. 86. The locus classicus of the Renaissance vision of the human microcosm, placed within the spheres and able through Platonic ascent to move in the spaces of the macrocosm, is Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Diginity of Man” (1486), which includes these lines: “We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the forms, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire. A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the laws written down by Us. In conformity with thy free judgement, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art confined by no bounds; and thou wilt fix limits of nature for thyself. I have placed thee at the center of the world, that from there thou mayest more conveniently look around and see whatsoever is in the world. Neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have We made thee. Thou, like a judge appointed for being honorable, art the molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow downward into the lower natures which are brutes. Thou canst again grow upward from thy soul’s reason into the higher natures which are divine.” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, on Being and the One, Heptaplus, trans. Charles Glen Wallis, Paul J. W.

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 3.9. MAPPED COSMOGRAPHY: JOHN SPEED’S MAP OF THE WORLD, 1626 [1632]. Speed’s map illustrates the fragmentary incorporation of cosmography into the double hemisphere world map. The space is dominated by the two terrestrial hemispheres, on which the imprint of cosmography remains in the marking of the great circles, the line of the ecliptic, and the large southern continent of Magellanica. Surrounding are familiar cosmographic elements but no text. Two oculi map the northern and southern celestial skies. In the upper left is the world machine of elements and ten spheres, its outer circle left blank. At top right a hand holds the armillary and there are images of sun and moon plus a diagram demon-

strating the earth’s roundness by means of observing a ship crossing the horizon. To the lower left and right are diagrams of solar and lunar eclipses using familiar intersecting pyramids of vision. Background space is occupied by personifications of the four elements. The cosmography has national and imperial references: Speed accompanies his image with portraits of English explorers. Size of the original: ca. 38.9 51.5 cm. John Speed, A New and Accvrat Map of the World, in A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World (London, 1632). Photograph courtesy of the BL (Maps C.7.c.6).

conceptual framework the volume and range of empirical material available on the two worlds. Although these works were not titled cosmographies, the speculative use of maps and diagrams in them derives directly from earlier Renaissance projects.87

sance is Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963). Other accounts are Bernard O’Kelly, ed., The Renaissance Image of Man and the World (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), and Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). The theme is also discussed in Jill Kraye, “Moral Philosophy,” and Richard H. Popkin, “Theories of Knowledge,” both in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 303 – 86, esp. 312 –14, and 668 – 84, esp. 676 –78, respectively. 87. On Fludd, see William H. Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1988); Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (London:

Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 3 –34, esp. 4 –5. Literature on the microcosm or the macrocosm is vast. An early summary is George Perrigo Conger’s Theories of Microcosms and Macrocosms in the History of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922). A classic account of microcosmic thought in the Renais-

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

A similar commitment to cosmography underpinned the pious handbook intended to demonstrate God’s providential plan, combining a simplified outline of conventional Ptolemaic cosmology with a geographical sketch of the earth. Giuseppe Rosaccio’s Teatro del cielo e della terra (1598) and Francesco Robacioli’s 1602 print with the same title, or William Hodson’s Divine Cosmographer (1640) and Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie (1652), demonstrate that such works existed in Catholic and Protestant regions.88 In the latter, the printed Bible, itself regarded as the principal vehicle for redemption, offered ample opportunities for cosmographic mapping.89 Similar illustration is found in emblems and moral devices. Attachment to divinity—in court, in the curiosity cabinet, or in the pious pamphlet—was a consistent if conservative feature of late Renaissance cosmography. William Hodson, writing in 1640, although rehearsing a tired cliché, ably summarizes its appeal: “As it is a most pleasant kind of Geographie, in this large mappe of the World, in the celestiall and terrestriall Globe, to contemplate the Creatour; so there is nothing that obtaineth more of God, than a thankfull agnition of the favours and benefits we daily receive from his bountifull hands.”90 a geography of cosmography and cosmographers This survey of European cosmography conceals complex geographical patterns: clusters of connected scholars and works differentiated by the various purposes that cosmography served and by distinctions between northern and Mediterranean countries and between Catholic and Protestant states. And as European overseas presence grew, so the science of globes itself became global. The Relaciones geográficas of Spanish cosmographers Juan López de Velasco and Andrés García de Céspedes are detailed descriptions and inventories of Spanish America; Jesuit missionaries in both Asia and America collected astronomical and geographical information for annual reports to Rome and produced cosmographies locally, such as Matteo Ricci’s world map (1602).91 One geographical distinction might be made between a more open and commercial cosmography in northern Europe, especially in Germany and Flanders, and a more secretive and courtly cosmography in the south, especially in Iberia and peninsular Italy. Another was between an urban-mercantile cosmography along the axis from Amsterdam through southern German cities to Venice, and a territorial-state cosmography within the Atlantic kingdoms from England to Spain. Commercially successful and widely translated handbooks by Regiomontanus, Apian, and Gemma Frisius; illustrated cosmographies and atlases by Schedel, Münster, Mercator, and Ortelius; and navigation collections such as de Bry’s came from

publisher-humanists in independent merchant cities such as Nuremberg, Venice, and Antwerp. In these cities cosmographic materials circulated freely through merchant contacts and in independent universities, especially after the Lutheran reform, and printers saw profits in maps, educational handbooks, illustrated encyclopedias, and voyage narratives. These publications spread across the continent. For example, the recommended texts in the Iberian universities of Valencia, Salamanca, Alcalá, and Coimbra, where cosmography was studied alongside judicial astrology and perspective, were those of Apian and Gemma, together with those of Sacrobosco and Euclid and Regiomontanus’s Epitome of Ptolemy.92 Court cosmographers operated in a less commercial world. Works produced by Sebastiano Leandro, Egnazio Danti, Giacomo Gastaldi, and Oronce Fine or by Galileo Galilei and Thames and Hudson, 1979); and Frances Amelia Yates, Theatre of the World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). On Kircher, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); idem, “The Economy of Scientific Exchange in Early Modern Italy,” in Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Court, 1500 –1750, ed. Bruce T. Moran (London: Boydell, 1991), 5 –24; Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Search for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979); and Cosgrove, “Global Illumination.” As Kemp points out, “optics, mystery and divine awe naturally co-existed as major strands of mediaeval, Renaissance and baroque thought in a manner which is difficult to understand from a modern perspective” (Science of Art, 191). 88. Giuseppe Rosaccio, Le sei età del mondo di Gioseppe Rosaccio con Brevità Descrittione (Venice, 1595), and idem, Fabrica universale dell’huomo . . . (1627). Among Rosaccio’s more than forty published works were a pilgrim’s guide, Viaggio da Venetia a Costantinopoli per mare, e per terra (Venice: Giacomo Franco, 1598), and a world map, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo (1597), reprinted in 1647 and decorated with ethnographic illustrations taken from Theodor de Bry (Shirley, Mapping of the World, 222 –24 [no. 205]). On Rosaccio, see Giuliano Lucchetta, “Viaggiatori, geografi e racconti di viaggio dell’età barocca,” in Storia della cultura Veneta, 6 vols. (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1976 – 86), vol. 4, pt. 2, 201–50, esp. 201–2. Francesco Robacioli’s Teatro del cielo e della terra is discussed in Shirley, Mapping of the World, 251 (no. 236). See also Robert J. Mayhew, Enlightment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650 –1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 49 – 65. 89. Catherine Delano-Smith and Elizabeth Morley Ingram, Maps in Bibles, 1500 –1600: An Illustrated Catalogue (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991). 90. William Hodson, The Divine Cosmographer; or, A Brief Survey of the Whole World, Delineated in a Tractate on the VIII Psalme by W. H. Sometime of S. Peters Colledge in Cambridge (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1640), 149. 91. Lamb, Cosmographers and Pilots; “Cosmographers in 16th Century Spain and America,” ; Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984); and Cosgrove, “Global Illumination.” 92. Ursula Lamb, “The Spanish Cosmographic Juntas of the Sixteenth Century,” Terrae Incognitae 6 (1974): 51– 64; reprinted in Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire, by Ursula Lamb, item V (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995).

Johannes Kepler represented one aspect of professional lives subject principally to the demands of patrons for prognostication, technical, or political services. The group gathered around Waldseemüller at St. Die was both commercial and courtly.93 Spanish and Portuguese cosmographers operated in a different context. From the late fifteenth century, most were employed in state-regulated navigation and geopolitical matters, in Spain at the Casa de la Contratación, the Consejo Real y Supremo de las Indias, and Philip II’s Academia de Matemáticas. They educated and examined pilots, tested and approved instruments, researched the longitude problem, maintained the padrón real, and examined the relaciones of sailors and administrators. Much of the resulting information was secret, although security was regularly breached, and Iberian cosmographies were produced, for example, Pacheco Pereira’s “Esmeraldo de situ orbis” (1505 – 8), Pedro de Medina’s Libro de cosmographia (1519), and Alonso de Santa Cruz’s “Historia universal” (1536) and “Isolario general.”94 Most such works remained unpublished, failing to nourish the mainstream of European cosmography.95 Juan Manual Navara’s “Art del Tiempo,” a manuscript breviary of 1611 into which Antonino Saliba’s remarkable Nvova figvra di tvtte le cose (plate 1) is bound, is a late example.96 In France and England, university cosmography employed standard scholastic texts and summaries from Germany. Cosmographers played similar roles to their peers in Italy or the Habsburg Empire, perhaps more entrepreneurial with individuals such as Dee or Le Testu, who were producing instruments and educating navigators commercially while promoting navigation at court as essential to their respective countries’ imperial ambitions. The Vatican might be regarded as a special case. Both the Papacy’s proclaimed spiritual sovereignty over the globe and the long-recognized need for calendar reform generated a strong interest in cosmography. Printed astronomical tables, the refinement of meridian lines and solar gnomons, and more accurate observations and mathematics underpinned calendar reform.97 Cosmography was significant in the Vatican throughout the Renaissance: Regiomontanus spent his final years in Rome and Egnazio Danti is only the best known of the cosmographers gathered by Gregory XIII for the 1582 reform, while the Jesuit College was a key center of cosmographic scholarship from its foundation into the late seventeenth century. These geographical groupings should not obscure the high degree of mobility among cosmographers. At the extremes, Waldseemüller remained within Alsace, while Thevet visited Brazil. Most traveled fairly extensively within Europe, between universities (especially Padua, Paris, Leiden, and Bologna) and courts.

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

The Cosmographic Work: Map, Text, and Illustration The shifting balance between mathematical and descriptive cosmography was reflected in unstable relations between globe, map, text, and graphic illustration both within and between works. This is further complicated by cosmography’s metaphysical and emblematic connections, especially in the seventeenth century. From the first attempts at Klosterneuberg to map Ptolemy’s coordinates, the world or universal map based on projection and coordinates was given the title cosmography. Münster’s 1532 Typvs cosmographicvs vniversalis is an example. Ptolemaic in conception, these maps commonly show the influence of earlier mappaemundi in their descriptive text panels and pictures. Thus, Waldseemüller’s Tabvla terre nove (1513) contains written description of the Columbian discovery in a panel set across the southern Caribbean. In its decorative border, Apian’s cordiform Tipvs orbis vniversalis (1520) illustrates the armillary and the graticule from whose combined geometries it was derived.98 Discovery of the Pacific Ocean allowed space on world maps for longer texts of descriptive cosmography. Mercator’s revolutionary Nova et avcta orbis terrae descriptio ad vsvm nauigantium emendatè accommodata (1569) includes not only technical text panels explaining map projection and use, but also cartouches recording the legend of Prester John and describing the Ganges River. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wall maps commonly incorporate text explanations of cosmography and cosmographic description either into the empty spaces of oceans and continental interiors or beyond the borders of the map proper.99 While Sacrobosco’s Sphaera supplied a model, cosmographic handbooks never achieved a standardized form. Waldseemüller’s mathematical summary in Cosmographiae introdvctio (1507) provides the basics for understanding his map and globe in nine chapters, with 93. Gallois, Géographes allemands, 38 – 69. 94. Medina, Navigator’s Universe. 95. Ursula Lamb, “Cosmographers of Seville: Nautical Science and Social Experience,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 vols., ed. Fredi Chiappelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 2:675 – 86, esp. 682 – 83; reprinted in Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire, by Ursula Lamb, item VI (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995). 96. Another example of Saliba’s map is in Shirley, Mapping of the World, 168 – 69 (no. 146). 97. J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 98. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 51–53 (no. 45). 99. See, for example, the world maps by Willem Jansz. Blaeu (1606 – 7),William Grent (1625), John Speed (1626), Jean Boisseau (1636), and Jodocus Hondius (1640 and 1647) in Shirley, Mapping of the World, 273 –76 (no. 258), 336 –37 (no. 313), 340 – 41 (no. 317), 363 – 64 (no. 340), 377–79 (no. 354), and 391–92 (no. 370), respectively.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

Vespucci’s narrative appended. These cover (1) the elements of geometry; (2) the meaning of sphere, axis, poles, etc.; (3) the circles of the heavens; (4) the theory of the sphere according to the system of degrees; (5) the five celestial zones in heavens and earth; (6) parallels; (7) climates; (8) winds; and (9) the divisions of the earth and distances between places. There are five woodcut diagrams of the poles, great circles, and zodiacal ecliptic; the climatic zones; the parallels according to Ptolemy; and a wind calendar with parallels and meridian. The quadrant is illustrated in the appendix. There are also tables of winds and Ptolemaic tabulae, but no diagram of the spheres or discussion of planetary movements, eclipses, judicial astrology, the calendar, or meteorological phenomena. Apian’s Cosmographicus liber of 1524 (Cosmographia in Gemma’s edition of 1529) devotes greater space to these technical subjects and correspondingly less to descriptive cosmography. Münster and Thevet give mathematical cosmography scant attention, the latter a mere four pages.100 Their focus is descriptive cosmography, using a limited set of images to convey mathematical principles. Pacheco Pereira’s “Esmeraldo” and Santa Cruz’s “Islario general,” coast and island descriptions respectively, open with brief, illustrated discourses on mathematical cosmography. Gregor Reisch and Oronce Fine are more balanced between celestial and terrestrial space and between mathematical and descriptive cosmography. Collections of navigation reports by Ramusio, the Hakluyts, or de Bry ignore mathematical cosmography.101 The theoretically conservative, philosophico-theological cosmography manuals, such as Cuningham’s Cosmographical Glasse (1559) or Simon Girault’s Globe dv monde (1519), treat mathematical cosmography very superficially. While illustration was not a prerequisite (many incunable editions of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera lack the diagrams found in manuscripts), the spheres, the armillary, and the climates and zones were all more readily understood by means of simple compass and rule drawings. By the early sixteenth century, mathematical cosmography was invariably illustrated, at least by simple woodcuts, reproducing the repertoire of images standardized in manuscript sources. Modern works were commonly bound with classics, generating new images. Thus Gerard of Cremona’s Theory of the Planets and Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum, illustrating relations between the planets’ epicentric paths and orbs, appear regularly with Sacrobosco’s Sphaera. The 1472 printing, for example, illustrates a world machine of twelve circles surrounding an inked central earth and a hemispheric illustration of zones and climates. Erhard Ratdolt’s graphically more sophisticated 1482 edition, with its frontispiece image of the armillary sphere, was an influential model (fig. 3.3).102 Other printings of medieval texts, including Neoplatonist works such as Proclus’s Sphaera (ca. 1500) and

Macrobius’s Commentary (1483), often borrowed from Sacrobosco their simple line diagrams of spheres, climates, and zones. D’Ailly’s Imago mundi (Louvain, ca. 1477) included seven full-page images of the celestial spheres, principal circles, celestial compass points, sub lunar elements, terrestrial zones and climates, and oikoumene. The 1500 Florence edition of Leonardo Dati’s popular Italian verse cosmography included solar and lunar eclipses, constellations, winds, and the terrestrial divisions.103 Astrological treatises such as Johannes Angelus’s Astrolabium (1488) borrowed these illustrations, adding ephemerides and diagrams of the zodiacal houses (ﬁg. 3.10). If Waldseemüller’s woodcuts were strictly limited, Apian’s handbook was much more richly illustrated, including vovelles and Ptolemy’s four projections; one vovelle illustrates his “cosmographic glass” (ﬁg. 3.11). Apian’s images are reproduced in later works.104 Midsixteenth-century manuals used sophisticated armillary diagrams to illustrate cosmography’s nomenclature. Gemma’s De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (1530, enlarged 1548) is an early example.105 Oronce

100. “He [Thevet] would later return to it [mathematical cosmography] only surreptitiously, in pages whose incoherence has been emphasized” (Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, 6). On the relative demand for mathematical and descriptive cosmography in England, see Cormack, Charting an Empire, 112 –18. 101. Collections of narratives of discovery such as these cannot properly be called cosmographies, but the information they contained fell within its scope and was offered as evidence of divine providence, as the younger Richard Hakluyt makes clear in the dedication to his The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: George Bishop and Ralph Newberrie, 1589). 102. For example, the editions of Sphaera published in Venice by G. Anima Mia, Tridinensis, in January 1491, or in Leipzig by W. Stöckel in 1499. 103. Leonardo Dati, La Sfera (Florence: Lorenzo Morgiani and Johannes Petri, for Piero Pacini, ca. 1495 –1500). The twenty-three-page text has an armillary sphera mundi based on printings of Sacrobosco as frontispiece, with sixteen simple line drawings. The text is discussed by Anthony Grafton in New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 63 – 69. 104. For example, Antonio Campi, in Tvtto il cremonese, 1583, reproduces Apian’s illustrations of the cosmos and of the earth from a polar projection, with cosmographers using the cross staff to take a sighting on the moon and stars in the eighth sphere. These are reproduced against a chorographic map of the province of Cremona to illustrate Apian’s hierarchy of cosmography, geography, and chorography. The arms of Philip II of Spain implicitly dedicate the cosmic order to the sovereign. The “cosmographic glass” illustrated by Apian’s vovelle is a cheap, woodcut version of the lavish, hand-colored disks of up to six layers in Apian’s Astronomicum Caesareum, printed at his private press at Ingolstadt in 1540 for Charles V and Ferdinand of Spain. Ronald Brashear and Daniel Lewis, Star Struck: One Thousand Years of the Art and Science of Astronomy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 2001), 80 – 87. 105. Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 35.

fig. 3.10. THE ZODIACAL HOUSES. Astrology was closely linked to cosmography through its belief in the movement of influences between the spheres. Thus cosmographic texts commonly illustrated the principal diagram for casting nativities and horoscopes. A simple square is divided geometrically into twelve “houses,” with the twelve zodiacal signs in four groups of three on its sides. Each “house” is then allocated to planetary positions at the relevant moment of the horoscope. Erhard Ratdolt’s explanatory diagram of the generalized heavens shows the majesty of astrology. Claudius Ptolemy, Quadripartitum: Centiloquium cum commento Hali (Venice: Erhard Ratdolt, 1484). Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke.

Fine’s Typvs vniversi orbis in Protomathesis (1532) combines the armillary and planetary spheres in a single image (fig. 3.12). Thevet’s La cosmographie vniverselle (1575) substitutes a wonderfully complex world machine for the absence of written mathematical cosmography (fig. 3.13). William Cuningham’s woodcut Cœlifer Atlas supports such a world machine on his shoulders (fig. 3.14).106 Mercator’s Atlas sive Cosmographiæ (1595), however, contains no image of the universal machine, a contested image in an era of competing world systems. The world machine was readily allied to the idea of cosmic vitality, of a physical creation imbued with spiritual forces passing between spheres, planets, elements, and humans. Speculative aspects of metaphysics—astrological influence, various forms of magic, alchemy, and Neoplatonic contemplation— drift across cosmography. Except in such specialized texts as Liber de intellectu (1510), by Carolus Bovillus (Charles de Bouelles), Francesco di Giorgio’s De harmonia mundi totius (1525), or Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1531), the metaphysical significance of cosmographic images is

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 3.11. PETER APIAN’S “COSMOGRAPHICAL GLASS.” Apian’s Cosmographia was in two parts; the first, devoted to mathematical cosmography, was heavily illustrated with instructional maps and diagrams, allowing the reader to undertake practical cosmographic exercises. Unique among these were Apian’s volvelles, whose circles and compass markers could be revolved in different directions, demonstrating the positions and movements of the planetary bodies. The most elaborate of these is Apian’s speculo cosmographico (cosmographic glass) divided into twenty-four segments to permit a range of astrological and horological calculations: “For in this mirror we can contemplate the whole world, that it, the likeness, image, and picture of the earth” (quotation on fol. 29). Size of the original: 25 17 cm. Peter Apian, Cosmographia (Antwerp: Gregorio Bontio, 1545), fol. 28. Photograph courtesy of MnU.

rarely explicit.107 Certainly, cosmographers such as Dee, Postel, Fludd, and Kircher embraced esoteric themes, but others, such as Robert Recorde in his Castle of Knowledge (1556), opposed such speculation. Metaphysicians placed speciﬁc emphasis on images, often considering them as active agents through which celestial powers

106. See the discussion in Heninger, Cosmographical Glass, 177–79. 107. Bovillus’s Liber de intellectu is a study of both angelic and human reason, opening with a woodcut image of divine light proceeding from the Father to the celestial realms of angels and the elemental world of man, and thence to the spheres of matter, minerals, life, and sense. On Agrippa, see Thorndike, History of Magic, 5:127–38.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

Platonic lambda (l) and the Christian Trinity.110 It shared with the number four, which enumerated the elements of the material world, significance as a limiting figure of physical extension. These numbers and the phenomena to which they were attached could be infinitely elaborated and illustrated by progressively complex arrangements of lines, circles, squares, and triangles.111 Geometrical figures could thus represent invariable form and correspondence patterned into the accidental world of the senses. By manipulating and elaborating forms, letters, words, and numbers, further connections, oppositions, conjunctions, and correspondences could be revealed and explored through images, generating complex exegeses of creation’s text. Cosmography’s illustrations could thus connect the accidental world of the senses with the intellectual perfection of the cosmos. Practically, Galenic medicine related human health to astrological and meteorological events, making the armillary sphere the symbol of physicians and generating health maps of relations between macrocosm and microcosm. Helkiah Crooke’s 1631 title page for Mikrokosmografia: A Description of the Body of Man, incorporating anatomical figures of man and woman with a diagram of the elements and an image of the anatomy theater, follows a graphic tradition dating back to Reisch.112

fig. 3.12. ORONCE FINE, TYPVS VNIVERSI ORBIS. Fine encloses elemental and celestial spheres (as far as the fixed stars only) within the armillary. Fine drew upon Santritter and de Sanctis’s 1488 frontispiece to Sacrobosco (a later reproduction is fig. 3.3h), although the author himself, the modern “Orontivs,” replaces the ancient Ptolemy as Urania’s companion, now set in a landscape with a scatter of cosmographic instruments. Oronce Fine, Orontij Finei Delphinatis, . . . De mundi sphaera, sive Cosmographia (Paris, 1542), before fol. 1. Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

might be “caught, and placated or used,” so that graphic images were taken very seriously in Renaissance culture even where occult science was not directly involved.108 Illustrations of the microcosms of mundus, annus, and homo (space, time, and human existence) were familiar from medieval writers such as Isidore of Seville, in whose Platonically inspired works number, form, and idea were regarded as synonymous and interchangeable.109 The ﬁgure of three, for example, drew signiﬁcance from both the

108. Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance, 46. See also Ingegno, “New Philosophy of Nature,” 240 ff., and Stephen M. Buhler, “Marsilio Ficino’s De stella magorum and Renaissance Views of the Magi,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 348 –71. 109. See, for example, Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 301–2 and 337 (ﬁg. 18.39). 110. Heninger, Cosmographical Glass, 97 ff. Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius, In Somnium Scipionis expositio (Venice: P. Pincius, 1500), contains illustrations of the Platonic lambda, the climatic zones of earth, and a crude mappamundi showing the habitable and inhabitable, known and unknown parts of earth. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae (Augsburg: Günther Zainer, 1472; Strasburg: Johana Mentelin, 1473); both editions have a limited number of woodcut illustrations of the Pythagorean tetrad. Isidore’s shorter De responsione mundi et astrorum ordinatione (Augsburg: Günther Zainer, 1472) contains seven elaborate circular illustrations of elemental correspondences within its thirty-three pages of text. 111. John Dee, in Mathematicall Praeface, connects the Neoplatonic idea of ascent through the cosmos directly to the study of number: “By Numbers propertie therefore, of vs, by all possible meanes, (to the perfection of the Science) learned, we may both winde and draw ourselues into the inward and deepe search and vew, of all creatures distinct vertues, natures, properties, and Formes: And also, farder, arise, clime, ascend, and mount vp (with Speculative winges) in spirit, to behold in the Glas of Creation, the Forme of Formes, the Exemplar Number of all thinges Numerable: both visible and inuisible, mortall and immortall, Corporall and Spirituall” (j and ver.). 112. The title page engraving by Martin Droeshout combines cosmography’s mapping conventions and illustrations by Vesalius. The connections between the Vitruvian design of the anatomy theater, Copernican remapping of the macrocosm, and the Vesalian microcosmic body are discussed in a commentary on Vesalius’s well-known frontispiece to De humani corporis fabrica . . . (1543) in Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 66 –78, with a summary of relevant literature.

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 3.13. ANDRÉ THEVET, L’VNIVERS. Perhaps the most elaborate of all armillary diagrams, Thevet’s seeks to illustrate diurnal and seasonal solar movement by means of shading, anticipating the light and shadow that became the focus of interest among cosmographers in the succeeding years. As a detailed illustration of the unity of celestial and terrestrial spheres, Thevet’s image is unequaled in the sixteenth century,

but by the date of its appearance cosmography was strained from the volume of new information it sought to integrate and the emerging distinction of astronomical from geographical mapping. André Thevet, La cosmographie vniverselle, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Guillaume Chandiere, 1575), 1:2a. Photograph courtesy of MnU.

All such cosmic relationships were open to esoteric and alchemic interpretation, which became common in the later sixteenth century. Cuningham’s Cœlifer Atlas, illustrating both worlds, has strong alchemical overtones that are also present in his title page, although the text is not

explicitly alchemical, unlike that of Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens (1618) or Thomas Vaughan’s Lumen de lumine (1651), which similarly contain images of the world system. Maier uses the world system to illustrate the alchemical marriage. Robert Fludd’s great study of

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

fig. 3.14. WILLIAM CUNINGHAM, CŒLIFER ATLAS, 1559. Cuningham’s cosmographic image, which he refers to as “the Type of the world” (fol. 51), draws upon Fine for its basic structure but adds crystalline sphere and primum mobile to the celestial spheres and six zodiacal signs of the ecliptic. The cosmos is supported by the figure of Atlas (whose appearance owes a debt to illustrations of the alchemical king), kneeling in a verdant landscape of earth and water, illuminated by sun and moon, amid symbols of renewal such as the tree trunk sprouting new growth, and under a firmament of air and stars. The idea of Atlas supporting the world machine originated in Gregor Reisch’s illustration of 1503 in his Margarita philosophica. The text lines are from a cosmographic passage in Virgil’s Aeneid. William Cuningham, The Cosmographical Glasse, Conteinyng the Pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie or Nauigation (London: Ioan Daij, 1559), fol. 50. Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

macrocosm and microcosm, Utriusque cosmi maioris (1617), elides conventional medical and alchemical images. Book 2 of volume 1 focuses on mathematics, illustrating a planisphere designed to predict celestial movements. Athanasius Kircher was even more proliﬁc than Fludd in examining and illustrating both exoteric and esoteric aspects of cosmic unity.113 Kircher’s images generate seemingly inﬁnite mathematical, proportional, and linguistic homologies across and beyond the accidental surfaces of material creation. For both scholars, pictorial images became graphic laboratories in which Neopla-

fig. 3.15. THE HIEROGLYPHIC MONAD. Based on an amalgam of all the planetary and zodiacal signs and the principle geometrical figures, this image was intended as the ultimate emblematic map of the cosmos. Kircher incorporates the circles of the sphaera mundi over the cross of the four elements, adding various hieroglyphics that reflect his belief in the Hermetic-Mosaic-Egyptian sources of wisdom. John Dee wrote a cosmological treatise on the image in 1564. Athanasius Kircher, Athanasii Kircheri e Soc. Iesv, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, 3 vols. (Rome: Vitalis Mascardi, 1652–54), 2:ii, 29. Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke.

tonic, hermetic, and cabalistic symbols generate fresh insights into creation (ﬁg. 3.15).

113. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atqve technica historia, in duo volumina secundum cosmi differentiam diuisa (Oppenheim: Johann Theodor de Bry,

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

Cosmographic Images the world machine The sixteenth-century world machine combines armillary and Aristotelian spheres. The former could be physically modeled, and from the 1520s appears frequently in a trio with terrestrial and celestial globes. After about 1440, terrestrial globes began to be manufactured following Ptolemy’s instructions. Behaim’s Nuremberg “earth apple” is a terrestrial sphere with no specific reference to the celestial realm. But globe making was one of the cosmographer’s tasks, especially in Germany and Flanders. Waldseemüller, Johannes Schöner, Gemma Frisius, and Gerardus Mercator all made celestial and terrestrial globes, which their cosmographic texts accompanied. But the Aristotelian spheres could not easily be modeled, and there is no European parallel to Hindu cosmological globes.114 On the other hand, the spheres’ conceptual nature invited greater variation in representation than the mathematical armillary. While the basic diagram remains relatively consistent from medieval precedents, variations reflect debates within natural philosophy as well as diverse graphic conventions. Elemental, celestial, and super-celestial regions were each internally subdivided. The most consistent and stable (at least until the Copernican debate accelerated in the 1580s) was the celestial region of seven planetary spheres: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Their paths were represented as circular (very occasionally as horizontal) bands of equal width, numbered or marked by their respective astrological symbol, metal, or classical deity. Ratdolt’s late fifteenth-century woodcuts of planetary gods directing their chariots around their spheres were widely copied. Actual planetary distances from earth were known from Ptolemy’s Planetary Hypotheses and studied much by astronomers. With the occasional exception, such as Bartolomeu Velho’s spectacular rendering, cosmographers rarely illustrated these. Aristotle’s principle of plenitude denied any space between the ethereal orbs within which the planets rotated. Astronomical problems and the philosophical hypotheses necessary to keep the moving planets within their orbs (the subject of Peuerbach’s Theoricae novae planetarum) are ignored in cosmographic diagrams. Copernicus’s new image of the Sacroboscan diagram, and above all Kepler’s illustration in Mysterium cosmographicum (1597), which demonstrated that no orb is in contact with another and that there are immense distances between the diverse systems, were significant in challenging the very existence of crystalline spheres.115 The width of the eighth sphere of fixed stars, identified as the biblical firmament by the majority tradition from Aquinas and Sacrobosco to Riccioli, also presented prob-

lems.116 Saturn’s sphere bounded its inner edge, while its outer marked the limit of sensible space. This circle was generally indicated by star symbols, evenly spaced or randomly scattered around the band, occasionally with some attempt to indicate the constellations, or was divided in twelve sections marked by zodiac signs. The Copernican hypothesis and the confirmation by telescope of stellar distances would destroy this orb, as Thomas Digges’s 1576 diagram anticipated (fig. 3.16). Varying opinions on the existence and movement of the heavens beyond the fixed stars are reflected in differences between cosmic diagrams. Was the firmament bounded on its outer edge by further spheres needed to account for observed motions in the firmament, including daily motion from east to west and the precession of the equinoxes? Following Sacrobosco and Albert Magnus, Apian added two further material spheres to account for such movement. A crystalline sphere enclosing the fixed stars is represented by Gregor Reisch as the “waters above the heavens” mentioned in Genesis. The tenth sphere is primum mobile, primary cause of all rotation in the world machine. Oronce Fine’s armillary diagram, building on Agostino Ricci’s arguments in De motu octavae sphaera (1521), shows only the eight visible spheres and the empyreum beyond (see fig. 3.12), a minority opinion at this time, but appeared with greater frequency among empirically sensitive cosmographers later in the century. Mercator denied the existence of a primum mobile, claiming that God created the world machine ex nihilo, although neither his world map of 1569 nor his son’s of 1587 (which does illustrate the armillary sphere) illustrates the world machine.117 Whether the material 1617). Further volumes appeared in 1619, 1620, 1621, and 1624. On Fludd and Kircher, see note 87. 114. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “Cosmographical Mapping,” in HC 2.1:332 – 87, esp. 352 –58 on South Asian cosmological globes. The metaphysical implications of the difference between solid and plane figures in representing the cosmos was a matter of considerable concern to Kepler and underlay his work on the Platonic solids. Simon Girault’s images of a solid sphere cut open to reveal the concentric spheres represent a rare attempt to picture a cosmographic globe. 115. Johannes Kepler, Mysterium cosmographicum, 2d ed. (Frankfurt: Erasmi Kempferi, 1621), widely reproduced. See the discussion by Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone, 1993), 185 –202, and Westman, “Nature, Art and Psyche,” 203. On the developing interest in the Platonic solids, especially in Nuremberg, see Kemp, Science of Art, 62 – 63, esp. 62: “The Nuremberg perspectivists specialised in the portrayal of geometrical bodies, particularly the Platonic solids and their derivatives.” According to the theory, earth was represented by the cube (hexahedron), water by the icosahedron, air by the octahedron, fire by the pyramid (tetrahedron), and the cosmos by the dodecahedron. 116. Hetherington, Encyclopedia, 79 – 81. Grant, Planets, 696 –97, lists six questions “on the orbs and planets and their relations” that dominated scholastic discussion of this matter. 117. Figures 10.12 and 10.6. See also Shirley, Mapping of the World, 137 and 139 – 42 (no. 119) and 178 –79 (no. 157).

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

such as the Regiment of the Leagues, a cosmographichorological wheel divided into twelve sectors for the months, with a thirteenth for the “golden numbers” of individual years (fig. 3.17).120 Velho’s five-part “world machine” consists of a single diagram of the two earthly hemispheres, with pyramids reaching to the sphere of Mercury (the nearest planet) and then, with a change of scale, to Venus and the sun, and then to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the fixed stars. For the first four planetary

fig. 3.16. A PERFIT DESCRIPTION OF THE CÆLESTIALL ORBES: THE INFINITE COPERNICAN COSMOS. Thomas Digges paraphrased Copernicus’s first book in an appendix to his father Leonard’s perpetual almanac, illustrating his belief with a heliocentric map that breaks the sphere of the fixed stars. The implication for the empyrean is clearly stated in Digges’s text. His fellow Englishman William Gilbert’s partial acceptance of heliocentricity, based on studies of magnetism extended to the planetary bodies themselves, led Gilbert, also, to the idea of an infinitely extended cosmos of stars, as shown in the Digges’s diagram, which also appeared in a diagram in Gilbert’s posthumously published De mundo sublunari of 1651. Size of the original: ca. 22 17 cm. Leonard Digges, A Prognostication of Right Good Effect . . . (London, 1576). Photograph courtesy of the BL (718.g.52, fol. 43).

cosmos consisted of eight or ten spheres, it was almost invariably contained at its outer edge by a line marking it off from the purely intelligible empyrean realm. The empyreum itself was left as inﬁnite space by Apian and Gemma. But metaphysical cosmography elaborated it according to theological doctrine. The nine angelic choirs reaching to the divine Mens and the Trinity could be mapped onto this super-celestial space, as in the very different illustrations from Schedel and Fludd.118 Some of the most dramatic illustrations of the world machine are found in Portuguese presentational atlases by André and Diogo Homem (1559) and Bartolomeu Velho (1568) (plate 2).119 Following the structure already apparent in the Catalan atlas, these incorporated elaborate ephemerides and calendars and calculating instruments

118. Hartmann Schedel’s narrative of creation according to the Genesis account is illustrated in Liber chronicarum of 1493 by means of a series of woodcuts that build, circle by circle and under God’s creative hand, the Aristotelian cosmos. The complete cosmos places four elemental and seven celestial spheres, the fixed stars or zodiac, crystalline sphere, and primum mobile eccentrically within a sphere of the Empyrean, showing God enthroned amid the elect and the nine choirs of angels. The English physician Robert Fludd produced a series of mappings of the world machine to illustrate his metaphysical cosmography, Utriusque cosmi maioris. In one example (vol. 2, p. 219) he reproduces the circles as a great spiral of creation, originating in God and descending through the Mens (primum mobile) and nine choirs of angels to the fixed stars, planets, and elemental realm. The twenty-two circles are both numbered and allocated Hebrew letter-numbers, while winged figures represent the archetypes of this Platonic cosmos. Both diagrams are illustrated in Heninger, Cosmographical Glass, 20 and 164. 119. Cortesaõ and Teixeira da Mota, Portugaliae monumenta cartographica, vol. 2, pl. 207 (map), and 103 –5 (biography). Bartolomeu Velho, “Cosmographia” (1568), BNF. Velho describes his work as “Principles of true cosmography and universal geography of all the lands that are discovered: situated in proportion to the globe: with all their distances and heights according to the navigators: And with the figures of the proportions of all the parallels both terrestrial and celestial: And many instruments required for navigation with their demonstrations and declarations.” The description of the world machine covers folios 19v–21v. Velho’s illustrations of the planetary gods drawn across the sky in their chariots owe their origin to Ratdolt’s images of planetary gods and zodiacal signs in early printings of Albert Magnus. Ratdolt’s images were used to illustrate a number of cosmographic and astrological texts in the incunable period and beyond, for example, Abu¯ Mashar, Introductorium in astronomiam, trans. Hermannus Dalmata (Augsburg: Erhard Ratdolt, 1489), and Johannes Angelus, Astrolabium (Augsburg: Erhard Ratdolt, 1488). The same images were used by Aldus Manutius in Venice to illustrate his printing of Julius Firmicus Maternus, De nativitatibus (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499). These images of charioted gods reflected and promoted the broad acceptance of pagan figures within Christian calendar iconography that had been growing since the thirteenth century. The classic study is Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (1953; reprinted Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), esp. 37– 83 on “the physical tradition.” Only four works by Velho survive. 120. Edson, in “World Maps and Easter Tables,” discusses the longstanding relationships between the computing of Easter tables and that of tetradic diagrams and world maps. Such computation was part of the cosmographer’s work. Golden numbers were calculated and printed for the first time by Regiomontanus in his Calendarium and Ephemerides, published annually for the years between 1475 and 1506. The principle of the golden number is explained by Zinner in Regiomontanus, 350 – 51. See also Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997), 55 –57.

fig. 3.17. DIOGO HOMEM’S “PERPETUAL NOVILUNAR TABLE,” 1559. Portuguese atlases contained numerous cosmographic illustrations, some of them unique. In addition to standard diagrams of the armillary, the spheres (with crystalline sphere, empyreum, and zodiacal bands), and the climatic zones with wind heads, Diogo’s world atlases contain a “perpetual novilunar table.” Surrounded by nineteen concen-

tric circles giving days, hours, and minutes for every golden number, these tables allow exact calculation of lunar phase hours of moonlight and of the moon’s position within the ecliptic for each day of the year. Size of the original: ca. 57.5 42.2 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Res. Ge DD 2003, fol. 8).

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

fig. 3.18. DETAIL FROM GUILLAUME POSTEL’S POLO APTATA NOVA CHARTA UNIVERSI, 1578 (1621 EDITION). Postel’s polar projection world map is flanked by two cartouches illustrating the machine of the world: on the left (shown here) an armillary with fragments of horological devices, cogwheels, tetrahedrons, and a dodecahedron; on the right a terrestrial globe and other solids (the full map is reproduced as fig. 47.6). The polyhedrons suggest reference to the five platonic solids illustrated in Johannes Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum in an attempt to maintain harmonia mundi in a heliocentric cosmos by relating them to the measured planetary orbits of Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars, and Jupiter. The five regular solids had long been associated by Neoplatonists with the four elements: the cube/hexahedron with earth; the icosahedron with water; the octahedron with air; the pyramid/tetrahedron with fire; and the dodecahedron with the cosmos as a whole. In early sixteenth-century Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer, following the Italian Neoplatonic cosmologist Luca Pacioli, had illustrated the solids, and the theme attracted perspective books such as Jean Cousin’s Livre de perspective of 1560 (almost certainly Postel’s source), Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva: Corporum regularium of 1568, and Daniele Barbaro’s Libro di prospettiva (1569). Size of the entire original: 97 122 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Service Historique de la Défense, Département Marine, Vincennes (Recueil 1, map no. 10).

bodies, relative size and distance are indicated by scaled dimensions and distances on the chart. More distant planets are shown in the form of their classical gods according to a representational convention derived from Ratdolt’s astrological illustrations. Other folios illustrate the different proportions of the parallels for each moving planet and distances from the earth to the concave and convex edges of each celestial orb. Velho’s text is restricted to a brief survey of mathematical cosmography. Kepler’s unique image of the Platonic solids (1597) as the measure of distance between the planetary orbs is a very different but equally dramatic rendering of cosmic distances. Conceptualizing the cosmos in terms of complex polyhedrons is perhaps hinted at in the unique cosmographic cartouches that support terrestrial and celestial globes on the flanks of Guillaume Postel’s world map of 1578 (1621) (fig. 3.18).121 Representations of elemental space also varied. At its simplest, in Reisch for example, earth is a solid circle surrounded by a band of watery lines, aerial billows of cloud, and fiery tongues of flame. The elements could be elaborated through color or symbol or reduced to schematic reference. Earth and water were commonly merged within a single central circle of the world machine, implying their nonsymmetrical distribution on the sphere. Apian fills the sphere with an oblique landscape view, while others map the continents or name the elements within the sphere. World maps followed the same representational conventions, often framing the global surface with air and fire by line, color, or such icons as the salamander or phoenix for fire, birds for air, and fish for water. If maps of the global surface never entirely shook off cosmological references, images of subterranean, aerial, and fiery regions also remained dominated by the idea of a world machine. Aristotle’s meteorology concerned the zones of air and fire between the earth’s surface and the lunar sphere, including cloud types, all forms of precipitation, winds, climatic phenomena such as lightning, and the aurora and lunar halo. Comets and shooting stars, whose significance and location were critical for both prognostication and astronomical science, were also located in this zone.122 Reisch and Navara give great attention to comets, and Apian illustrated the direction of the comet’s tail with great observational accuracy. Antonino Saliba’s “cosmographic wheel” (plate 1) is principally de-

121. See note 69. 122. The location and significance of comets, allocated in Aristotle’s Meteorologia to the upper parts of the zone of fire, was a matter of continuous debate among Renaissance astronomers and cosmographers; they were eventually accurately located, like novae, beyond the lunar sphere, thus providing evidence for change in the celestial realm. Peuerbach, Regiomontanus, and Apian all made serious contributions to their study. The appearance of comets seems to have overtaken the significance of conjunctions in sixteenth-century prognostication.

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 3.19. MAPPING THE CORRESPONDENCES OF THE HUMAN MICROCOSM. Belief that the human body contained the form and composition of the greater cosmos was a long-held principle, offering considerable scope for graphic elaboration. The physician Robert Fludd, who shared Paracelsus’s belief that medicine’s task was to bring macrocosm and microcosm into harmony, devoted numerous illustrations to mapping the microcosm and depicting the immediate influence of the Aristotelian “climate” (i.e., the regions of air) on bodily health. Fludd’s image of the regions of air, Catoptrvm meteorographicvm, resembles Antonio Saliba’s (plate 1) and illustrates the various meteorological phenomena, visible and invisible, described in De meteoris. Above is the tetragrammaton and the suggestion that the divine chain reaches down to the

reclining, Adamite figure who states: “Man is the perfection and goal of all creatures in the world.” Flanking the divine source are ten panels allocated to cosmic spheres, choirs of angels, and Hebrew names of God. Astronomical meteorology is tabulated to the left of the hemisphere of air, and to the right is a circle of planetary aspects allowing prediction of auspicious moments when the “gates of heaven” open to the upper spheres and rains may be expected. Beneficial and evil meteors are listed to the left and right of the microcosmic figure, respectively. Robert Fludd, Philosophia sacra et vere Christiana seu meteorologia cosmica (Frankfurt: Officina Bryana, 1626). Photograph courtesy of the Harvey Cushing /John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, New Haven.

voted to phenomena in Aristotle’s regions of air, as is Robert Fludd’s image of their effects on the human microcosm (ﬁg. 3.19).123 Saliba and also Francesco Robacioli (1602) share the conventional view that the earth’s core contains the zones of hell, familiar from illustrations

123. Antonino Saliba’s Nuova ﬁgura di tutte le cose was engraved in Naples in 1582.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

of Dante’s Inferno (fig. 3.20).124 Kircher’s maps of these regions in Mundus subterraneus (1665 and 1678) as generative parts of a vital earth allow no space for the damned. His Arca Noë (1675) is rather more biblical, using Ortelius’s map to plot the regions exposed by the retreating waters of the biblical flood.125 images of the competing world systems Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium celestium (1543) was illustrated by a simple, powerful redrawing of the conventional image of the spheres but centered on the sun, with the earth in the third sphere (fig. 3.21). Only after 1570 did cosmologists begin to replicate the diagram, starting with Valentinus Naiboda and his 1573 sequence and continuing through Thomas Digges (1576), Tycho Brahe (1577–96), and Nicolaus Reimers (1588) before the century’s end.126 Helisaeus Röslin’s De opere Dei creationis . . . (1597) allowed immediate visual comparison between Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Tychonian systems (fig. 3.6). Galileo himself illustrated heliocentricity by means of the conventional spheres (fig. 3.22). JeanBaptiste Morin’s illustration in Famosi et antiqui problematis: De telluris motu vel quiete. Hactenus optata solutio (1631) was succeeded by Pierre Gassendi’s in 1647, while Giovanni Battista Riccioli illustrated six possible systems, including his own (fig. 3.8).127 They were reproduced by Kircher, and they were engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar for Edward Sherburne’s translation of Marcus Manilius’s Sphere a mere decade before Newton’s Principia.128 Comparative world systems were illustrated regularly on seventeenth-century cosmographies, for example, those by Willem Jansz. Blaeu (who had worked at Tycho Brahe’s observatory in 1596 and published the astronomer’s catalog of one thousand stars) and his successors.129 John Seller’s 1673 Novissima totius terrarum orbis tabula conveys beautifully the transition from theoretical to observational science of the cosmos (cosmography to astronomy or geography) by surrounding a double hemisphere, “plain style” world map with conventional landscapes of the seasons and zodiac signs and diagrams of the principal world systems as well as lunar maps based on Galileo’s observations and Johannes Hevelius’s selenography.130 moral and sacred dimensions of cosmographic images The elemental spheres of the world machine or surrounding the mappaemundi did not readily accommodate the shape of the Ptolemaic oikoumene. They disappear from world maps until the double hemisphere format, popular from the latter years of the sixteenth century, offered new opportunities for their representa-

tion.131 In late Renaissance works, texts and epigrams made explicit connection between cosmography and religious or moral life, generally avoiding the pagan use of classical allegory found in a late edition of Natalis Comes’s

124. Dante’s Commedia divina had been a source of cosmographic images since its appearance. Illustrations of the circles of hell appeared in editions of the work throughout the Renaissance. A selection of these and relevant bibliographic reference are available at (“Dante’s Hell”). See also Giuseppe Rosaccio, Teatro del cielo e della terra (Venice, 1598), 9. Robacioli’s broadside Teatro del cielo e della terra (Brescia, 1602) places a world map below a graphic description of the heavens and earth. Unlike Saliba’s image, the circles are eccentrically drawn; the innermost circle, which stands directly above the north pole on the world map, is marked “inferno” and contains an image of purgatory and hell. 125. Athanasius Kircher, Athanasii Kircheri e Soc. Jesu Mundus subterraneus . . . , 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Joannem Janssonium and Elizeum Weyerstraten, 1664 – 65), also included a number of images of the sun and moon based on Christoph Scheiner’s observations. The map of the postdiluvian world is modeled on Ortelius’s Totius orbis terrarum and printed in Athanasii Kircheri è Soc. Jesu Arca Noë . . . (Amsterdam: Joannem Janssonium, 1675), 158. In addition to his own drawings and maps, Kircher drew promiscuously on the work of others; detailed study of the sources of his imagery is yet to be undertaken. 126. Heninger, in Cosmographical Glass, 48 –51, discusses the implications of different modes of picturing the firmament. On the reaction of cosmographers such as Gemma Frisius to Copernican heliocentricty, see Hallyn, Poetic Structure, 152 –53. According to Umberto Eco, in The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995), Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s occult interests led him to the same conclusion: “It was Agrippa who first envisioned the possibility of taking from kabbala and from Lull the technique of combination in order to go beyond the medieval image of a finite cosmos and construct the image of an open and expanding cosmos, or of different possible worlds” (p. 131). See also William Gilbert’s image of an open universe of stars in De mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova (Amsterdam: L. Elzevirium, 1651). 127. Westman in “Two Cultures or One?” discusses the Riccioli image; see also Heninger, Cosmographical Glass, 66 – 68. 128. Heninger, Cosmographical Glass, 70 –79. 129. The results of Tycho Brahe’s observations were printed on Blaeu’s celestial globe of ca. 1598 (see fig. 44.39). See C. Koeman, “Life and Works of Willem Janszoon Blaeu: New Contributions to the Study of Blaeu, Made during the Last Hundred Years,” Imago Mundi 26 (1972): 9–16. On the Blaeu map publishing business more generally, see Y. Marijke Donkersloot-De Vrij, The World on Paper: A Descriptive Catalogue of Cartographical Material Published in Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1967). 130. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 478 –79 (no. 460), and Whitfield, Image of the World, 100 –101. 131. Nathaniel Carpenter, in Geography Delineated Forth in Two Bookes (Oxford: Iohn Lichfield and William Tvrner, printers to the famous vniversity, for Henry Cripps, 1625), noted that “the Planispheare cannot be expressed without the two faces or Hemispheares; wherof one represents the Easterne, the other the Westerne part of the Terrence Globe.” Quoted in Reeves, “Reading Maps,” 54. While the double hemisphere world map dates back to the 1520s—it was used by Franciscus Monachus ca. 1527 to represent the division of the globe between Spain and Portugal (fig. 10.2)—its popularity increased markedly in printed world maps from the 1590s (Shirley, Mapping of the World, 194 ff.).

fig. 3.20. DANTE’S HELL. The seven circles of hell described in Dante’s Inferno (and corresponding to seven planetary spheres) were first illustrated in crude woodcuts in Girolamo Benivieni’s edition of the Divine Comedy in 1481 and further elaborated in both the 1515 second edition of Aldus Manutius and Bernardino Daniello’s edition of 1568. In 1595 the Accademia della Crusca accompanied its edition with this “scientific” engraving combining circles and triangles, obviously inspired by measured cosmographic drawings of the heavens.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, printed editions of the Divine Comedy sought to illustrate Antonio Manetti’s investigations into the site, shape, and size of Dante’s cosmography. Size of the original: 17 12 cm. “Profilo, pianta, e misvre dell’Inferno di Dante secondo la descrizione D’Antonio Manetti Fiorentino,” in La Divina commedia . . . Accademici della Crusca (Florence: Domenico Manzani, 1595), insert preceding p. 1. Photograph courtesy of MnU.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

rarum illustrating Gerardus Mercator’s Historia mundi (1635). The tetragrammaton, sign of unum and plenum and mystical Hebrew name and number of God, is the most common mode of introducing the Creator into the image of creation. On Joan Blaeu’s wall map Nova totius terrarum orbis tabula (1648) it parts the billowing clouds with light in a dramatic cosmographic chiaroscuro.133 Biblical history provided decorative elements on seventeenth-century world maps, reflecting the long-standing relationship between universal history and cosmography. The divine presence in creation is illustrated by two graphic traditions, one devoting a single image to each day of Genesis, the other representing God himself observing, blessing, or embracing a completed cosmos. Hexameral illustrations opened many cosmographic texts and printed Bibles. In Münster’s Cosmography, Reisch’s Margarita philosophica, and Miles Coverdale’s 1535 Bible, an anthropomorphic God dominates the frame, his handiwork composed of circles, stars, and landscapes. Schedel reduces the divine presence to a single hand, perhaps influenced by Dürer’s idea of a supreme artist manifested in the mathematical harmonies of his creation. This idea is dramatically realized in de Hollanda’s “De aetatibvs mvndi imagines” (fig. 3.23).134

fig. 3.21. COPERNICUS’S HELIOCENTRIC COSMOGRAPHY. Copernicus employed the conventional circles, mapping seven spheres to illustrate his revolutionary idea of a suncentered cosmos. They are numbered inward from the sphere of fixed stars (labeled “imobilis”) through four revolving planets including earth, two inner planets, and a central sun. Although superficially a slightly altered version of the conventional image of the cosmos, Copernicus’s mapping clearly challenges the Aristotelian image of a closed, harmonious cosmos as effectively as global geographical mapping upset images of elemental symmetry. Size of the original: ca. 28 19 cm. From an autograph manuscript of Nicolaus Copernicus, “De revolutionibus . . . ,” fol. 9v. Photograph by T. Duda, courtesy of Biblioteka Jagiello´nska, Cracow (MS. BJ 10000).

Mythologiae (Padua, 1616).132 Neostoicism’s belief in a uniﬁed cosmos encouraged the use on world maps of epigrams from Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus, reminding the viewer that the material world should not distract from matters divine and eternal. Ortelius’s Typus orbis terrarum quotes Cicero: “What can you see then as great in human affairs [in a map] in which all eternity and the size of the whole earth is shown?” Biblical reference was more common. Simon Girault’s image quotes Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the ﬁrmament showeth his handiwork.” Lines from Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell within it,” appear on the Typus orbis ter-

132. Comes’s discussion of the classical gods is illustrated by a geocentric mapping of the spheres (shown in a partial pyramidal section), which allocated a cosmos of four terrestrial and seven celestial spheres plus the empyrean region to symbols and personiﬁcations of pagan spirits (illustrated in Heninger, Cosmographical Glass, 173). 133. Eleven copies of this map exist; the example studied hangs in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin. See Shirley, Mapping of the World, 392 –96 (no. 371), and Minako Deberg, “A Comparative Study of Two Dutch Maps, Preserved in the Tokyo National Museum: Joan Blaeu’s Wall Map of the World in Two Hemispheres, 1648 and Its Revision ca. 1678 by N. Visscher,” Imago Mundi 35 (1983): 20 –36. Joan Blaeu’s most complete cosmographical work was his Atlas, which appeared from 1634 with editions in all of the principal European languages. It reached its fullest development as the eleven-volume Atlas maior, sive Cosmographiæ Blaviana, qva solvm, salvm, coelvm, accvratissime describvntvr, 11 vols. (Amsterdam: Ioannis Blaeu, 1662 – 65), which opens with a statement about the strains of attempting to cover the whole of cosmography and a description of the “harmony of the macrocosm,” which deals with the “fabric of the world, the disposition of the heavenly globes, the place of the earth, its form and grandeur.” Blaeu continues by dividing the matter of cosmography into astronomy and geography and thenceforth deals with his materials under these distinct headings. See Johannes Keuning, “Blaeu’s Atlas,” Imago Mundi 14 (1959): 74 – 89. It is tempting to suggest that the symmetrical arrangement of these spaces and their numbers (four and six) were consciously linked to the signiﬁcant cosmological numbers three, four, and six, discussed earlier, but there is no explicit evidence of this. The arrangement of elements and seasons in the corners is, however, obvious and consistent. 134. Sylvie Deswarte, “Les ‘De aetatibus mundi imagines’ de Francisco de Holanda,” Monuments et Mémoires 66 (1983): 67–190; Jorge Segurado, Francisco d’Ollanda: Da sua vida e obras . . . (Lisbon: Edições Excelsior, 1970); J. B. Bury, “Francisco de Holanda and His Illustrations of the Creation,” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986): 15 – 48; and

fig. 3.22. GALILEO’S ILLUSTRATION OF HELIOCENTRICITY. Galileo used the conventional form of equally spaced circles marked by letters and planetary symbols, with additional circles for both the earthly moon and the four moons of Jupiter. Behind this clear style of illustration lay an epistemological assumption of the image’s capacity for direct mimesis, which flew in the face of the Platonic assumptions underlying humanist cosmography and was derived in part from the mechanical creation of images by direct action of light through lenses on paper, which Galileo himself had employed in mapping sunspots through the telescope. Galileo Galilei, Dialogo . . . sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo . . . (Florence: Gio Battista Landini, 1632), 320. Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

Drawing on Sacroboscan illustrations and inspired by Neoplatonic light and geometry symbolism, de Hollanda represented the Trinity by geometrical ﬁgures and color alone. In Kircher’s Harmonia nascentis mvndi, the pipes of a cosmic organ exhale the six days of creation (ﬁg. 3.24), while Joseph Moxon’s 1673 work parallels geometrical images of the hexameron with representations of the seven ages of human salvation above and below the world map.135 Images of a patriarchal God overseeing creation, juxtaposed with a diagram of the spheres, could suggest either Day 7 of creation or the continuity of divine presence in the world. Bartholomaeus Angelicus’s De proprietabus rerum (1495) has an enthroned Creator at the center of a celestial circle, separated from material creation and obscured from human senses by the conventional billowing cloud symbol. More frequently the material cosmos occupies the center of the image, while the deity embraces it or gestures from beyond. Such images might include elemental and planetary spheres, the elemental alone, or, unusu-

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

ally in Wenceslaus of Cracow’s “Introductionam astrologia ungler” (1515), three regions of air and the zone of fire.136 The innermost circle was commonly a landscape illustrating the beauty of the finished earth, often Eden complete with Adam, Eve, and the four rivers, as in Hans Lufft’s image for the 1534 Wittenberg Bible. Germanic tradition tended to picture the spheres eccentrically, while Italians placed them concentrically, although in Lorenzo Lotto’s depiction of the creation of the cosmos (Church of Santa Maria Maggior, choir: Bergamo, 1493) an eccentric composition generates a curving cone of four elemental and ten celestial crescents.137 The tradition endures in Robert Vaughan’s illustration for Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (1652) (fig. 3.25). Like de Hollanda, Lotto focuses on the creative significance of fiat lux to connect creation with light and, Neoplatonically, with love, a recurrent theme in cosmographic illustration. The metaphysics of light provided hermeticists such as Giordano Bruno, and possibly Copernicus himself, with a powerful attraction toward heliocentricity.138 Sacrobosco’s illustrations of the solar eclipse connect light to pyramidal form and matter and were readily associated with the Platonic lambda to suggest pathways of creative illumination, as de Hollanda, Fludd, and others illustrate (fig. 3.26). Kircher devoted an entire text to the diverse forms of illumination, summarized in his title page (fig. 3.27). Divine light was assumed to be incorruptible and colorless. For Aristotelians, color inheres in the property of elemental objects and is governed by the same mathematical harmonies as physical phenomena. Each element thus was illustrated in cosmographies by a specific color: air was blue, water green, fire red or golden-yellow, and earth ash-black or “dyed” with different colors (see also fig. 3.23). Jet-black signified eleidem, Two Notes on Francisco de Holanda (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1981). 135. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 474 –75 (no. 457). 136. Wenceslaus of Cracow, “Cztery sfery elementòw,” in “Introductionam astrologia ungler” (1515/24?). In this early sixteenthcentury astrological text, the three regions of air and the zone of fire are placed eccentrically above a landscape rendering of earth and water. While the conventional representation of terrestrial and celestial circles, especially in Italian works, rendered them concentric, north of the Alps an eccentric mapping was more common; the reasons for this difference in convention are unclear. They may signal a recognition of eccentricity or be an attempt to indicate a perspective from above down to the earth, because in this image the sun (the face of God?) shines illumination down to the earth, its light reflecting from nature. 137. For examples see Mariano Apa, Visio mundi: Arte e scienza dal medioevo al rinascimento. Saggi e interventi critici (Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1986), 17 and 108. 138. On the significance of Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonic metaphysics of light on Copernicus’s heliocentricity, see Waldemar Voisé, “The Great Renaissance Scholar,” in The Scientific World of Copernicus: On the Occasion of the 500th Anniversary of His Birth, 1473 – 1973, ed. Barbara Bien´kowska (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973), 84 –94.

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

fig. 3.23. A GEOMETRIC COSMOGONY. The Portuguese humanist Francisco de Hollanda produced a collection of 154 gouache biblical illustrations, some of them dramatically original in replacing conventional figural representation in the hexameral narrative with the geometric figures of triangle, cone, circle, and sphere. On Day 1 of the creation story in Genesis, illustrated here, a triple triangle representing the Trinity descends to the chaos of matter; the Father, an equilateral triangle marked with A and W and contained within the circle of intelligible space, extends into an equilateral triangle of light— the “word” of the Son: fiat lux—which itself touches the convex edge of a spinning ball of confused elements. A third triangle represents the Holy Spirit “moving over the waters,” reaching to the inner, concave edge of matter and setting it in motion. We see air and fire begin to separate from the central sphere. De Hollanda color codes the elements: ash-gray for earth, red for fire, and a mixture of green and white for the confused elements of water and air. Pure white is used for the invisible light of God. Days 2 and 3 of creation are illustrated by similar geometrical images, the cone acting as the conduit between the divine and material worlds and the ocean and coastal promontories of a curving globe emerging below the Trinitarian geometry of the heavens. De Hollanda’s image of “two great lights” governing day and night from Day 4 (illustrated in fig. 3.26e) is a pure cosmographic image derived from handbook illustrations of the eclipse. De Hollanda’s principal source seems to have been mid-sixteenth-century editions of Sacrobosco and Oronce Fine. Francisco de Hollanda, “De aetatibvs mvndi imagines” (1545 –73), fol. 3r (1545). Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

fig. 3.24. COSMIC HARMONY AS THE BREATH OF THE COSMIC ORGAN. Kircher borrowed from Fludd’s images of creation to illustrate the hexameral creation as a function of different musical registers, Christianizing the Pythagorean cosmological theme of musical harmony as the sustaining force of creation while also illustrating the cosmographic theme of the variety and fullness of the elemental realm. Athanasius Kircher, Harmonia nascentis mvndi, in Musurgia universalis . . . , 2 vols. (Rome: Haeredum Francisci Corbelleti, 1650), 2:366. Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke.

ments in transition. The principal sixteenth-century color theorist and Neoplatonist, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, connected the passage of divine light through the cosmos to color, and it may be that in later Renaissance cosmographic maps color should be read symbolically.139 Such a reading is presupposed in the Renaissance emblematic tradition, which frequently exploited the ontological status commonly attributed to Imago mundi.140 As images of divine authority, maps and diagrams of the cosmos were open to appropriation by secular power and 139. See Kemp, Science of Art, 264 – 80, for a full discussion and references. 140. Mangani, Il “mondo” di Abramo Ortelio.

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

tria has the globe set upon a stand with ﬂags at its corners and the words “Christo Duce.” François II of France has the dual spheres and the motto “One world is not enough,” while the device for Henri II of France sets the microcosm within the cosmic diagram, reaching toward the empyrium, with the word “Orbem.”142 Such conceits continued into the seventeenth century. Galileo’s naming of the moons of Jupiter pandered to his patron Cosimo II de’ Medici’s given name. In one image Elizabeth I of England’s virtues follow the spheres: from “unmoving justice” at the center, through religio (sun) and maiestas (Jupiter) to the empyreum, around which her titles are inscribed, the queen herself embracing the cosmos as a divinity.143 The anonymous Scala Cœli of the Gratious Queene Anne shows the dead queen of Denmark “on Earth in Heaven the same” at rest in the sublunar world while a ladder leads her spirit through the band of the zodiac toward the angelic spheres.144 Louis XIV’s mastery of universal space and time was proclaimed in medals of Apollo’s chariot crossing the zodiac

fig. 3.25. SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHRISTIAN COSMOS. A century and a half after its publication, the influence of Schedel’s image of the Christian cosmos in the Nuremberg Chronicle is apparent in Robert Vaughan’s metaphysical map illustration for Ashmole’s alchemical text. A complex circular geometry generates three eccentric spheres of heaven, earth, and hell. Heaven is occupied by various angels and members of the elect and overseen by an ambiguous winged figure marked by a single star. Demons are cast down across a tripartite elemental terrarum orbis of land, air, and water into the fires of the lowest circle. The cosmos is overseen by the figure of the Pancreator, who appears outside the world machine. Vaughan has drawn promiscuously upon a range of iconographic sources to create this late image of the biblical cosmos. Vaughan also designed the title page for Peter Heylyn’s Cosmographie of 1665. Size of the original: ca. 19 13 cm. Elias Ashmole, Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (London: F. Grismond, 1652), facing 211. Photograph courtesy of the BL (E. 653).

to humble use as contemplative icons. European monarchs commonly employed globe pairs to symbolize the spatial reach and divine origin of their temporal power. The Portuguese crown incorporated the armillary into its arms in the late ﬁfteenth century to signal its claims to cosmographic primacy.141 In 1580, Girolamo Ruscelli, Italian translator of Ptolemy’s Geography, also published a book of imprese for European monarchs. Philip II of Spain’s is Apollo’s chariot ﬂying between the two globes and the motto “Iam illustrabit omnia.” Ferdinand of Aus-

141. The third in a set of tapestries woven in gold, silver, silk, and wool for King João III of Portugal (between 1520 and 1530) uses the cosmographic image to celebrate his rule and that of his wife, Catherine of Austria. The royal pair appear as Jupiter and Juno, favored by Abundance, Wisdom, Fame, and Victory. See figure 17.1. The king gestures to his kingdom on a central terrestrial sphere with an axis set at forty-five degrees, turned to show circumnavigated Africa and the Indian Ocean with Portuguese flags marking claims to points along the coasts. The image is discussed and illustrated in Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 17–23 and pl. 1. It seems to be a faithful rendering of a passage from the fifth-century Neoplatonic text De nuptiis Philologia et Mercurii that had acted throughout the medieval period as an encyclopedia of natural philosophy and cosmology. See James Nicolopulos, The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in La araucana and Os lusíadas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 208 –9. 142. Girolamo Ruscelli, Le imprese illustri con espositioni, et discorsi (1566; reprint Venice: F. de Franceschi, 1580). Ruscelli was also responsible for the edition of Ptolemy published for the Venetian Accademia della Fama: La geografia di Claudio Tolomeo, Alessandrino: Nuouemente tradotta di Greco in Italiano (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1561), containing a “new universal map, with a description of the whole world.” The breadth of his humanist interest is signaled in his edition of the romance of Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso . . . annotationi et auuertimenti & le dichiarationi (Venice: V. Valgrisio, 1558). On Ruscelli, see William Eamon and Françoise Paheau, “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth-Century Italian Scientific Society,” Isis 75 (1984): 327– 42. 143. Mario Biagioli, “Galileo the Emblem Maker,” Isis 81 (1990): 230 –58, and Frances Amelia Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pl. 9c. 144. The engraving is reproduced in Arthur Mayger Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries: A Descriptive Catalogue with Introductions, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952 – 64), vol. 2, pl. 31. Many of the engravings reproduced in these volumes are emblematic and commonly use cosmographic iconography.

fig. 3.26. LIGHT AND SHADOW: MAPPING THE ECLIPSE. The series of six diagrams shows the genealogy of eclipse illustrations, from early illustrations of Sacrobosco’s explanation of solar and lunar eclipses (a) through Dati, Caxton, and Apian (using the shadow cast on the moon to prove the sphericity of the earth) (b –d), as the cosmography evolved. Francisco de Hollanda clearly drew upon these to illustrate Day 4 of the creation story in Genesis, when God sets the lights in the firmament (e), while Robert Fludd uses a very similar diagram to illustrate the principle of light and shadow that dominated late Renaissance metaphysics (f ). (a) Johannes de Sacrobosco, Sphaera mundi (Venice: Magistrum Gullielmum de Tridino de Monteferrato, 1491); (b) Leonardo Dati, La Sfera (Florence: Lorenzo Morgiani and Jo-

hannes Petri, for Piero Pacini, ca. 1495 –1500); (c) William Caxton, Image du monde (Myrrour of the worlde) (Westminster: W. Caxton, 1481), 70a; (d) Peter Apian, Cosmographia Petri Apiani per Gemma Frisium (Antwerp: Gregorio Bontio, 1550), fol. 5r; (e) Francisco de Hollanda, “De aetatibvs mvndi imagines,” fol. 6r (1551); (f ) Robert Fludd, Medicina catholica, seu, Mysticum artis medicandi sacrarium (Frankfurt: Caspari Rötelii and Wilhelmi Fitzeri, 1629 –31). Photographs courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA (a); the Huntington Library, San Marino (b); MnU (c); Beinecke (d); the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid (e); and the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University, New Haven (f).

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

how admirable is Thy name throughout all the earth” (fig. 3.29).146 Many of the emblems in a 1640 Jesuit collection use the orbs to teach moral lessons. Angels turn the machine of the world or hold the arrows of faith over the two hemispheres with the motto “Unus non sufficit orbis.”147 In the hypercoded universe of the emblem, every representation of the sphere—geometric, crystalline, tripartite imago mundi, or hemispheric graticule—can signify infinite possible interpretive elaborations to be explored in the textual part of the device (fig. 3.30).148 For Mercator, cosmography was itself an emblematic exercise: “the glory of this thy habitation granted unto thee only for a time, who doth so compar it with the heavens, that he may therefore lift up those minds which are drowned in these earthly and transitory things, and shew them the way to more high and eternal things.”149 By contrast, in Ship of Fools (1494) cosmography is called an “unsure science of vayne geometry,” seeking to circumscribe a world where the certainties of Strabo, Pliny, and Ptolemy are “daily demolished by the mariners.”150

fig. 3.27. KNOWLEDGE AND COSMIC ILLUMINATION. Baroque fascination with the physics and metaphysics of light as a cosmic principle is captured in Kircher’s illustration of cosmic illumination. From the tetragrammaton streams the light of sacred authority inscribing itself into the testament, while Christ /Apollo, bearing the planetary signs, sends beams of light to earth. One beam, via Astraea/Diana’s lunar mirror, provides profane illumination. A second beam enters a telescope, inscribing itself on the senses, while a third penetrates the Platonic cave, suggesting the illumination of pure contemplation. Kircher sustained the cosmographic conceit that if the light of divine love streamed down through the cosmos, spiritual purification invited the soul’s ascent toward the supercelestial realm. Size of the original: 26 18.7 cm. Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lvcis et vmbræ, 2d ed. (Amsterdam: Joannem Janssonium, 1671), title page. Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke.

above a globe ﬂeur-de-lis, and more concretely in the iconographic program for Versailles. On great globes commissioned for the Sun King, Vincenzo Coronelli illustrated the heavens at the moment of his nativity and the terrestrial reach of his empire. Use of the graphic device of ladder, rope, chain, or other mechanism to connect material and heavenly spheres is common (ﬁg. 3.28).145 Jodocus Hondius’s Typus orbis terrarum (1589) suspends a cordiform world map from a celestial thread, encircled by the motto: “Jehova, Our Lord,

145. Girolamo Fracastoro describes this chain explicitly as anima mundi: “Now then, this chain is nothing other than the soul of the world, of which we have spoken, or the nod and will of God, who wholly permeates the universe and moves and binds all things, moving and drawing them, however, for a purpose known to that First Mover.” Girolamo Fracastoro, “Fracastorivs, sive de anima, dialogvs,” in Opera omnia (Venice: Apvd Ivntas, 1584), 158v. 146. Mangani, “Abraham Ortelius.” The image of the earth hanging from the divine hand was widely used in the seventeenth century. The title page of William Hodson’s Divine Cosmographer, engraved by William Marshall, is an example, picturing the cosmographer standing on the globe of earth, which hangs midway between elemental earth and water. He points into the regions of air and ﬁre, with sun and moon shown on either side, upward toward the hand of God that reaches out from the circle of the Trinity to suspend the globe by a tiny thread. The motto reads: “Neither the heaven, earth, nor water pleases as a boundary.” 147. Imago primi Saecvli Societatis Iesv a provincia Flandro-Belgica eivsdem societatis repraesentata (Antwerp: Balthasaris Moreti, 1640). 148. Charles Moseley, A Century of Emblems: An Introductory Anthology (Aldershot: Scolar, 1989), and Elizabeth See Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 149. Gerardus Mercator, Historia Mundi; or, Mercator’s Atlas, Containing His Cosmographicall Description of the Fabricke and Figure of the World, trans. Wye Saltonstall (London: T. Cotes for Michael Sparke and Samuel Cartwright, 1635), A3. 150. Sebastian Brant, Stultifera nauis . . . (The Ship of Fooles), trans. Alexander Barclay (London: Richard Pynson, 1509). A section titled “Of the folysshe descripcion and inquisicion of dyuers contrees and regyons” (fol. CXXXIX) reads: Who that is besy to mesure and compare The heuyn and erth and all the worlde large Describynge the clymatis and folke of euery place He is a fole and hath a greuous charge Without auauntage wherfore let hym discharge Hym selfe, of that role whiche in his necke doth syt About such folyes dullynge his mynde and wyt

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

fig. 3.28. MAPPING THE SCALE OF NATURE. The Trinity, represented as a triple-crowned Father with his crucified Son resting in his lap and the dove of the Holy Spirit shining illumination from his breast, occupies the upper center of the image, radiating light into the clouds of unknowing and praised by surrounding archangels. He holds orb and ring while the Virgin looks on. From God’s right hand a chain descends via an angel holding the armillary (or speculum?). The chain connects descending orders of angels, humans, birds of the air, fish of the sea, and animals and plants of earth. In roundels below are five world system diagrams, and below these an underworld space of hell. The goal of human existence is ascent up the scale of nature rather than descent into bestiality (cf. Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man), avoiding the fate of the falling angels who plummet down the right margin of the image. Size of the original: 25 19 cm. Diego Valadés, Rhetorica christiana . . . (Perugia: Petrumiacobum Petrutium, 1579), 220, insert 2. Photograph courtesy of MnU.

cosmographic mapping in painting, architecture, landscape, and literature Cosmography ﬁgured within the widespread cultural trope of the “theater of the world,” common after 1550 in the dual sense of nature as a stage where the human

spectator may marvel at God’s work and of the theater as a space in which creation’s diversity may be brought into order and coherence.151 Ortelius’s title is the best-known example; it also appears in Jean Bodin’s cosmography, Universae naturae theatrum (1596).152 Painters, architects, and poets regularly drew upon the connected cosmographic metaphors of machine and theater of the world, most notably the world landscapists of the 1520s and 1570s.153 Caesare Caesariano’s Italian translation of Vitruvius Pollio’s De architectura libri dece (Como, 1521), the ﬁrst to be illustrated, includes woodcuts of the armillary, the spheres, and a map of Italy.154 Picturing the months and seasons was implicitly cosmographic, inevitably inﬂuenced by astrological and speculative themes in natural philosophy. Frescoes at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara map the labors of the secular year onto a cosmic cycle of zodiacal signs, pagan divinities, and intermediate decans.155 Paintings and poems of paradise or the Last Judgment also offered scope for cosmographic images, which John Milton’s epic would exploit most fully. Cosmography touched upon all four arts of the quadrivium; thus Giorgione’s Castelfranco frieze of the liberal arts or Lotto’s at Bergamo illustrate instruments of cosmic measure including the sphaera mundi. The world theater is most completely represented in the cosmographic suites of princes, complete with globes, armillary, geographic and chorographic wall maps, and astronomical ceiling. Egnazio Danti designed two such spaces, for Cosimo I de’ Medici at Florence and for the Bolognese Pope Gregory XIII in the Vatican. That for Cosimo’s Guardaroba Nuova was a gigantic emblem of Cosimo I, relating a trio of globes (celestial, terrestrial, and armillary) at the center of the room to geographical maps of large parts of the world painted on the walls and to the duke’s cabinets of curiosities, treasures and marvels gathered from across the world: a threedimensional and comprehensive mapping of the cosmographic conceit of cosmic correspondence through spatial order. The scheme at the Belvedere mapped Rome’s claims to an empire of faith whose boundaries were not 151. Blair, Theater of Nature, 153 –79, and Mangani, Il “mondo” di Abramo Ortelio, 38 – 84. 152. Denis E. Cosgrove, “Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93 (2003): 852 –70. 153. Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth.” 154. Denis E. Cosgrove, “Ptolemy and Vitruvius: Spatial Representation in the Sixteenth-Century Texts and Commentaries,” in Architecture and the Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, ed. Antoine Picon and Alessandra Ponte (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 20 –51. 155. The Ferrara works are discussed in Yates, Giordano Bruno, 57; see also Valerie Shrimplin-Evangelides, “Sun-Symbolism and Cosmology in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 4 (1990): 607– 44.

fig. 3.29. THE COSMOGRAPHIC EMBLEM: JODOCUS HONDIUS, TYPVS ORBIS TERRARVM, 1589. The cordiform, single hemisphere projection of the earth, attributed hermetic qualities through its cosmographic connection with the Sacred Heart and with redemptive love streaming through the cosmos, here dangles on a celestial thread encircled by lines from Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell within it.” The celestial spheres are indicated by the hemispheres of light emanating from the tetragrammaton. William Marshall’s title page design for William Hodson’s Divine Cosmographer (1634) uses a similar idea, but a globe rather than a world map dangles from the thread. Diameter of the original: 9 cm. Photograph © National Maritime Museum, London (G 201:1/2).

territorial but connected earth to heaven, with the gallery of geographic maps and illustrations of church history connected conceptually and physically to the astronomical instruments and images in the Sala della Meridiana.156 The vault or dome is an obvious location for images of the cosmos, exploited by quattrocento artists such as Masaccio and elaborated by Raphael and Giulio Romano. The vault of Gregory XIII’s Sala de Bologna, designed by Ottaviano Mascherino and Lorenzo Sabatini, shows the pattern of stars and ﬁgures of constellations with the horizon line, cosmic circles, and zodiacal band and a side image of two astronomers under a pergola that mimics the armillary bands.157 The most elaborate works are mannerist and Baroque, connecting celestial and terrestrial spaces by actual or illusionistic beams of light. In the cathedrals of both Bologna and Palma Mallorca, tiny roof apertures allow a beam of sunlight to move across interior space, illuminating elements of interior design (including Danti’s meridian line at Bologna) and in-

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 3.30. EMBLEMATIC MAPPING OF THE TWO SPHERES. In an engraving by William Marshall, the English emblematist Francis Quarles places the poet on a terrestrial globe turning from material temptation (signified by a sack of coins and a sleeping Cupid) and fame (represented by the laurel wreath and heraldic device) to gesture toward the heavenly spheres for inspiration. At his side, the lute signifies Pythagorean music, as Quarles’s motto makes clear. Here the two spheres are brought together by inspiration alone. Francis Quarles, “The Invocation,” in Emblemes (London, 1635). Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke. 156. Lucio Gambi and Antonio Pinelli, eds., La Galleria delle Carte Geografiche in Vaticano / The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, 3 vols. (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1994); Florio Banfi, “The Cosmographic Loggia of the Vatican Palace,” Imago Mundi 9 (1952): 23 –34; Francesca Fiorani, “Post-Tridentine ‘Geographia Sacra’: The Galleria delle Carte Geografiche in the Vatican Palace,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 124 – 48; and idem, Marvel of Maps. On the cosmographic ceiling, see Kemp, Science of Art, 70 –71; see also the discussion of Giulio Romano’s design for the Gonzaga family in E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 109 –18. 157. Kemp, Science of Art, 72. Kemp points out that “in the minds of Gregory XIII and Danti . . . the science of perspective was deeply interwoven with techniques of cartographic projection, astronomical measurement and related procedures of terrestrial and cosmological

Images of Renaissance Cosmography, 1450 –1650

graphic tour de force.158 This is a recurrent Jesuit trope; it appears in the emblem of a cordiform world map draped over an altar from which the light of faith beams across the world.159 Renaissance architectural treatises, in the tradition of Vitruvius’s De architectura, illustrate the machine of the world by images of the armillary, global circles, and cardinal winds (ﬁg. 3.31). Cosmic measure was regarded as fundamental to the design of buildings and whole cities.160 The prevalence of centric ground plan and dome, for example, in Donato Bramante’s tempietti at Todi and Rome or in Michaelangelo’s St. Peter’s, reﬂect the architects’ desire to reproduce the imago mundi. It has been suggested that cosmographic principles governed the plan of Tycho Brahe’s Hven observatory; certainly ideal cities imagined by Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Tommaso Campanella or designed by Filarete, Vincenzo Scamozzi, and Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban are cosmological in inspiration and cosmographic in form.161 Utopias are as much literary as philosophical works. In this respect they share with poetry and drama a tradition of mapping cosmography in words. The world machine was a common trope in the Renaissance literature of most European countries, especially in epics through which the national territory, like its monarch, is given metaphysical attributes. In the closing cantos of Luís de Camões’s Os

fig. 3.31. VITRUVIAN MICROCOSM. The classical architectural writer Vitruvius Pollio famously suggested that the proportions of the erect human figure in different positions (arms outstretched or held at different angles to the body) fitted precisely the figures of circle and square whose geometry governed the architecture of the cosmos. Measured illustrations of the Vitruvian microcosm, with circle and square centered upon either navel or genitals, are to be found in virtually every Renaissance architectural treatise, prefacing a discussion of the harmonic proportions of the body and its individual parts: head, foot, arm. The most familiar of these images is Leonardo da Vinci’s, but it recurs in architecture from 1450 to the mid-seventeenth century and determined the plans, elevations, and decorative elements of building throughout the Renaissance. Scamozzi’s figure is placed at the center of a set of geometrical diagrams, connecting the microcosm to both pure form and specific architectural principles. Scamozzi’s treatise also contains illustrations of the terrestrial globe with great circles, graticule, and surrounding winds and of the wind rose, compass, and alidade. Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale (Venice, 1615). Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke.

dicating hour and season; Andrea Pozzo’s ceiling design for St. Ignazio in Rome illustrates the light of faith descending from an inﬁnite vanishing point, refracted by means of a mirror to the four continents in a cosmo-

geometry” (p. 76). The cosmographic and cartographic relationship between Gregory and Danti is fully explored in Fiorani, Marvel of Maps. 158. Heilbron, Sun in the Church, and Kemp, Science of Art, 137– 39. Kemp’s summary of Pozzo’s achievement might stand for the aims of the cosmography: “The whole point of the illusion . . . is that the distorted chaos of shapes is able miraculously to coalesce into a coherent revelation when viewed from the proper position” (p. 139). 159. Reproduced in color in Mangani, “Abraham Ortelius,” pl. 2; see also Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 160 – 61. 160. Andrea Palladio’s buildings and his text, I quattro libri dell’architettura, 4 vols. (Venice: Domenico de Franceschi, 1570), exemplify clearly the inﬂuence of cosmological thought on Renaissance architecture. Palladio’s professional life between the late 1530s and 1580 coincides with the high point of Renaissance cosmography. On Palladio’s connections with Venetian cosmography, see Cosgrove, Palladian Landscape, 188 –250. See also Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, 4th ed. (London: Academy Editions, 1988). On the ideal city, see Giulio Carlo Argan, The Renaissance City (London: Studio Vista, 1969). 161. Jole Shackelford, “Tycho Brahe, Laboratory Design, and the Aim of Science: Reading Plans in Context,” Isis 84 (1993): 211–30; Francis Bacon, The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, and the New Atlantis of Francis Lord Verulam (London: Methuen, 1905), 147–76, esp. 169 –70, on cosmological inﬂuences; and Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetic Dialogue . . . , trans. A. M. Elliot and R. Millner (London: Journeyman Press, 1981), esp. 15 –17. Campanella’s Realis philosophiae epilogisticae partes quatuor (Frankfurt: G. Tampashii, 1623) is effectively a cosmographic text based on ideas of providential harmony as a principle of creation. An “apologia pro Galileo” is bound into the text. On artillery, warfare, and mapping, see Niccolò Tartaglia, La nova scientia . . . con una gionta al terzo libro (Venice: N. de Bascarini, 1550).

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

Lusíadas, for example, the Atlantic goddess Thetis offers Vasco da Gama, ﬁgured in the work as Portugal’s Aeneas, a vision of the crystalline orbs.162 In the ﬁnal years of the English Renaissance, John Milton staged Paradise Lost within a cosmography that moves from the world machine to the landscape of Eden. Moving through the spheres, Satan approaches its center: And fast by, hanging in a golden chain, This pendent world, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon. Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge, Accursed, and in cursed hour, he hies.163

Conclusion Renaissance cosmography evolved in the face of complex empirical, theoretical, and representational challenges. From the West’s rediscovery of Ptolemy’s promise of mapping an absolute geographical space within the order and harmony of the world machine, cosmic unity itself came under threat from experience in both spheres. Conceptual images, inherited from medieval sources, thus evolved into more complex, disputed illustrations of the world machine and its parts, while the demonstration of cosmos, always more apparent graphically than textually, weakened in the face of observational overload. Both printing and Protestantism brought to European eyes the world and the Bible as parallel texts. Despite the rhetoric of observation and experience, the expanding book of nature required as much exegesis as the vernacular Testaments. Cosmography’s probing of the world machine for invariant structures below the accidental nature of the sensible world was conducted in large measure through images: measured and mathematical, iconic and emblematic. Representing an expanding oikoumene and deepening heavens itself prompted critical reﬂection on the means and meanings of vision and illumination at a time before art and science disengaged and parted ways. The asymmetries, fragmentation, and disharmonies that disrupted Renaissance cosmography, and the sheer

volume of accidental nature produced by observation, paralleled other cultural disruptions: accelerated trade, monetization, new geopolitics, and doctrinal conflict. In all respects, Aristotelian spatial closure was being pried open and the simplicity and security of its representation eroded. The attendant anxieties generated further desires and dreams of unity and harmony, met by Christian cosmography’s continued offer of reassuring images to princes, alchemists, and pious folk. In their fight to maintain the unitary vision, cosmographers amassed greater volumes of data and synthesized them in ever more elaborate images. But eyewitness descriptions and anamorphic images produced by natural light through lenses increasingly revealed a more accidented creation whose staggering variety evaded capture, even in the extravagant combination of text, diagram, picture, and cartography that constituted the great Baroque world map, such as Hugo Allard’s 1652 Nova totius terrarum orbis tabula.164 We might therefore trace in the maps, diagrams, and texts of Renaissance cosmography an emerging crisis of the image. Was the world machine anything more than a representation? And what claims to truth or efficacy might its representation make? By 1650 observation and experiment seemed to be resolving these questions in favor of mathematics and mechanics rather than maps and metaphysics, restricting cosmography to the theological and moralizing role that it had always served, but whose social significance would thenceforth be more marginal and insecure.

162. See p. 464 in this volume and Nicolopulos, Poetics of Empire, 221– 69. Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas (1572); see idem, The Lusiads, trans. Richard Fanshawe, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963). And see the discussion in Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 120. 163. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 2 vols., ed. A. W. Verity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), 69 (bk. 2, ll. 1051–55). 164. Shirley, Mapping of the World, 416 –17 (no. 392).

4 • Renaissance Star Charts Anna Friedman Herlihy

Between the early fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, star charts progressed from imprecise, often decorative illustrations based on medieval manuscripts to sophisticated map projections with systematized nomenclature for the stars. The reimportation into Europe of technical classical texts such as Ptolemy’s Almagest, as well as Islamic works such as Abu¯ al-H . usayn Abd alRah.ma¯n ibn Umar al-S.u¯fı¯’s constellation maps, appears to have played a significant role in this transformation. By the early sixteenth century, with the publication of Albrecht Dürer’s pair of maps in 1515, the most popular format for small celestial maps was definitively set: two hemispheres, north and south, on some sort of polar projection. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, when Johannes Bayer published his 1603 Uranometria, the basic star atlas format was solidified, with one page for each constellation and perhaps a few hemispherical charts covering larger regions of the sky. The revolutionary star charts of Conrad of Dyffenbach and the earliest of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli’s comet maps mark the beginning of a new focus on a more precise representation of the night sky than had previously been apparent in medieval manuscripts. Three distinct traditions for Renaissance star charts emerged: decorative—in which star positions do not conform to observable star patterns; rigorous—where star positions more accurately reflect the star patterns in the night sky and attention to mathematical and scientific precision; and specialized—where star maps help record celestial phenomena and/or new discoveries or demonstrate practical uses for the stars. By the end of the sixteenth century, the decorative tradition began to wane, although the others coexisted throughout the Renaissance and beyond. Many factors came into play in the evolution of Renaissance star maps, in addition to classical and Islamic scientific texts. Medieval manuscripts set the stage for all three traditions.1 Globes influenced star charts, providing new information and artistic styles. Star charts likewise influenced globes.2 Astrolabes also played a role in the evolution of star charts, providing a model of the stereographic projection. As was the case in much of cartography in general, makers often drew upon the work

of their predecessors for both technical data and artistic style, with certain works reﬂecting moments of breakthrough and the founding of new traditions.

Historiography Despite the recent publication of a number of lavish illustrated books intended for a general public audience,3 the study of Renaissance star charts (and indeed star charts in general) has been largely neglected by the scholarly

I would like to thank Elly Dekker for her invaluable feedback and comments on the draft of this chapter, especially regarding the Hipparchus rule, and for several additional references of which I was unaware. I would also like to thank the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum History of Astronomy Department for providing space, time, and resources to work on parts of this chapter. A note on terminology: given the lack of consensus on the proper term for a two-dimensional rendering of the stars (among the options— star/celestial /astronomical chart and star/celestial /astronomical map), “star chart” and “star map” are used interchangeably in this chapter; “celestial and astronomical chart /map” refers, in my opinion, to a much broader category of maps than those of the stars. Abbreviations used in this chapter include: Globes at Greenwich for Elly Dekker et al., Globes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Globes and Armillary Spheres in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (Oxford: Oxford University Press and the National Maritime Museum, 1999), and Adler for the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, Webster Institute for the History of Astronomy, Chicago. 1. In this chapter I attempt to partially redress the omission of a complete discussion of medieval European star charts in volume 1 of The History of Cartography series. 2. Although the main focus of this chapter remains star charts, globes are introduced into the discussion as appropriate due to the overlapping and complementary histories of these two forms of maps of the stars. 3. For example, see (in chronological order): George Sergeant Snyder, Maps of the Heavens (London: Deutsch, 1984); Giuseppe Maria Sesti, The Glorious Constellations: History and Mythology, trans. Karin H. Ford (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991); Carole Stott, Celestial Charts: Antique Maps of the Heavens (London: Studio Editions, 1991); Peter Whitﬁeld, The Mapping of the Heavens (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks in association with the British Library, 1995); and Marc Lachièze-Rey and Jean-Pierre Luminet, Celestial Treasury: From the Music of the Spheres to the Conquest of Space, trans. Joe Loredo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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community.4 Celestial globes, on the other hand, have been more extensively researched.5 This is, to a large extent, the result of a historiographical separation of two-dimensional and three-dimensional material. The history of celestial globes has tended to be subsumed by the study of globes in general, whereas celestial charts are infrequently discussed in general histories of twodimensional cartography. This division of globes and charts has carried over into the popular literature as well, where the broad term “celestial cartography” has been primarily applied to star charts, with a limited inclusion of globes and other types of celestial charts. Occasionally, however, scholarly studies of celestial material have bridged this divide.6 Historians of art and astronomy have contributed the greatest numbers of works about star charts, many, if not most, of which are cited in this chapter. Prior to 1979, however, no specialized catalog of celestial cartography was published.7 To be sure, there were some early attempts at general histories, but these suffer from inaccuracies and often limited information. For example, in his 1932 work Astronomical Atlases, Maps and Charts: An Historical and General Guide, Brown asserts that “the earliest actual map of the heavens, with ﬁgures of constellations shown and the stars of each group marked with any precision, appears to be that of Peter Apian”— one of many gross errors in the volume.8 In addition to star charts, Brown does, however, include sections on many other types of celestial cartography excluded from most later general works on “celestial charts” or “celestial cartography.” In 1979, Warner authored The Sky Explored: Celestial Cartography 1500 –1800. Although its scope was primarily limited to star charts (including specialized star charts such as comet path maps) and a few important celestial globes, her work provided a sound foundation upon which future scholars could build.9 Yet despite this groundbreaking work, new scholarship on star charts is sparse. Journal articles, both pre- and post-Warner, have provided detailed research on particular makers and themes, most notably those by various authors on the Dürer hemispherical maps and their manuscript predecessors and Dekker’s many articles; exhibit catalogs have provided brief accounts of a number of other charts.10 4. There are many examples, of which only a few are mentioned: The History of Cartography series neglected to cover medieval star charts in volume 1. Leo Bagrow, in History of Cartography, rev. and enl. R. A. Skelton, trans. D. L. Paisey, 2d ed. (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985), makes but two ﬂeeting references to celestial globes. Norman J. W. Thrower, although regularly discussing the contributions of astronomy and astronomers to terrestrial mapping in Maps & Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), rarely mentions any sort of celestial map or globe, except for brief discussions of the contributions of Edmond Halley and a slightly more extensive discussion of lunar maps, starting with Galileo and ending with modern technology; his only two celestial illustrations are both lunar maps. A survey of all issues of Imago Mundi

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays ﬁnds that only a handful of articles have been written about any aspect of celestial cartography, half of which are about celestial globes. In a relatively recent guide to map terminology, Wallis and Robinson relegate “astronomical maps” to “maps of natural phenomena” rather than categorizing them as a major “type of map,” as they do celestial globes; Helen Wallis and Arthur Howard Robinson, eds., Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900 (Tring, Eng.: Map Collector Publications in association with the International Cartographic Association, 1987), 135 –38. 5. Much of this work has been done in journals such as Der Globusfreund, with more recent work in catalogs; see, for example, Globes at Greenwich or Peter van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici: The Production of Globes in the Low Countries (Utrecht: HES, 1993). 6. For example, see Zoﬁa Ameisenowa, The Globe of Martin Bylica of Olkusz and Celestial Maps in the East and in the West, trans. Andrzej Potocki (Wrociaw: Zakiad Narodowy Imienia Ossolin´skich, 1959); Deborah Jean Warner, The Sky Explored: Celestial Cartography, 1500 –1800 (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1979); Rochelle S. Rosenfeld, “Celestial Maps and Globes and Star Catalogues of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1980); and many of the works of Elly Dekker, in particular “Der Himmelsglobus—Eine Welt für sich,” in Focus Behaim Globus, 2 vols. (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseums, 1992), 1:89 –100, and “Andromède sur les globes célestes des XVI e et XVII e siècles,” trans. Lydie Échasseriaud, in Andromède; ou, Le héros à l’épreuve de la beauté, ed. Françoise Siguret and Alain Laframboise (Paris: Musée du Louvre / Klincksieck, 1996), 403 –23. 7. Many of the major Renaissance works are cited in Ernst Zinner, Geschichte und Bibliographie der astronomischen Literatur in Deutschland zur Zeit der Renaissance (1941; 2d ed. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1964); however, this listing is not indexed or arranged by type of work, so it is impossible to tell which volumes contain celestial charts except in the occasional instances when Zinner annotates an entry. For medieval and early Renaissance manuscript charts and constellation drawings, see the four volumes of Fritz Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters: vol. 1, [Die Handschriften] in römischen Bibliotheken (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1915); vol. 2, Die Handschriften der National-Bibliothek in Wien (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1927); vol. 3, in two parts, with Hans Meier, Handschriften in Englischen Bibliotheken (London: Warburg Institute, 1953); and vol. 4, by Patrick McGurk, Astrological Manuscripts in Italian Libraries (Other than Rome) (London: Warburg Institute, 1966). The latter two volumes have the series title translated into English as Catalogue of Astrological and Mythological Illuminated Manuscripts of the Latin Middle Ages. For both medieval and Renaissance sources, see also A. W. Byvanck, “De Platen in de Aratea van Hugo de Groot,” Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen 12 (1949): 169 –233. 8. Basil Brown, Astronomical Atlases, Maps and Charts: An Historical and General Guide (London: Search, 1932), 13. The well-known 1515 Dürer hemispherical maps predate the Apian map, as do several important manuscript maps. Interestingly, Brown laments the general neglect of celestial cartography within both academic and collecting circles. 9. Warner’s work should, however, be used with caution, as many more star charts have come to light since its publication more than a quarter century ago. 10. Useful museum catalogs include: Celestial Images: Astronomical Charts from 1500 to 1900 (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1985); Focus Behaim Globus, 2 vols. (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseums, 1992); Anna Felicity Friedman [Herlihy], Awestruck by the Majesty of the Heavens: Artistic Perspectives from the History of Astronomy Collection (Chicago: Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, 1997); and the online catalog Out of this World: The Golden Age of the Celestial Arts (Kansas City, Mo.: Linda Hall Library, ongoing), .

Renaissance Star Charts

Medieval and Renaissance Star Knowledge and Representation measuring and plotting star locations Very few medieval star maps can be considered scientifically rigorous.11 Late medieval astronomers did conduct some direct observation of the sky, especially of comets and eclipses and for time-finding purposes, but most astronomical scholarship was literary and mathematical in nature, derived from texts translated from or based on classical works as well as a few Arabic ones.12 Many, if not most, of the constellation illustrations that accompanied medieval astronomical and astrological texts were intended as decorative illustration, not something that an astronomer or student would take outside and compare to the sky.13 Since astronomers, astrologers, students, and others rarely conducted actual observation of the sky during this period, the decorative images sufficed, even for such weighty scientific texts as Ptolemy’s Almagest. There are early indications of a move toward scientifically rigorous mapping of the sky in a handful of Arabic-influenced manuscripts dating from the late medieval period. With very few exceptions, medieval and Renaissance mapmakers did not look at the stars and directly sketch the patterns they were seeing to create a new map; instead, scientific star mapping was a process of indirect observation. Mapmakers or astronomers used the coordinates listed in a star catalog to plot star positions onto a map grid. In many cases, however, they did not even create original maps, but copied from earlier maps or globes, bypassing both star catalogs and observation of the sky. To create a new star chart prior to Tycho Brahe’s publication of his catalog of stars, astronomers and mapmakers relied on existing star catalogs that were essentially versions of the star catalog contained in Ptolemy’s Almagest but updated to account for the effects of precession. Such catalogs often contained errors due to inaccurate precessional calculations or miscopied or misread values. In essence, medieval and some early Renaissance mapmakers relied upon the eyes of classical scholars for their star positions. By the early Renaissance, several astronomers began to focus on observational astronomy, and enough observations were conducted to determine that there were serious problems with practicing an astronomy that relied on antiquated sources.14 Finally, in the late 1500s, after hundreds of years of reliance on outdated stellar measurements, Tycho Brahe undertook his project to reobserve and measure the position of every visible star with new and significantly more accurate instruments, creating a star catalog so momentous that it made its way into celestial globes and star charts circulated around Europe

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through manuscript versions before the catalog had even been printed. It must be noted that prior to about 1660, all astronomers used the naked eye (aided by instruments such as the cross staff, torquetum, and quadrant—not telescopes) to determine positions of celestial bodies.15 internal versus external perspective and the hipparchus rule From antiquity until well into the seventeenth century, scholars envisioned the stars as being located on a sphere surrounding the earth (with, post-Copernicus, the solar system at its center). This gave rise to two possible ways to map the stars, either from inside the sphere, as seen from a point standing on the earth looking up at the sky, or from outside the sphere, as if looking down upon the surface of a celestial globe. The resulting “internal” and

11. In this chapter I attempt to address the assertion by many recent authors that scientifically rigorous manuscript maps of the heavens were commonplace or widespread. Such maps are the exception rather than the rule. Both Warner, in Sky Explored, xi, and Wallis and Robinson, in Cartographical Innovations, 136, erroneously assert that in medieval constellation images the stars were often correctly positioned. 12. For more on astronomical scholarship and teaching in the Middle Ages, see Olaf Pedersen, “European Astronomy in the Middle Ages,” in Astronomy before the Telescope, ed. Christopher Walker (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 175 – 86, and Michael Hoskin and Owen Gingerich, “Medieval Latin Astronomy,” in The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy, ed. Michael Hoskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 68 –97. 13. One of the few well-documented instances of early medieval star viewing concerned the monastic practice of timekeeping after dark. Monks kept time by watching certain constellations. Gregory of Tours created and illustrated his own constellations for this purpose in the sixth century in his “De cursu stellarum,” although it is unclear whether creating such constellations was common practice or an unprecedented novelty. See Stephen C. McCluskey, “Gregory of Tours, Monastic Timekeeping, and Early Christian Attitudes to Astronomy,” Isis 81 (1990): 9 –22; republished in The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Readings from Isis, ed. Michael H. Shank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 147– 61. A later instance concerns the use of the Pole Star and a Ursa majoris to tell the time at night, documented as early as 844 in the writing of Pacificus of Verona. See Joachim Wiesenbach, “Pacificus von Verona als Erfinder einer Sternenuhr,” in Science in Western and Eastern Civilization in Carolingian Times, ed. Paul Leo Butzer and Dietrich Lohrmann (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1993), 229 –50. In general, however, such explicit references to observation of the stars and realistic illustrations are rare from this time. 14. For details about some of these men, see N. M. Swerdlow, “Astronomy in the Renaissance,” in Astronomy before the Telescope, ed. Christopher Walker (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 187–230. There is some evidence for star charts drawn in the early Renaissance with original observations, for example, the comet maps of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, some of which feature carefully plotted star positions. 15. Telescopes were, however, used from the early seventeenth century on for the observation of the moon and stars. For a detailed account of the instruments of observation during the classical, medieval, and Renaissance periods, see J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying (Oxford: Phaidon, Christie’s, 1987), esp. 7–26.

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“external” perspectives become an issue in looking at star charts.16 A result of this issue relates to the orientation of the figures depicted in star charts and globes. The so-called Hipparchus rule, described by Hipparchus in the second century b.c. (although it may be from an even earlier source), prescribed that human constellation figures should be depicted such that when observed from Earth, the front of the figure faces the viewer. Thus figures on external perspective charts and on celestial globes should be depicted from the back.17 Problems arose with adherence to this rule, although for the most part, Renaissance celestial cartography (both charts and globes) faithfully followed it.18 precession of the equinoxes and epochs Although the apparent positions of the stars are “fixed” with respect to one another, resulting in unchanging constellation patterns, the position of the celestial sphere with respect to the earth gradually shifts over a cycle of 25,800 years because of the wobble of the earth’s axis, as if around a cone, due to differential gravity effects of the sun and moon. Thus the points at which the celestial equator crosses the ecliptic (the equinoxes) gradually drift westward. Precession affects the stellar longitude at a constant rate (around one degree of change every seventy years), but not stellar latitude. This resulting precession of the equinoxes causes star maps to be useful for observational purposes for only a limited time. From Ptolemy on, astronomers had proposed various values that could be added to celestial longitude to correct for the effects of precession. All these proposed corrections were inaccurate to a greater or lesser degree; thus the accuracy of star charts for a particular date depended on which updated star catalog a mapmaker was using. This complicates determining the epoch (the actual date that corresponds to the star positions on a map) of any particular map; it can be dramatically different from the date of the making of the map (for example, although the well-known Dürer et al. star maps are dated 1515, they were actually drawn for an epoch of ca. 1440).19 Determining the epoch of a map can help to unravel what star catalog and precessional constant a mapmaker may have used in creating the map; determining the epochs of similar maps can help to trace whether their makers were using the same star catalog. new constellations and astronomical discoveries During the Middle Ages, the constellations depicted followed the text that they were illustrating—the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations, the forty-four of Aratus, the

forty-two of Hyginus, and so on.20 During the Renaissance, mapmakers created star maps unrelated to any particular text, but the prominence of Ptolemy’s Almagest led to the solidification of the forty-eight Ptolemaic constellations as foundational. However, as is apparent in any polar projection star map produced prior to 1600, the center of the southern hemisphere contains a vast expanse of empty, unrecorded space (fig. 4.1). This is due to the incomplete “passage” of the entire celestial sphere over any particular point on Earth (except along the equator); some stars (and, by extension, constellations) are never seen from certain latitudes. Because the Ptolemaic constellations had been recorded from a Mediterranean latitude, the southernmost stars are excluded. The celestial latitude line beyond which stars cannot be seen from a European point of view (the boundary of visibility or line of never-visibility) is slightly south of the celestial Tropic of Capricorn, depending upon exactly where in Europe one is. Thus the only way to record these stars and to fill the empty space on star maps was to travel farther south. The largest contribution to new constellations in the Renaissance came from the travels of Pieter Dircksz. Keyser and Frederik de Houtman, who measured the positions of the southern stars not visible from Europe on their expeditions to the southern hemisphere in the mid1590s. Petrus Plancius formed these into twelve new constellations that were first published on the 1597/98 globe he made in conjunction with Jodocus Hondius Jr. and later in Johannes Bayer’s 1603 atlas (fig. 4.2).21 Keyser and De Houtman’s trip was the first systematic expedition to record the southern stars, although prior to their travels there had been sporadic reports of sightings of the Southern Cross, the Magellanic Clouds (two galaxies prominently visible in the southern sky), and the Coal16. Warner labels this way of viewing the stars “geocentric” versus “external,” but this presents potential confusion in post-Copernican eras as many cartographers created “geocentric” maps although their cosmology was decidedly not geocentric. Dekker labels the different views “sky view” versus “globe view.” 17. For more information on the Hipparchus rule, see Dekker, “Andromède,” 408 –9, or Dekker, “Der Himmelsglobus,” 92. 18. Johannes Bayer is a notable exception. Dekker considers the Renaissance adherence to the Hipparchus rule a remarkable feat, given that there is no extant evidence of Renaissance mapmakers’ familiarity with Hipparchus (personal communication, 2002). 19. For a detailed explanation of precessional theories and their relationship to the epoch of the maps by Dürer et al., see Warner, Sky Explored, 71 and 74. 20. The Aratus constellations are technically those of Eudoxus, whose work is no longer extant. For a useful index of the Eudoxan versus Ptolemaic constellations, see Michael E. Bakich, The Cambridge Guide to the Constellations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 83 – 84. 21. Elly Dekker, “Early Explorations of the Southern Celestial Sky,” Annals of Science 44 (1987): 439 –70.

fig. 4.1. CELESTIAL MAP BY JOST AMMAN. This map exhibits an unusual vertical arrangement that is also seen in its companion terrestrial map. The border, unusually decorative for a celestial map from this time, features portraits of six prominent ancient philosophers and a variety of scientific instruments. The artistry of some constellations reflects those of Johannes Honter, in that many of the characters are clothed. However, others, such as Orion, reflect the Dürer tradition.

Amman employs an external perspective and has added the constellation Coma Berenices. Note that there is a large empty space in the center of the southern hemisphere; this is due to the invisibility of that area of the sky from European latitudes. Ptolemaeus, Geographia, libri octo (Cologne, 1584). Photograph courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence.

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fig. 4.2. MAP OF THE NEW SOUTHERN CONSTELLATIONS. Shortly after Plancius and Hondius introduced constellations based on Keyser and De Houtman’s newly recorded southern stars, Johannes Bayer published this two-dimensional version. In addition to the twelve new constellations of Plancius, Bayer includes the two Magellanic Clouds (labeled

“Nubacula Major” and “Nubacula Minor”), visible at the center of the map. It is unclear why he did not assign letters to the stars in these new constellations, as he did throughout the rest of his atlas. Johannes Bayer, Uranometria (1603). Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

sack nebula.22 Small, regional maps sometimes documented these three celestial features. In northern skies, several comets and novae appeared during the Renaissance; they were sometimes recorded on celestial globes and on star charts, but more often formed the basis for regional, topical star charts that focused on these unusual phenomena.23 Other new constellations were created during the Renaissance in order to corporealize areas of stars that had been recorded, but were noted as unformed or outside the boundaries of any particular Ptolemaic constellation. In 1536, Caspar Vopel introduced Coma Berenices and Antinous on a new globe. In 1589, Petrus Plancius and Jacob Floris van Langren added Crux and Triangulus Antarcticus, likewise on a globe. In 1592, Plancius created Columba and Polophylax on the inset celestial maps of a larger world map. Plancius added nine biblical-

themed constellations in 1612 on a globe produced in conjunction with Pieter van den Keere.24 Jakob Bartsch replaced Plancius’s Apes with his own Vespa in 1624, and Isaac Habrecht II introduced Rhombus (an early predecessor of Reticulum) on his celestial globe of 1625.25 22. See Elly Dekker, “The Light and the Dark: A Reassessment of the Discovery of the Coalsack Nebula, the Magellanic Clouds and the Southern Cross,” Annals of Science 47 (1990): 529 – 60, for an extensive account of the recording and mapping of the Southern Cross. 23. For a chronology of comets appearing over Europe in the Renaissance, see Donald K. Yeomans, Comets: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1991), 405 –19, and Gary W. Kronk, Cometography: A Catalog of Comets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 –), 1:260 –347. 24. For a detailed listing of Plancius’s biblical constellations, see Warner, Sky Explored, 206. 25. See Elly Dekker, “Conspicuous Features on Sixteenth Century Celestial Globes,” Der Globusfreund 43 – 44 (1995): 77–106 (in English

Renaissance Star Charts

Medieval Constellation Illuminations as Precursors to the Renaissance Most early Renaissance constellation images derived from medieval manuscript examples. Except for a few manuscripts based on the work of the Islamic astronomer al-S.u¯fı¯ and the occasional planisphere and planispherelike celestial depiction,26 European constellation images from the medieval period are not, in fact, maps, but instead are fanciful drawings with star configurations rendered in a manner that does not conform to the appearance of the stars in the sky. Typically, each constellation appears as a separate drawing, although some manuscripts include a circular celestial image encompassing the visible sky. In some illustrations, stars are placed within constellation figures according to mythological accounts of their position, in essence mapping the text rather than the sky; in other illustrations, stars are merely decorative additions that embellish the constellation figures. Manuscripts also commonly featured constellation illustrations without any stars, but with only the mythological figures. Throughout the Middle Ages, various astronomical, astrological, and mythological texts were illustrated with constellation figures. The oldest images accompany versions of the mythological “Aratea,” 27 dating back at least as far as the early ninth century, and they continued to be popular texts until at least the seventeenth century (figs. 4.3 and 4.4).28 Other texts illuminated with constellation figures during the Middle Ages include the “Poeticon Astronomicon” of Hyginus, Bede’s “De signis coeli” (often referred to as the Pseudo-Bedan catalog), the “Liber introductorius” of Michael Scot, and the astronomical work of the ancient astronomer Nimrod.29 Most constellation images from the early medieval period tend to follow the model of the early “Aratea” manuscripts in terms of the design of the figures, retaining a classical aesthetic. As time progressed, constellation images began to reflect Romanesque and Gothic styles; as Islamic constellation texts became available, certain Arabic attributes began to be incorporated into constellation iconography.30 Some authors, such as Michael Scot, included atypical constellations, such as Tarabellum and Vexillum, along with the traditional Aratean choices (fig. 4.5).31 By the late thirteenth century, a body of manuscripts emerged that began to lean in the direction of scientifically rigorous maps of individual constellations, in that the positions of the stars reflected the actual patterns in the sky, although without any sort of map projection. Called the Sufi Latinus corpus, they were derived from alS.u¯fı¯’s constellation treatise, which included a complete Ptolemaic star catalog with individual constellation maps.32 The earliest seems to have been derived from a now lost manuscript from Sicily (plate 3); 33 others date to the early years of the Renaissance. In the Sufi Latinus manuscripts, the figures have been modified to fit a West-

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ern European aesthetic to varying degrees, but all retain Arabic iconographic and stylistic influence to a greater or and German), for information on the depiction of Coma Berenices and Antinous on sixteenth-century celestial globes; see also her listing of new constellations, including when and by whom they were introduced, in Globes at Greenwich, 559 – 60. 26. The term “planisphere” should be used only in the specific sense of a representation based on the stereographic projection, as in Ptolemy’s Planisphaerium. For many of the medieval and early Renaissance maps that depict the entire visible sky, it is impossible to determine if the projection was intended to be stereographic. In addition, circular hemispherical maps in a projection other than the stereographic have also commonly been called planispheres in the past. In this chapter I use the term “planisphere-like map” to describe these two types of circular maps when a general descriptor is needed, as their overall circular format and coverage of either the visible sky or each hemisphere is reasonably similar. 27. Three main versions of the astronomical myths of Aratus were used during the Middle Ages. They are commonly referred to as the Aratus Latinus, the Germanicus Aratea, and the Ciceronian Aratea. For a good discussion of the various Aratea versions and an annotated list of Carolingian Aratus manuscripts, see Patrick McGurk, “Carolingian Astrological Manuscripts,” in Charles the Bald: Court and Kingdom, ed. Margaret T. Gibson and Janet L. Nelson (Oxford: B.A.R., 1981), 317–32. 28. The earliest extant illustrated Aratea appears to be Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 387 (dated between 809 and 821); for many others, see the Aratus sections in the source lists of illustrated astronomical manuscripts in Byvanck, “De Platen in de Aratea,” 204 – 33. Byvanck cites relevant catalog pages and illustrations for Saxl, vol. 1, [Die Handschriften] in römischen Bibliotheken, and vol. 2, Die Handschriften der National-Bibliothek in Wien, among other secondary source materials. See also Alfred Stückelberger, “Sterngloben und Sternkarten: Zur wissenschaftlichen Bedeutung des Leidener Aratus,” Museum Helveticum 47 (1990): 70 – 81; revised and published in Antike Naturwissenschaft und ihre Rezeption 1–2 (1992): 59 –72. 29. For numerous illustrations, see the four Saxl volumes and also Byvanck, “De Platen in de Aratea,” 204 –33. For a discussion of Bede’s “pseudepigrapha,” including De signis coeli, see Charles William Jones, Bedae Pseudepigrapha: Scientific Writings Falsely Attributed to Bede (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1939). For a detailed study on one of the Michael Scot manuscripts, see Ulrike Bauer [Bauer-Eberhardt], Der Liber introductorius des Michael Scotus in der Abschrift Clm 10268 der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München (Munich: Tuduv-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1983). For a brief description of Nimrod’s constellation images, see Charles Homer Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science (1924, reprinted New York: Frederick Ungar, 1960), 338 – 41; Haskins reports that of the two manuscripts he discusses, only one (MS. Lat. VIII 22, at the library of St. Mark’s in Venice) has illustrations. 30. For a useful account of stylistic and iconographic changes in constellation renderings throughout the Middle Ages, see Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, “Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4 (1933): 228 – 80, esp. 230 – 41. 31. Bauer, Michael Scotus; Franz Boll, Sphaera: Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1903), 439 – 49; and Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965), 100 –102. 32. Emilie Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” in HC 2.1:12 –70, esp. 60. For detailed information on the Sufi Latinus corpus, see Paul Kunitzsch, “The Astronomer Abu ’l-H . usayn al-S.u¯fı¯ and His Book on the Constellations,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 3 (1986): 56 – 81, or idem, “S.u¯fı¯ Latinus,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 115 (1965): 65 –74. 33. BNF (Arsenal MS. 1036 [Bologna, ca. 1270]). See Kunitzsch, “Astronomer Abu ’l-H . usayn al-S.u¯fı¯,” 74.

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fig. 4.3. AQUARIUS FROM ARATUS, “PHAENOMENA,” MANUSCRIPT. The printed version of the constellation Aquarius seen in figure 4.4 derives directly from this Leiden “Aratea” manuscript predecessor. Most of the stars, especially those in the stream of water, are merely decorative; others, however, do correspond to mythological descriptions of star placement within this constellation, although not to their actual patterns in the sky. Size of the original: 17.5 15.3 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden (MS. Voss. Lat. Q 79, fol. 48v).

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 4.4. AQUARIUS FROM ARATUS, PHAENOMENA, PRINTED VERSION BY HUGO GROTIUS. Compare figure 4.3. Aratus of Soli, Syntagma Arateorum opus antiquitatis et astronomiae studiosis utilissimum . . . , ed. Hugo Grotius (Leiden: Christophorus Raphelengius, 1600). Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

an “Aratea” manuscript that dates from ca. 900, uses an equatorial projection of sorts.37 lesser extent.34 Like the al-S.u¯fı¯ maps, these renderings also include a numbering system for the stars corresponding to that of the Ptolemaic star catalog and a graduation of sizes of stars, reﬂecting different magnitudes. In addition to the manuscripts derived from al-S.u¯fı¯, medieval circular celestial charts constitute a rudimentary type of map. The majority mapped the relationship of neighboring constellations, and in this capacity they lack stars (ﬁg. 4.6). The earliest map of this type, in an “Aratea” manuscript, dates to 818, and examples of such charts, in varying stages of complexity, appeared until the early years of the Renaissance.35 Most include circles representing the tropics, equator, or ecliptic, and some seem to have been constructed using a rough version of the stereographic projection.36 Some are divided into northern and southern hemispheres; others depict only the portion of the sky visible from a typical European latitude (from either the north ecliptic or equatorial pole to the boundary of visibility). Such maps also vary between internal and external perspective. One unusual variant, in

Advances in Two-Dimensional Mapping It seems that it was not until the early ﬁfteenth century that rigorous star maps appeared with map grids and precisely placed stars, despite the availability in Europe (via Moorish Spain) as early as the tenth century of astrolabes, which provided a model of the stereographic projection, and Is-

34. Kunitzsch classiﬁes them into four groups. See Kunitzsch, “Astronomer Abu ’l-H . usayn al-S.u¯fı¯,” 68 –71. 35. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Clm. 210). For more information on such charts, see Saxl, Die Handschriften der NationalBibliothek in Wien, 19 –28, or Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” 13 – 17 (both also include the relationship of such charts to similar Islamic examples). 36. For a diagram of such charts, see Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” 15 and ﬁg. 2.3. 37. Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen, Switzerland (Cod. Sangall. 902). This manuscript is pictured in Saxl, Die Handschriften der NationalBibliothek in Wien, 22.

Renaissance Star Charts

fig. 4.5. MICHAEL SCOT’S CONSTELLATIONS TARABELLUM AND VEXILLUM. Scot’s “Liber introductorius,” an astronomical and astrological manuscript, enjoyed a certain amount of popularity between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries; the particular copy in which these constellations appear dates from the second half of the fifteenth century. Scot introduced a number of unusual constellations not seen in other astronomical works. Tarabellum and Vexillum are both located in the southern celestial hemisphere; the former is an awl, while the latter is a flag or banner. Photograph courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (MS. M.384, fol. 28).

lamic and classical resources such as al-S.u¯fı¯ and Ptolemy from the late thirteenth century. The earliest extant twodimensional star maps other than astrolabes with identifiable projections appear to be those in the Vatican library manuscript attributed to the copyist Conrad of Dyffenbach and dated 1426.38 This manuscript contains four maps that chart a limited number of stars with sketchedin outlines of selected constellations (fig. 4.7). The star catalog information derives from Gerard of Cremona’s Latin translation of an Arabic version of Ptolemy’s Almagest; the constellations do not seem to have been influenced by the work of al-S.u¯fı¯.39 Numbers indicate the positions of the stars and represent their magnitudes. Three of the maps employ unusual trapezoidal projections that may have been developed based on the works of Hipparchus (transmitted through Arabic sources); 40 these maps appear to

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fig. 4.6. MAP SHOWING GENERAL RELATIONSHIP OF CONSTELLATIONS TO ONE ANOTHER FROM A TENTH-CENTURY ARATUS MANUSCRIPT. This map, while not showing star positions, conveys the general relationship of one constellation to another in the sky. The constellations are arranged according to an internal perspective, and the figures are facing forward following the Hipparchus rule. The map is constructed with the center on the ecliptic pole; the celestial equator is indicated by the offset circle. Size of the original: 37 28.5 cm; diameter: ca. 23.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Burgerbibliothek, Bern (Cod. 88, fol. 11v).

have had no inﬂuence on other contemporary charts. The fourth map is a circular map drawn using the azimuthal equidistant projection and centered on the ecliptic pole.41 38. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Codex Palat. Lat. 1368), 63r, 63v, 64r, and 64v. For detailed information on these maps, see Dana Bennett Durand, The Vienna-Klosterneuburg Map Corpus of the Fifteenth Century: A Study in the Transition from Medieval to Modern Science (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1952), 114 –17, and Saxl, [Die Handschriften] in römischen Bibliotheken, 10 –15. Two are illustrated in Durand, pl. I, the other two in Saxl, pl. XI. See also John Parr Snyder, Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 9 and 29 –30. 39. Kunitzsch, “Astronomer Abu ’l-H . usayn al-S.u¯fı¯,” 67, n. 36. Kunitzsch corrects Saxl’s assertion that the style of the constellations exhibits Arabic inﬂuence. 40. Durand, Vienna-Klosterneuberg, 115. 41. Durand suggests that this projection may have come from an Arabic source, possibly Abu¯ al-Rayh.a¯n Muh.ammad ibn Ah.mad al-Bı¯ru¯nı¯ (Vienna-Klosterneuberg, 116).

fig. 4.7. TRAPEZOIDAL PROJECTION MAP FROM 1426 BY CONRAD OF DYFFENBACH. One of the four earliest extant, nonastrolabic star maps, this map curiously uses the trapezoidal projection, one usually reserved for smaller area regional maps. It shows a portion of the ecliptic (Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces) and several surrounding con-

stellations (for example, the Great Square of Pegasus asterism is indicated above Pisces). The star positions are indicated with numbers that correspond to their magnitude. Photograph © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City (Codex Palat. Lat. 1368, fol. 64v).

Renaissance Star Charts

The circular Conrad of Dyffenbach map may have served as a model for later polar projection maps of the north and south celestial hemispheres, such as the more complete and elaborate maps of ca. 1440 occasionally attributed to Johannes von Gmunden (they were produced in Vienna and are hereafter referred to as the Vienna maps); the Vienna manuscript also contains individual maps of each constellation with star lists.42 The Vienna maps also use the Ptolemaic star catalog as the basis for star positions— each star is numbered to correspond to the Ptolemaic catalog. This numbering feature was present on individual-constellation maps in medieval European copies of al-S.u¯fı¯ manuscripts as well as original Islamic al-S.u¯fı¯ manuscripts.43 Despite their overall Western appearance, the Vienna maps manifest Arabic influence in certain iconographic attributes of constellations.44 They also adhere to the Hipparchus rule, faithfully showing the constellations from their backs, given that these are external perspective charts (which is notable given that Islamic cartographers regularly ignored the Hipparchus rule).45 The Vienna maps appear to have influenced several celestial globes, including that of Hans Dorn from 1480 and that of Johannes Stöffler from 1493.46 Around the turn of the sixteenth century, polar projection star maps shifted from the equidistant to the stereographic projection, which had been well established centuries earlier on astrolabes.47 This change to the stereographic is exhibited by the next extant maps in the early Renaissance chronology—a pair of northern and southern hemispheres from 1503 (now in Nuremberg, and hereafter referred to as the Nuremberg maps).48 These planispheres seem to be derived from a map in the tradition of the ca. 1440 Vienna maps; they share the epoch 1424 as well as similar artistry and a starnumbering system that corresponds to that used in the Ptolemaic catalog. There may also be evidence for at least one other pair of manuscript maps in this tradition, said to have been owned by Johannes Regiomontanus, and perhaps also a set that predates the ca. 1440 Vienna maps.49

Individual-Constellation Illustrations in the Early Renaissance By the beginning of the ﬁfteenth century, the rendering of individual constellations had split into two strains: one continued in the decorative tradition of the Middle Ages, while the other began to render star positions in keeping with the actual appearance of the night sky. Both traditions seem to have been inﬂuenced by Islamic maps and globes and the reimportation of classical authors, although to different extents. Decorative manuscript images of individual constellations began to coalesce into a more uniform iconography,

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regardless of which text they were illustrating.50 Reflecting Renaissance scholars’ renewed interest in the scholarship of the classical period, the selection of illuminated texts narrowed: Caius Julius Hyginus and the Germanicus edition of the “Aratea” predominated, with occasional reference to works by other authors, such as the “Astronomicon” by the Renaissance humanist Basinio da Parma.51 As with earlier medieval illustrations, certain constellation figures manifest Islamic attributes, but the overall aesthetic followed Western European traditions. Early Renaissance illuminations that did indeed map the stars as seen in the sky were comparatively rare, as was the case with medieval manuscripts. Several maps of the Sufi Latinus corpus of manuscripts date to the early Renaissance.52 Other manuscript maps of individual constellations from the Renaissance, which depict rea-

42. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Cod. 5415). Durand attributes these maps to “Magister Reinhardus” at Salzburg in 1434 (Vienna-Klosterneuberg, 116). For more information, see Saxl, Die Handschriften der National-Bibliothek in Wien, 25 and 150 –55, and pls. IX and X. 43. Such as Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale (Arsenal MS. 1036). 44. Kunitzsch, however, asserts that they are not part of the Sufi Latinus corpus (“Astronomer Abu ’l-H . usayn al-S.u¯fı¯,” 6 n. 3). 45. Elly Dekker, “From Blaeu to Coronelli: Constellations on Seventeenth-Century Globes,” in Catalogue of Orbs, Spheres and Globes, by Elly Dekker (Florence: Giuti, 2004), 52 – 63, esp. 56, and Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” 60 – 61. 46. Dekker, “Andromède,” 409. The Stöffler globe also exhibits influence from Hyginus constellation illustrations, and there is also an anonymous globe influenced by these maps. The Dorn globe was owned by Martin Bylica and is described in detail in Ameisenowa, Globe of Martin Bylica; see esp. 36 – 41 for the relationship to the Vienna maps, and see also Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” 60 – 61. 47. Very few polar projection maps used the equidistant projection after this point, most notably those of Peter Apian, Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, and Johannes Bayer. 48. Germanisches Nationalmuseum; see Focus Behaim Globus, 2: 519 –21, and W. Voss, “Eine Himmelskarte vom Jahre 1503 mit den Wahrzeichen des Wiener Poetenkollegiums als Vorlage Albrecht Dürers,” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 64 (1943): 89 –150. For an English account of these charts and their relationship to a nonextant celestial globe that belonged to Conrad Celtis, professor at the University of Vienna around the turn of the sixteenth century, and also to the celestial globe of Martin Bylica, see Ameisenowa, Globe of Martin Bylica, 47–55. 49. Ameisenowa, Globe of Martin Bylica, 40. 50. McGurk, Astrological Manuscripts in Italian Libraries, xxi. 51. McGurk, Astrological Manuscripts in Italian Libraries, xxi. McGurk also lists copies of Michael Scot, Ludovicus de Angulo, and the Alphonsine Tables as other illustrated fifteenth-century manuscripts, with limited copies of the Aratus Latinus and the Ciceronian Aratea, and no copies of the Carolingian Pseudo-Bedan and anonymous star catalogs. 52. Such as the Vienna and the Catania; for Vienna (MS. 5318 [1474]), see Saxl, Die Handschriften der National-Bibliothek in Wien, 132 – 41, and for Catania (MS. 85 [fifteenth century]), see McGurk, Astrological Manuscripts in Italian Libraries, 10 –16.

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sonably accurate star configurations, do not seem to be stylistically influenced by the al-S.u¯fı¯ maps.53 The presence of individual-constellation star maps that corresponded to actual star configurations had little impact on printed constellation images during the earliest years of the Renaissance. Such illustrations continued in the decorative tradition, with Hyginus and Aratus manuscripts predominating as sources for constellation information. This attests to an interest in the constellation myths in those publications rather than any scientific content pertaining to observing the sky. Erhard Ratdolt appears to have been the first to publish constellation illustrations in 1482 in an edition of Hyginus’s Poeticon astronomicon. Although no one has identified a particular manuscript that served as a model for Ratdolt’s illustrations, the figures in several Renaissance constellation manuscripts exhibit similarities to his figures.54 Ratdolt’s edition served, in turn, as a model for many other illustrated editions of both the Poeticon astronomicon and Aratus’s Phaenomena.55 Astrological texts, on occasion, also included constellation illustrations, especially for sections on the zodiac. For example, Ratdolt’s 1489 edition of a Latin translation of the Kita¯b al-qira¯na¯t (Book of conjunctions) by Abu¯ Mashar Jafar ibn Muh.ammad al-Balkhı¯ illustrates the zodiacal constellations with the woodblocks used in his 1485 edition of Hyginus’s text.56 Although most early printed constellation images seem to be limited to either the Hyginus or Aratus texts or images derived from them, there appear to be at least a few works that contain illustrations of some of the anomalous constellations reported by Michael Scot.57 The impact of printing on the dissemination of text and image turned the Poeticon Astronomicon and Phaenomena into popular Renaissance texts. It was not until 1540, with the publication of Alessandro Piccolomini’s star atlas (discussed later), that the stellar placements within printed individual maps of the constellations resembled those seen in the night sky. The copying of manuscript sources for constellation illustrations continued even as late as 1600 with the publication of Hugo Grotius’s elaborate edition of the Phaenomena. The artist Jacob de Gheyn III made nearly exact renderings of the illustrations contained in a Carolingian Aratus manuscript, the Leiden “Aratea” (figs. 4.3 and 4.4).58

Early Renaissance Printed Planispheres and Planisphere-like Maps As with the first printed constellation illustrations, the first printed planisphere-like map followed an older medieval model that predated the Islamic-influenced advances in celestial mapping of the early fifteenth century. Contained in the aforementioned Pisanus edition of the Phaenomena,59 it may be traceable to particular manu-

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

script sources, although it is a mirror image of possible models.60 Like its sources, the planisphere-like map lacks stars and simply shows the general arrangement of the constellation ﬁgures, with the north celestial pole at the center and the boundary of visibility at the edge.61

53. For Vienna (MS. 5415), see Saxl, Die Handschriften der National-Bibliothek in Wien, 150 –55. For information correcting Saxl about this manuscript, see Kunitzsch, “Astronomer Abu ’l-H . usayn alS.u¯fı¯,” 67 n. 36. For the fifteenth-century Florence manuscript, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (MS. Angeli 1147 A. 6), see McGurk, Astrological Manuscripts in Italian Libraries, 33. 54. Such as Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Urb. Lat. 1358), and Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Cod. Plut. 89); see Saxl with Meier, Handschriften in Englischen Bibliotheken, pt. 1, lvii–lviii. 55. For example, Thomas de Blavis, a fellow Venetian printer, copied the second edition (1485) of Ratdolt’s work, creating mirror images of Ratdolt’s constellations during the process of tracing them onto new woodblocks. Many of these reversed (and artistically cruder) printing blocks were then used in a 1488 edition of the Phaenomena published by Antonius de Strata and edited by Victor Pisanus. Ara, Boötes, and the Pleiades have been replaced with wood-engraved images, presumably because the publisher was lacking these particular woodblocks. These particular representations of Boötes and Ara deviate from the standard models. An unusual example of an early Poeticon astronomicon edition is one published by Melchior Sessa (Venice, 1512). A later edition was published in 1517 by Sessa with Pietro di Ravani. Many of the constellation illustrations differ dramatically from those by Ratdolt and his imitators. Some descriptions of star placements and numbers of stars have been altered to be in keeping with Ptolemaic star positions (the source for the revised star numbers and positions is unclear; they closely resemble those of Ptolemy, but do not correspond exactly), and the illustrations that accompany these altered passages reflect the new text. Certain maps, such as those for Ursa Major and Taurus, seem to reflect the influence of direct observation of the night sky. Some constellations, however, mimic earlier models, particularly those in the southernmost part of the sky; the illustrations for these constellations derive from Ratdolt. 56. Ten of the woodblocks are reused; the woodblock that fused the figures of Scorpio and Libra was recut so as to create two separate illustrations. 57. Warner mentions an anonymous work, Astronomia Teutsch, Himmels Lauf, Wirckung unnd Natürlich Influenz der Planeten unnd Gestirn . . . (Frankfurt, 1578) that depicts Michael Scot’s constellations Tarabellum and Vexillum. She surmises that the anonymous Eyn newes complexions-buchlein (Strassburg: Jakob Cammerlander, 1536), which is an illustrated Michael Scot text, likewise contains images of these two constellations (Sky Explored, 272 –73). 58. Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit (MS. Voss. Lat. Q. 79). Warner’s assertion that the de Gheyn illustrations derive from the Ratdolt images is incorrect. For more information on the Leiden “Aratea,” see Ranee Katzenstein and Emilie Savage-Smith, The Leiden Aratea: Ancient Constellations in a Medieval Manuscript (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1988), and Dekker, “Blaeu to Coronelli.” 59. Warner, Sky Explored, 270. 60. Possible models include the manuscript maps in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Giovanni Cinico, Naples, 1469), and the BL (Add. MS. 15819). 61. As happened with individual constellation images, this map was copied and reprinted in other texts, such as Scriptores astronomici veteres, 2 vols. (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499). The map is not derived from Ratdolt, as were the other illustrations in the volumes.

Renaissance Star Charts

Albrecht Dürer was the first to publish scientifically rigorous star charts in 1515; they derive from manuscript sources— either the Vienna ca. 1440 maps or the Nuremberg 1503 maps.62 Dürer created this pair of planispheres in collaboration with two mathematicians: Johannes Stabius, who drew the coordinates, and Conrad Heinfogel, who positioned the stars; Dürer was responsible for the artistry of the constellation figures surrounding the stars.63 Dürer’s charts closely resemble the manuscript predecessors, including his labeling of the stars with numbers corresponding to those in the Ptolemaic catalog. As with the 1503 Nuremberg maps, they employ the stereographic projection. The corners of the northern map contain drawings of four figures that reference the influence of classical and Arabic authors (Aratus, Manilius, Ptolemy, and al-S.u¯fı¯). The Dürer charts influenced the style of many subsequent planispheres and planisphere-like maps, individual-constellation maps, specialized charts, and globes.64 In 1537, Gemma Frisius copied Dürer’s charts nearly exactly for a globe, creating essentially a three-dimensional version of the two maps fused together along the ecliptic.65 François Demongenet, who produced celestial globes in 1552 and ca. 1560, appears to have been influenced by the Dürer tradition, although he added elements such as the hunting dogs of Boötes, Caspar Vopel’s constellation Antinous, and a figure in the constellation Eridanus.66 Demongenet’s work in turn served as source material for the elaborate celestial ceiling by Giovanni Antonio Vanosino (ca. 1575) in the Sala del Mappamondo at Caprarola, as well as globes by a variety of makers.67 The Dürer maps also helped to popularize the representation of the constellation Lyra as a hybrid of an eagle and a lyre; the roots for such iconography can be traced to Islamic influence.68 As popular as the Dürer charts, if not more so, was a pair of planispheres by Johannes Honter, published initially in 1532.69 Honter was obviously influenced by the Dürer maps, but made significant changes. He reversed the perspective of the stars from external to internal, as well as changing the artistry to reflect a less classical aesthetic. Curiously, Honter constructed these star charts 62. Dekker mentions the source as “an earlier manuscript map dated 1440” (presumably the Vienna Cod. 5415 maps); see Dekker, “Conspicuous Features,” 81. Warner says that the source could be “the star catalog and planisphere in the mid-fifteenth-century Viennese astronomical manuscript (Vienna Codex 5415)” or “the manuscript planisphere of 1503, drawn by an anonymous artist of Nuremberg in collaboration with Conrad Heinfogel, Sebastian Sperantius, and Theodore Ulsenius.” This is because of similar mistakes in labeling the stars; see Warner, Sky Explored, 71–75, quotations on 74. Ameisenowa surmises that Dürer’s model may have been a manuscript chart that is no longer extant (Globe of Martin Bylica, 40 – 44). See also the extensive article linking Dürer’s work to the 1503 manuscript planisphere, Voss, “Eine Himmelskarte vom Jahre 1503”; the detailed description of the charts in Rosenfeld, “Celestial Maps and Globes and Star Catalogues,” 154 –72;

111 and articles by Edmund Weiss, “Albrecht Dürer’s geographische, astronomische und astrologische Tafeln,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 7 (1888): 207–20, and Günther Hamann, “Albrecht Dürers Erd- und Himmelskarten,” in Albrecht Dürers Umwelt: Festschrift zum 500. Geburtstag Albrecht Dürers am 21. Mai 1971 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg, 1971), 152 –77. 63. The roles of the three men are clearly described in the attribution on the southern hemisphere map. 64. Maps include those by Eufrosino della Volpaia (1530), Peter Apian (1536 and 1540), Caspar Vopel (1545), and several anonymous versions. Volpaia included non-Ptolemaic southern hemisphere stars according to Andrea Corsali. Apian’s original map, Imagines syderum coelestium . . . (Ingolstadt, 1536), was reprinted as a volvelle in the Astronomicum Caesareum (Ingolstadt, 1540), which was an important work in the history of astronomy, filled with volvelles (mostly planetary). In contrast to Dürer, however, Apian employed the polar equidistant projection instead of the stereographic. Apian also slightly modified Dürer’s figures, adding the hunting dogs to Boötes and a figure in Eridanus; the hunting dogs had previously appeared on the 1493 manuscript globe of Johannes Stöffler (for more information on this globe, see the entry by Elly Dekker in Focus Behaim Globus, 2:516 –18). The Apian map was copied in turn by James Bassantin in Astronomique discours (Lyons, 1557); see Warner, Sky Explored, 10, and Dekker, “Conspicuous Features,” 81. For a detailed account of Apian and his work, including his connections to Islamic source material, see Paul Kunitzsch, Peter Apian und Azophi: Arabische Sternbilder in Ingolstadt im frühen 16. Jahrhundert (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986). Individual constellation maps include those by Heinrich Decimator (1587) and Zacharias Bornmann (1596). Specialized charts include those of Cornelius Gemma (of the comet of 1577) and Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hagek (of the nova of 1572 and the comet of 1577). Further information on all two-dimensional maps cited in this note can be found in Warner, Sky Explored. The globes include, in addition to the Gemma Frisius and Demongenet works mentioned in the text, one from 1506 by Johannes Prätorius; see Dekker in Focus Behaim Globus, 2: 637–38. For a study of six globes from the mid-sixteenth century, see Dekker, “Conspicuous Features,” in which she uses the Dürer maps as a basis for comparison. 65. The only significant difference is the constellation Eridanus; see Elly Dekker, “Uncommonly Handsome Globes,” in Globes at Greenwich, 87–136, esp. 87–91 (including complete photographic documentation); idem, “Conspicuous Features”; and Elly Dekker and Peter van der Krogt, “Les globes,” in Gérard Mercator cosmographe: Les temps et l’espace, ed. Marcel Watelet (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1994), 242 – 67, esp. 263 – 66. 66. The 1552 gores included only the hunting dogs. For more on the Demongenet tradition, see Elly Dekker, “The Demongenet Tradition in Globe Making,” in Globes at Greenwich, 69 –74. 67. For other Demongenet-influenced globes, see Dekker, “Demongenet Tradition,” 72. For more on the Caprarola celestial ceiling, see Loren W. Partridge, “The Room of Maps at Caprarola, 1573 –75,” Art Bulletin 77 ( 1995): 413 – 44; Kristen Lippincott, “Two Astrological Ceilings Reconsidered: The Sala di Galatea in the Villa Farnesina and the Sala del Mappamondo at Caprarola,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 185 –207; and Deborah Jean Warner, “The Celestial Cartography of Giovanni Antonio Vanosino da Varese,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 336 –37. Vanosino also created the celestial ceiling in the Sala Bologna in the Vatican. 68. For more information on this particular manifestation of Lyra, see Paul Kunitzsch, “Peter Apian and ‘Azophi’: Arabic Constellations in Renaissance Astronomy,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 18 (1987): 117–24, esp. 122, or idem, Peter Apian und Azophi, 45 –50. 69. Warner, Sky Explored, 123.

fig. 4.8. AN ASTROLABE-LIKE STAR MAP, 1596. Not only a mapmaker, but an instrumentmaker as well, John Blagrave designed this map as part of his work describing one of his inventions, the Uranical astrolabe. The design of the map reflects the rete of a traditional astrolabe. It is also a good example of a single planispheric star map that shows only the sky visible from Europe. Notice that the outside boundary is not the ecliptic or celestial equator, as might have been expected at

this time, but instead a latitude somewhat south of the Tropic of Capricorn (which is not marked on this map because it is in ecliptic rather than equatorial coordinates). Although in most respects the style of Blagrave’s figures follows Mercator, Lyra is quite different, looking somewhat like the Dürer model. Size of the original: ca. 25.7 25.7 cm. “Astrolabium vranicum generale” (London, 1596). Photograph courtesy of the BL (Harl. MS. 5935, fol. 14).

Renaissance Star Charts

with the coordinate system shifted by thirty degrees longitude from what would have been correct for the date, putting the vernal equinox in the constellation Aries. It is unclear whether Honter intended the maps to be for an ancient epoch or if this was an unintentional mistake. Despite their lack of utility for the epoch in which they were published, this pair of maps was republished numerous times, in 1541, 1553, 1559, and 1576, as the woodblocks changed hands between various publishers.70 This may indicate that the pair of maps was not actually used for serious scientific work, but rather was intended to merely illustrate the classical texts they were accompanying, which included an edition of Ptolemy’s Almagest and several Aratea editions.71 The manuscript maps of the fifteenth century and those of Dürer and Honter mark a drastic change in the construction of star maps.72 These new, scientifically rigorous maps plotted the stars according to the celestial coordinates assigned to them, resulting in significantly more accurate representations of stellar patterns. In addition, polar projection charts of the northern and southern celestial hemispheres (either stereographic or equidistant) became the typical way in which mapmakers rendered the entire celestial sphere, in contrast to maps of individual constellations that focused on small sections of the sky.73 Even at the end of the sixteenth century, when mapmakers began to use models other than Dürer or Honter, they still regularly employed a pair of polar projections. For example, Thomas Hood’s maps from 1590 show the influence of Gerardus Mercator’s celestial globe of 1551, but retain the double hemisphere format. Occasionally, post-Dürer maps hearkened back to an earlier model, one often seen in manuscript planispheres and planisphere-like maps and likely influenced by astrolabe retes. A single polar projection map was drawn that encompassed the entire visible sky rather than drawing two maps representing the entire sky (including those parts not visible). In contrast to astrolabe retes, however, such maps were not limited to the brightest stars and included constellation figures. The format made sense, because at this time much of the center of the southern hemisphere maps (beyond the boundary of visibility for Europeans) contained expanses of blank space as the southernmost stars had not been recorded adequately, if at all. Peter Apian seems to have been the first to create a detailed map of this sort in 1536, followed by John Blagrave in 1596 (fig. 4.8); such printed maps were relatively rare in the Renaissance.74

Early Atlases In 1540, Alessandro Piccolomini created what might be called the ﬁrst star atlas. Writing in the vernacular (Italian, in this case) rather than Latin, Piccolomini sought to

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expand his audience beyond scholarly confines. De le stelle fisse featured individual maps for each of the Ptolemaic constellations, rendered from an internal perspective.75 In contrast to those who had produced earlier works, however, Piccolomini charted the stars simply, with no adornment from constellation figures (fig. 4.9), a feature unique to atlases (although not single maps) until the late seventeenth century, except for Julius Schiller’s published counterproofs (discussed later). Piccolomini’s maps lacked grid lines and were designed to be read with the assistance of a device that would enable the user to determine star positions.76 His atlas also attempted to create a system of nomenclature for the stars; in contrast to the Dürer charts and their manuscript predecessors, which assigned numbers to the stars, Piccolomini’s used letters, with the brightest star typically labeled “a” and subsequent letters assigned based on decreasing magnitude, a system similar to that employed by Johannes Bayer over sixty years later. Other attempts at star atlases followed those of Piccolomini: Heinrich Decimator published Libellus de stellis fixis et erraticis in 1587, and Giovanni Paolo Gallucci published Theatrum mundi, et temporis . . . in 1588. Although different in many respects, the two works, likely created independently despite their closeness in date, feature grid lines and constellation figures, and would allow a user to locate star patterns or individual stars more easily than Piccolomini’s atlas. Decimator’s charts seem to have been copied from either a chart or globe in the Dürer tradition, although from which specific work it is un-

70. The 1541 republication illustrated the Ptolemaic star catalog in Claudius Ptolemy, Omnia, quae extant opera, geographia excepta (Basel: Henrich Petri, 1541). Other republications are listed in Warner, Sky Explored, 123 –26. 71. The Honter maps served as inspiration for a number of other makers, including Adam Gefugius (1565), Lucilio Maggi (1565), Jan Januszowski (1585), and Simon Girault (1592); they also seem to have influenced the style of certain figures (although not the overall star map) of Jost Amman (1564). See individual entries in Warner, Sky Explored. The Amman map is listed in Sky Explored, 274, as “Anonymous VII”; it has a terrestrial mate listed in Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472 –1700, 4th ed. (Riverside, Conn.: Early World, 2001), 129 and 132 (no. 113), which mentions the celestial companion. 72. For a brief discussion of the projections employed by these two cartographers, see Snyder, Flattening the Earth, 22 –23. 73. Snyder asserts that the equidistant was “only half as popular for polar celestial maps as the stereographic”(Flattening the Earth, 29). 74. See Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” 15, for a diagram of a polar stereographic projection as it pertains to a Byzantine map, which also helps to explain maps such as Blagrave’s that extend to the boundary of visibility. 75. For detailed information about Piccolomini and his atlas, see Rufus Suter, “The Scientific Work of Allesandro Piccolomini,” Isis 60 (1969): 210 –22. 76. Suter, “Allesandro Piccolomini,” 221.

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dinates of the stars can be determined from the charts themselves without reference to a star catalog or other aid.80 Yet, although Theatrum mundi, et temporis included a star catalog, there is no attempt at labeling the stars to correspond to the catalog, another feature that would have enhanced its utility. It was not until the next century that all the sixteenth-century modiﬁcations designed to enhance practical use—internal perspective, a system of stellar numbering/nomenclature, map grids, and scales, introduced by such cartographers as Dürer, Honter, Piccolomini, and Gallucci—would be synthesized into a single atlas.

Trends and Changes Regarding Iconography and Format

fig. 4.9. ORION, FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF PICCOLOMINI’S DE LE STELLE FISSE, 1540. This atlas is unusual for the time because the stars are unadorned with decorative constellation figures. It may have been the first work of celestial cartography intended specifically for a popular audience; it was written in the vernacular (Italian, in this case) and dedicated to Lady Laudomia Forteguerri, with the intention that she (and others) use it to educate themselves about the stars. De le stelle fisse’s numerous republications in several languages attest to its popularity. Note the three bright stars forming Orion’s belt in the center of the image (labeled c, d, and e). Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

clear.77 The stars seem to be numbered according to the Ptolemaic catalog, although again there are variations.78 Information about the constellations, compiled from a variety of sources, accompanies each map. Gallucci’s Theatrum mundi, et temporis is a comprehensive six-book volume about astronomy and geography noted for its numerous volvelles.79 The maps are more complicated than those of Decimator. Gallucci rendered the charts using a trapezoidal projection, and he substantially increased the number of grid lines over any maps previously published, enabling the user to more easily read star coordinate positions off of the charts. The constellation figures in this atlas are extremely rudimentary, rough outlines of the overall shapes of the figures, and their source is unclear. Some scholars have deemed Gallucci’s atlas the first “true” star atlas, as rough coor-

The overall aesthetic of most celestial maps during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century appeared relatively similar whether their makers used Dürer, Honter, Mercator, or another artistic tradition as inspiration. There were some notable exceptions to the aesthetic of elaborate constellation figures adorning the stars. Drawing perhaps upon Piccolomini’s charts that represented the stars with no constellation figures, a few large-scale maps were published in this spartan form. Guillaume Postel appears to have been the first to create a pair of planispheres, in 1553,81 followed by Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, whose popular navigational maps were first printed in 1584.82 Most sixteenth-century star charts illustrated the Ptolemaic constellations, with the exception of editions of Hyginus and Aratus. A few maps, however, began to include the new constellations that had been introduced by such map and globe makers as Vopel and Plancius.83 At least one chart, however, presented constellation figures never 77. There are slight differences between the Decimator charts and the Dürer charts. For example, in the Decimator charts Lyra lacks strings and the face of Ophiuchus is quite different. The Decimator charts also contain an increased number of grid lines, similar to Dürer tradition charts such as Warner’s “Anonymous III” or a globe (Sky Explored, 271). 78. For example, Taurus has thirty-four stars numbered instead of the thirty-three on the Dürer charts. 79. Gallucci’s work was published in several editions (Warner, Sky Explored, 91). 80. For example, see Warner, Sky Explored, xi. 81. In Guillaume Postel, Signorum coelestium vera configuratio aut asterismus . . . (Paris: Jerome de Gourmont, 1553). 82. Lucas Jansz. Waghenaer, Spieghel der zeevaerdt (Leiden: Christoffel Plantijn, 1584 – 85); for more information and other editions, see C. Koeman, Atlantes Neerlandici: Bibliography of Terrestrial, Maritime, and Celestial Atlases and Pilot Books Published in the Netherlands Up to 1880, 6 vols. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1967– 85), 4: 465 –501. 83. For example, Coma Berenices appears in Amman (1564) and Januszowski (1585), and Antinous appears on a Cornelius Gemma comet chart of 1578 (discussed later in this chapter).

Renaissance Star Charts

before seen on European works: Peter Apian included several traditional Bedouin constellations in the chart that appeared in his Instrument Buch and Horoscopion.84 In the mid-sixteenth century, polar projection celestial maps began to appear as small insets on maps of the world (for example, see fig. 3.9). Vopel seems to have been the first to include such charts on his large wall map of 1545. This map is now lost,85 but the Bernard van den Putte reissue of 1570 shows that, as with Vopel’s celestial globe, the original chart would likely have followed in the Dürer tradition, with the addition of Vopel’s Coma Berenices and Antinous; the 1570 reissue even goes so far as to include mirror images of the four personages that inhabit the corners of Dürer’s northern hemisphere map, although it is unknown whether this feature was present in the original edition. Soon thereafter, numerous mapmakers from all areas of Europe began including similar inset charts on their world maps, continuing this tradition well into the seventeenth century; many of these cartographers never published separately issued celestial charts of their own.86 Copies and reprintings of these and other similar maps comprise at least several dozen known instances of star charts inset into world maps from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century.87 Nearly all star maps inset into world maps view the sky from an external perspective; early charts follow in the tradition of Dürer, while later charts draw upon the newly created artistic traditions of such map and globe makers as Mercator, Hondius, and Blaeu.88 Only a few employ an internal perpective, most notably the ca. 1561 map of Giacomo Gastaldi (but not the Matteo Pagano ca. 1550 copy of his 1546 map) and the 1582 map of Postel; both cartographers used the Honter charts as source material for their insets. Gerard de Jode’s map includes only one star map, rather than a pair, and it is rendered in what appears to be an oblique orthographic projection to give it a globelike appearance. As cartographers drafted new constellations, they added them to the inset maps.89 Although small and often overlooked, star charts included on world maps provided a widespread form of access to stellar information. During the first half of the seventeenth century, they by far outnumbered separately issued star maps. Despite the overwhelming popularity of the equatorial stereographic projection for world maps, there were few attempts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at creating star maps that showed a large region of the sky in any format other than that of polar projections of the north and south celestial hemispheres. The equatorial format was not commonly seen until the mid- to late seventeenth century.90 One exception can be found in Globe du monde, contenant un bref traité du ciel & de la terre (1592), a book designed by Simon Girault to teach astronomy to his children. In addition to including rough

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copies of the Honter charts, Girault created a pair of equatorial hemispherical maps (ﬁg. 4.10). They are quite crude, however and merely contain the outlines of the ﬁgures without stars.91 Occasionally cartographers also employed formats that gave their maps a globelike appearance; this seems to have been the case most often with maps of comet paths.92 For regional maps, such as those in atlases like Gallucci’s Theatrum mundi, and some topical maps, such as comet path maps, the trapezoidal projection became the favored choice.

Bayer’s URANOMETRIA: A Model for the Future Johannes Bayer’s Uranometria broke new ground in the history of star charts. Published in Augsburg in 1603, the Uranometria far surpassed any celestial atlas or map created before it, in both scope and artistry. Alexander Mair

84. Both works were published in Ingolstadt in 1533. This chart was described in great detail in Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” 61– 62; Kunitzsch, “Peter Apian and ‘Azophi,’” 117–24; and idem, Peter Apian und Azophi. 85. For the copies of Vopel’s map, see Jerónimo Girava (1556), Giovanni Andrea Valvassore (1558), and Bernard van den Putte (1570); they are described in Shirley, Mapping of the World, 114 –17 (nos. 101– 2), 146 and 148 – 49 (no. 123). The 1556 edition is a very sketchy copy, whereas the other two can be considered much closer to the original. 86. Maps included those by Giacomo Gastaldi and Matteo Pagano (ca. 1550), Giacomo Gastaldi (and others) (ca. 1561), Gerard de Jode (1571), Guillaume Postel (1582), Petrus Plancius (1592 and 1594), Willem Jansz. Blaeu (ca. 1608 and 1619), Jodocus Hondius Jr. (1617), John Speed (1626), Cornelis Danckerts (1628), Jean Boisseau (1636 and ca. 1645), Claes Jansz. Visscher (1638), Melchior II Tavernier (1643), Joan Blaeu (1648), Nicolas I Berey (ca. 1650), and Hugo Allard (ca. 1652). 87. Further information on all of these charts can be found in Shirley, Mapping of the World. It is unclear as to whether the Gastaldi 1546 map was originally designed to have inset celestial maps, as does the Pagano copy; the only extant copy of the earlier map is a proof that lacks the border illustrations. 88. For more information on the inﬂuence and development of different artistic styles as they relate to Renaissance celestial globes and star charts, see Dekker, “Blaeu to Coronelli.” 89. For example, the aforementioned Vopel example; Plancius ﬁrst published his new constellations Columba and Polophylax on his 1592 world map, including Crux, Triangulum Australe, and the Magellanic Clouds that he had introduced on his 1589 globe. 90. It is possible that there were instances of equatorial celestial hemispheres inset into world maps during the sixteenth century, although none survive from that period. A 1795 copy of a map presumably from 1559 contains such star charts (Shirley, Mapping of the World, 118 –19 [no. 103]). 91. It is doubtful that Girault devised this map himself given the crude artistry, history of copying from other makers, and likely precedent for the existence of equatorial maps during the sixteenth century, although none survive. 92. For example, the 1533 Prugner comet map discussed later in this chapter. For information on globular and other globelike projections such as the oblique orthographic, see Snyder, Flattening the Earth, 14 –18.

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fig. 4.10. EARLY EQUATORIAL CELESTIAL MAP, 1592. Simon Girault designed this map in part to show the points of intersection between the equator (labeled “le eqvinoctial”) and the ecliptic (labeled “le zodiac”). The only stars indicated are those of the Big Dipper in Ursa Major, but presumably the

other chart in his book— a pair of polar projection maps copied from Honter—fulfilled the need for illustrating the approximate patterns of the stars. Simon Girault, Globe du monde (Langres: Iehan des Preyz, 1592), 37. Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

engraved the elegant illustrations, but rather than following the model of one particular star chart or globe, Mair (presumably in consultation with Bayer) seems to have relied on a variety of sources for guidance.93 Prominent among them is Grotius’s edition of Aratus, which Bayer quoted. However, several constellations were derived from other sources, and the Grotius models were often married with aspects of iconography from other constellation renderings such as Ratdolt’s Hyginus illustrations and a Dutch Saenredam-style globe.94 Many of Bayer’s constellation figures violate the Hipparchus rule. According to the rule, since Bayer’s atlas mapped the stars from an internal perspective, the constellation figures that adorn the stars should have been depicted from the front. However, only some Uranometria figures face forward; others face backward. Whether this was due to Bayer’s unfamiliarity with the Hipparchus rule or represented an intentional break with historical precedent is unclear. Bayer plotted the stars in the Uranometria on a trapezoidal projection, and the star positions were determined largely from Tycho Brahe’s 1,005-star catalog, which, although not yet published at this time, had been available in the form of manuscript copies and had been incorporated into several globes. For the southern sky, however, Bayer turned to Hondius’s 1597/98 celestial globe, which featured constellations formed from Keyser and De Houtman’s star positions. At the end of the volume, Bayer

included the first printed two-dimensional map of these recently charted southern stars (see fig. 4.2). Bayer’s greatest legacy, perhaps, is the system of stellar nomenclature he introduced in the Uranometria, one that is still used today for most stars visible with the naked eye, although over half a century passed before other astronomers began to use Bayer’s system.95 Bayer departed from the Ptolemaic model, which used long and often ambiguous phrases of text to describe each star. He may have been influenced by Piccolomini’s system, which labeled the stars with letters, or the Dürer maps and preceding manuscripts (including al-S.u¯fı¯ manuscripts and European copies derived from them), which numbered the stars according to their order in the Ptolemaic catalog. Bayer’s system, for most constellations, assigned the Greek letter alpha to the brightest star, then each subsequent Greek letter to the other stars in order of descend93. This is contrary to Warner’s assertion that they came strictly from de Gheyn’s illustrations in the Grotius Aratus (Sky Explored, 18). Certain constellations do correspond, such as Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Cetus, and some of the zodiac, but many others do not. 94. Bayer also incorporated the Islamic-influenced eagle-instrument combination for Lyra, although the design of the instrument part only is from the Grotius Aratus. For more information on Bayer’s influences, see Dekker, “Blaeu to Coronelli,” 55 –57. For more on the Saenredam style, which refers to Jan Pietersz. Saenredam, the engraver of Blaeu’s celestial gores of about 1598, see “Blaeu to Coronelli,” 52 and 57. 95. Austin Royer was the first in 1679; see Warner, Sky Explored, 18.

Renaissance Star Charts

ing brightness; when all twenty-four Greek letters had been used, Bayer switched to Latin letters.96 Curiously, the Uranometria inspired few copies, perhaps because it was republished in so many editions.97 Aegidius Strauch, however, produced a tiny pocket atlas based on Bayer, Astrognosia synoptice et methodice in usum gymnastorum academicum adornata (Wittenberg, 1659), which lacks grid lines and the nomenclature system, and consequently was likely designed as a novelty rather than for actual use. After Bayer’s monumental publication, few star charts or atlases seem to have been published until the midseventeenth century, aside from the tiny star charts inset into world maps (discussed earlier).98 Several publications appeared during the 1610s: an illustrated star catalog by Christoph Grienberger (1612) and a pair of celestial charts by Jodocus Hondius Jr. (1616). Also produced during this decade were a number of charts showing the path of the comet of 1618. Grienberger employed the gnomonic projection; he was the first to use this projection for a significant number of maps.99 Only one chart is recorded from the 1630s: an unusual hand fan design embellished with tiny star charts by Melchior Tavernier (1639).100 No separately issued star charts or atlases seem to have been drafted in the 1640s. The paucity of new star charts during the first half of the seventeenth century may also be due in part to possible decreased academic production during the Thirty Years War of 1618 – 48. The 1620s, however, saw the publication of several charts and an atlas. In 1623, Wilhelm Schickard published a pair of conical star maps in his Astroscopium, pro facillima stellarum cognitione noviter excogitatum; the volume was republished in 1655. In addition to the innovative conical projection, Schickard provided alternate biblical names for a number of the traditional constellations.101 The next year, Jakob Bartsch included three celestial maps in his Usus astronomicus planisphaerii stellati . . . (1624). Employing new formats for star charts, Bartsch devised two rectangular projection maps, each covering half of the zodiacal region, in addition to a polar projection chart of the night sky to somewhat outside the Tropic of Cancer. Additionally, Bartsch included all of the new biblical-themed constellations of Plancius. In a more traditional vein, Isaac Habrecht II published a pair of hemispherical charts in 1628 based on his globe of 1621, which was in turn based on the work of Plancius; these were the first two-dimensional maps to include the constellation Rhombus.102 Julius Schiller oversaw the production of Coelum stellatum christianum—the most significant of the star atlases published between Bayer’s atlas and that of Johannes Hevelius (1690). Published posthumously in 1627, Schiller’s atlas implemented a thorough and radical reworking of the constellations. Each constellation was

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transformed into a figure from the Bible, and elaborate new maps were engraved (fig. 4.11). No other cartographer had carried out such a detailed reassignment project— or has since. The maps, however, are often neglected by historians, perhaps dismissed because of the biblical content. Schiller’s Coelum stellatum christianum was essentially a revision of Bayer’s atlas, and Bayer himself consulted on the project. It incorporated an extensive amount of new material that had been published since 1603.103 A team of scholars worked on the project, including Schickard, who had included many biblical identifications for constellations on his maps from 1623, and Bartsch, who finished the project after Schiller’s death. Schiller’s atlas included fifty-one maps, forty-nine of which were centered on a constellation; some of the existing constellations were combined into larger star groups.104 The twelve apostles replaced the zodiacal constellations, while figures from the New Testament populated the north celestial hemisphere, and figures from the Old Testament the South. Although they represented a revision of Bayer’s internal perspective atlas, these maps employed an external perspective, likely so that they would be represented from a “God’s-eye” view. Schiller produced a companion volume, Coelum stellatum christianum concavum (published in 1627), which featured counterproofs of the star maps before the figures had been engraved, resulting in internal perspective, stars-

96. Certain of Bayer’s constellations were labeled inconsistently. For a detailed description of Bayer’s assignment of letters, see Joseph Ashbrook, “Johann Bayer and His Star Nomenclature,” in his The Astronomical Scrapbook: Skywatchers, Pioneers, and Seekers in Astronomy, ed. Leif J. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 411–18. 97. For a listing of later editions, see Warner, Sky Explored, 19. 98. The distribution of celestial charts in the first half of the seventeenth century is based on both the Warner survey of celestial charts in Sky Explored and that of Anna Friedman Herlihy in Star Charts of the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum (Chicago: Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, forthcoming). 99. Snyder, Flattening the Earth, 19. Johannes Kepler seems to be the first to have used this projection for a celestial map of the nova of 1604 (1606). Orazio Grassi also used this projection in his three comet maps (1619). The next significant use of this projection seems to have been by Ignace Gaston Pardies (1673). 100. Friedman, Awestruck, 16. It is not know whether this is Melchior I or Melchior II Tavernier. 101. For more about the use of conical projections in star charts, see Snyder, Flattening the Earth, 31 and 68. There has been little research about biblical constellation forming and renaming projects. For Christian interpretations of the zodiac, see the following detailed study: Wolfgang Hübner, Zodiacus Christianus: Jüdisch-christliche Adaptationen des Tierkreises von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Königstein: Hain, 1983). 102. Warner, Sky Explored, 104 –5. 103. For details of the additions, see Warner, Sky Explored, 229 –32. 104. For a complete listing of the biblical constellations and their traditional counterparts, see Warner, Sky Explored, 231.

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fig. 4.11. ONE OF SCHILLER’S NEW BIBLICAL CONSTELLATIONS. Julius Schiller replaced the constellation Taurus with that of Saint Andrew. The V shape that makes up the horns and face of the bull in the traditional constellation constitutes half of the cross that Saint Andrew carries. The stars

of the Pleaides are positioned in the figure’s shoulder, transferring what had been in the shoulder of an animal to that of a man. Compare figure 4.12. Julius Schiller, Coelum stellatum christianum (Augsburg, 1627). Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

only charts (fig. 4.12).105 Two equatorial stereographic projection planispheres illustrated the entire heavens, later republished in a larger format in the Harmonia macrocosmica seu atlas universalis et novus (1660/61) of Andreas Cellarius.106 After the mid-seventeenth century, three sets of charts (ca. 1650) by Antoine de Fer, Melchior II Tavernier, and Pierre I Mariette marked the beginning of a flurry of celestial mapmaking, much of it influenced by the works of both Willem Jansz. and Joan Blaeu. The highly decorative maps of Andreas Cellarius in the Harmonia macrocosmica may have sparked the publication of many such maps throughout the last decades of the seventeenth century.

Specialized Star Charts In this period, several specialized types of star charts emerged, intended to do more than merely map the locations of the stars. Many depicted the location of astronomical phenomena, while others demonstrated new dis105. Counterproofs are reverse images taken from freshly inked prints. Not all copies of the atlas have the counterproofs. An example at the Adler features stars-only proofs from an external perspective, despite having the “concave” title page. Additionally, at least one copy (in private hands) has counterproofs of the maps with the constellation ﬁgures. 106. Andreas Cellarius, The Finest Atlas of the Heavens, intro. and texts R. H. van Gent (Hong Kong: Taschen, 2006), and Warner, Sky Explored, 53 –54.

Renaissance Star Charts

fig. 4.12. PUBLISHED COUNTERPROOF OF SCHILLER’S CONSTELLATION SAINT ANDREW. This internal perspective star map is a mirror image of figure 4.11, although rendered without the constellation figures. Julius Schiller, Coelum stellatum christianum concavum (Augsburg, 1627), 69. Photograph courtesy of the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology, Kansas City.

coveries. Some showed readers how to use instruments that relied on stellar positions or how to use the stars themselves to solve problems. In contrast to large-scale charts and atlases, which on occasion also show phenomena and discoveries, specialized charts constitute a separate category because of their small, regional format and their topical focus on something other than a general mapping of the night sky, as well as their variable standards of mathematical and scientific exactness within the subgenre. Charts that map the location and/or path of comets appear to be the first such specialized charts, as well as by far the most common. Significantly, a map of the path of a comet exhibits a new kind of mapping, one that is concerned with mapping movement across space rather than mapping static objects in space. A format of depicting the comet’s path as linear became the most common way to chart these phenomena, particularly during the cometrich seventeenth century. Medieval attempts to represent comet locations lacked the precision of Renaissance and later efforts, depicting decorative constellation images that only vaguely hinted at their place in the sky, if they suggested it at all.107 In addition to precise maps, comet illustrations similar to the medieval models continued to appear throughout the Renaissance.108 Comet maps range from the general, merely locating a comet in a particular area of the sky, to the specific, showing a precise location or path in the sky on particular dates and at particular times; in many instances come-

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fig. 4.13. COMET PATH MAP BY PAOLO DAL POZZO TOSCANELLI. Toscanelli’s chart of the comet of 1449-50 clearly shows a linear progression against a backdrop of stars (with a few constellation figures sketched in). The length and direction of the tail and the date on which each observation was made are given. Size of the original: 29.8 44.6 cm. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence (Banco Rari 30, fols. 251v-250r). By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana.

tary locations were charted with respect to the positions of the surrounding stars and/or constellations, which were relevant to their prognosticative meaning. Comet maps often included the length and direction of the tail of the comet; direction was an important component of divination.109 The earliest extant comet maps are those by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, an avid comet observer and recorder from Italy (fig. 4.13).110 Toscanelli’s manuscript charts track the path of the comets of 1433, 1449 –50, and 1456, and the two in 1457 as a series of dots labeled with dates; these dots are superimposed upon the background of the fixed stars. Some charts include sketched-in constellation figures and comet tails. The implied line that 107. For example, the often reproduced section of the Bayeux tapestry (1073 – 83) showing the comet of 1066. 108. For example, the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) or the Diebold Schilling manuscript (ca. 1508 –13). For other examples, see Roberta J. M. Olson, “ . . . And They Saw Stars: Renaissance Representations of Comets and Pretelescopic Astronomy,” Art Journal 44 (1984): 216 –24, and Sara Schechner Genuth, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 109. For detailed information on divination based on cometary appearances, see Schechner Genuth, Comets. 110. For more information on Toscanelli, see Clarisse Doris Hellman, The Comet of 1577: Its Place in the History of Astronomy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 74 –75; Jane L. Jervis, Cometary Theory in Fifteenth-Century Europe (Wrociaw: Ossolineum, Polish Academy of Sciences Press, 1985), 43 – 48; and Yeomans, Comets, 24 –26.

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fig. 4.14. EARLY PRINTED COMET PATH MAP. Nicolaus Prugner’s map of the comet of 1533 shows it traveling through the constellations Auriga, Perseus, and Cassiopeia (although stylistically this figure is similar to Andromeda). Lacking the precision of Toscanelli’s earlier manuscript charts, which plotted daily cometary positions, this map does, however, give a sense of a linear path. The comet is also clearly positioned within the celestial realm rather than the atmospheric, though astronomers did not prove until nearly half a century later that this was truly the realm of comets. Size of the image: ca. 12.1 10.7 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BL (8563.aaa.33[2.]).

would connect these dots represents the path of the comet. Toscanelli’s charts vary in the method of mapping, from freehand versions to those with grids and scales.111 His maps were signiﬁcant not only because they were the ﬁrst to precisely map comets; they were also, aside from astrolabes, among the earliest extant two-dimensional star maps to employ map projections.112 It was about three-quarters of a century before similar charts of later comets began to appear in printed works, although this may be explained in part by the lack of comets observed over Europe between 1476 and 1531. In the early 1530s, a comet mapping tradition arose in Germany independent of Toscanelli’s work in Italy. Apian appears to have spurred the movement with his publication

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

of Ein kurtzer bericht der Obseruation vnnd vrtels, des Jüngst erschinnen Cometen (1532), about the comet of 1531. As part of his proof that comet tails always point away from the sun, Apian produced a diagram of the comet’s path for the title page. This illustration shows nine positions of the comet along a trajectory that intersects the ecliptic, labeled with dates; additionally Apian shows an astronomer in the corner measuring the comet’s position through triangulation with a star in Bootes and the star in the tail of Leo.113 By at least 1533, with the publication of the rough map by Nicolaus Prugner (Nicolas Pruckner) that positions the comet passing through several constellations on the surface of the celestial sphere, comet path maps appear to have taken hold as a concise way of depicting changing location over time (fig. 4.14).114 After the appearance of the comet of 1556, several more examples of comet path maps surfaced. Conrad Lycosthenes produced a path map in his chronicle of 1557 showing the comet on a partial planispheric projection— in essence synthesizing Apian’s comet path illustration and the planispheric star maps that had been popularized by Dürer and Honter during the first half of the sixteenth century. Paul Fabricius, Joachim Heller, and Johann Hebenstreit also produced path maps for this comet.115 For the 1577 comet, Fabricius and Cornelius Gemma improved upon previous models; Fabricius not only indicated the dates of the cometary appearance, but specified the length and direction of the comet tails, while Gemma connected cometary position marks and labeled the resulting line “via cometae,” emphasizing the pathlike nature of cometary motion. Similar maps for the comet of 1577 that appeared later include those by Nicolaus Bazelius, Theodorus Graminaeus, Hagecius ab Hagek, Michael Mästlin, and Leonhard Thurneysser.116 Comet path maps became increasingly common during the sev111. For extended descriptions of these charts and biographical material on Toscanelli, see Jervis, Cometary Theory, 43 – 85. 112. The others would be Conrad of Dyffenbach’s four maps from 1426. 113. Apian produced two similar illustrations in his Practica auff das MDXXXVIIII Jar gemacht in der Löblichen hohenschul zu Ingolstadt (Landshut, 1539), but both are less precise than the Kurtzer title page. The Practica title page shows a comet passing through the constellation Leo, but lacks the references to specific stars or the labeling of daily cometary appearances by date; an interior illustration shows the comet traveling in a path nearly parallel with the ecliptic—in this second illustration the dates of observed locations are indicated, as is a star in Bootes—but this map lacks the precision of the one in the Kurtzer. 114. It is possible that other comet path maps were produced for the comets of 1532 or 1533, but I have not yet found evidence of such. It is also possible that Apian was not the originator of the format in Germany, but no earlier printed comet maps have been forthcoming. 115. Hellman, Comet of 1577, 107, 108 n. 233, and 109 n. 241. These are the first instances in which she mentions maps of comet paths. 116. For details, see Hellman, Comet of 1577, or Warner, Sky Explored.

Renaissance Star Charts

fig. 4.15. A POLE STAR CHART BY PETER APIAN. This diagram shows how to use stars in the Big Dipper asterism as pointers to find the Pole Star. Ursa Major, however, is depicted according to an old, non-Ptolemaic model that views this arrangement of stars as a wagon being led by three horses. Note also the early inclusion of the star Alcor and the foot of the constellation Cepheus. A sundial—an instrument designed to be used during the day—is curiously included as part of this illustration; this is because one must orient a sundial toward the north in order for it to tell the time properly. Peter Apian, Quadrans Apiani astronomicus et iam recens inuentvs et nunc primum editus (Ingolstadt, 1532), fol. 24v. Photograph courtesy of the Adler.

enteenth century, especially for the comets of 1618, 1664, 1665, and 1680. Accompanying many Renaissance comet tracts were charts that illustrated the position of the comet in relation to the elemental spheres, similar to the center of cosmographical diagrams of the universe. Until Tycho Brahe’s revolutionary determination that comets existed in a superlunary realm, they were thought to be atmospheric phenomena. These types of maps show the comet as existing in the sphere of air, often with reference to the cardinal directions, the ecliptic, or certain constellations. Other maps take still different approaches at mapping the locations of comets and documenting the passage of time. One interesting work from 1619 by Johann Baptist Cysat creates a series of such static images, much like a ﬁlmstrip, showing the comet of 1618 progressing through several different constellations. Novae, in addition, were a popular subject of specialized charts. The 1572 nova in Cassiopeia was charted by Brahe, Cunradus Dasypodius, Thomas Digges, Hagecius ab Hagek, Cyprianus Leovitius, and Michael Mästlin, among others. Willem Jansz. Blaeu included the novae of 1572, 1600 (in Cygnus), and 1604 (in Serpentarius) on his globes; he observed the latter two himself.117 The 1604 nova was also charted by Johannes Kepler.118 Another function of specialized charts was to demonstrate how the Pole Star could be located. Peter Apian published several different versions of such charts (ﬁg.

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4.15),119 and similar ones appeared in books ranging from those on navigation to, in later centuries, those for teaching astronomy to children. Diagrams of nocturnal use often included maps of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, as certain stars in the dipper-shaped asterisms in these two constellations figure directly into finding the time at night with this instrument; such diagrams can be traced to medieval illustrations of horologium nocturnum use from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.120 Other specialized star charts that relate to instrument use are less obvious—for example, to help the reader locate certain stars used in the design of some of his instruments, Apian includes non-coordinate maps of the brightest stars in a handful of relevant constellations.121 Discoveries sparked the creation of topical charts. As described earlier, Bayer included a chart of the new southern constellations developed by Plancius. Earlier manuscripts and texts, especially those concerned with navigation and the voyages of discovery, contained diagrams of the Southern Cross, including those by Alvise Cà da Mosto (ca. 1470), João de Lisboa (1514), Fracanzio da Montalboddo (1507), and Pedro de Medina (1545).122 Amerigo Vespucci’s observations of the southern sky, including the Coalsack nebula, were published in 1503 or 1504. In 1500, João Faras (Maître João) sent a letter to the Portuguese king containing a map of the stars surrounding the Antarctic pole. Later maps by Andrea Corsali (1516) and Piero di Dino (1519) include not only stars but the Magellanic Clouds.123 Galileo Galilei produced what are perhaps the most well-known specialized star charts of all time. With the newly developed telescope, Galileo observed stars not able to be seen by the naked eye. He published four noncoordinate drawings of the formations of these new stars 117. R. H. van Gent, “De nieuwe sterren van 1572, 1600 en 1604 op de hemelglobes van Willem Jansz. Blaeu,” Caert-Thresoor 12 (1993): 40 – 46, and Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 493, 494, 504, 507, and 517. 118. For more information about these maps, see Warner, Sky Explored. 119. Warner, Sky Explored, 8. 120. Medieval examples can be seen in Wiesenbach, “Pacificus von Verona,” 233 and 236. A typical Renaissance example is the nocturnal illustration from Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut, 1524, and numerous later editions). 121. For example, Apian’s quadrant design includes sixteen principal stars that aid in its function; in his illustrations of the quadrants, the stars are numbered to correspond to star maps included later in the book. Peter Apian, Instrument Buch (Ingolstadt, 1533; reprinted Leipzig: ZA-Reprint, 1990), and idem, Quadrans Apiani astronomicus et iam recens inuentvs et nunc primum editus (Ingolstadt, 1532). 122. Dates refer to first extant copy or publication. 123. Although Corsali and de Dino’s maps predate Magellan’s voyage, these two celestial formations (which are now known to be galaxies) are today commonly called the Magellanic Clouds, using a term seemingly created in the seventeenth century. For a comprehensive study of the early mapping of the southernmost sky, see Dekker, “The Light and the Dark.”

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Concluding Remarks

fig. 4.16. A CHART OF THE PLEIADES BY GALILEO GALILEI. Included around the six easily visible stars of this group are thirty previously invisible stars that Galileo observed. Size of the original page: 24 17 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

in the Sidereus nuncius (1610): the belt and sword of Orion, the Pleiades (ﬁg. 4.16),124 the stars comprising the Orion nebula, and the stars comprising the Praesepe nebula.125 Signiﬁcantly, Galileo’s maps showed not only that there were far more stars than previously believed, but that nebulous stars were, in actuality, many stars clustered close together.

Dramatic changes in the mapping of stars marks the Renaissance period, as authors and mapmakers moved away from a reliance on classical scholarship to original work. By 1650, star maps had become firmly entrenched as scientific illustrations intended for scholarship or education rather than as decorative additions. Yet at both the beginning and the end of the Renaissance, technology limited star mapmakers. In the early years prior to Tycho Brahe, instruments lacked precision, and in the later years, Galileo’s experiments with the telescope yielded a new world of stars that needed to be mapped. Despite the newfound ability to see more stars, by the mid-seventeenth-century instruments had not been developed that could aid astronomers in accurately measuring their positions and, by extension, charting them. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that telescopically viewed stars came to be charted on traditional star maps. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the telescope became an integral part of mapping the stars, and the mapping of ever-increasing numbers of telescopically viewed stars would radically alter the aesthetic of celestial charts. Despite technological advances that enabled astronomers to better locate, measure, and subsequently map more stars, Renaissance star charts had a lasting impact on these later mapping projects. Artistic constellation styles have dramatically changed over time, but the formats for atlases and planispheric maps developed during the Renaissance have persisted for hundreds of years and continue to influence modern-day mapmakers.

124. The ﬁrst accurate separate map of the Pleiades was produced by Mästlin in 1579; see Warner, Sky Explored, 169. Prior to Mästlin’s chart, this asterism had often been separately illustrated in both manuscript and printed versions of Hyginus and Aratus. 125. For details on these maps, see Warner, Sky Explored, 88 – 89.

5 • Lunar, Solar, and Planetary Representations to 1650 R. H. van Gent and A. Van Helden

The production of maps and representations of individual heavenly bodies between about 1500 and 1650 must be seen in the larger context of the linked developments in media and representational arts. The development of printing, first with woodblocks and then engravings, made possible what Ivins has called “exactly repeatable pictorial statements,” prerequisites for a visual dimension of science.1 At the same time, Renaissance naturalism and perspective in art changed the focus of the artist from symbolic, generalized representations to realistic, particular ones (even if, in art itself, these new forms still served symbolic functions). Along with printing with movable type, the resulting representational developments made possible a new juxtaposition of text and image that constituted an important aspect of the profound changes in natural philosophy during this period. The links between astronomy and geography were only part of the great changes taking place within astronomy and cosmology that were caused by the development of new instrumentation, especially the telescope. Here accurate observations and representations were crucial in the arguments about the nature of the heavens that went together with the change from a finite, two-tiered, full (i.e., no empty spaces), hierarchical universe of words and essences to an infinite, uniform universe of mostly empty Euclidean space of mathematical relations. Ironically, whereas in the Aristotelian cosmos heavenly bodies, especially the planets, were distinguished only by their brightness, color, and orbital characteristics and their individuality came from the symbolic load they carried, in the new, uniform universe in which their symbolism became irrelevant (especially as astrology was gradually separated from astronomy), they gained new individualities: Saturn was not merely a globe; Jupiter had bands; Mars had a variegated surface like that of the moon; and Venus and Mercury went through phases. Conjunctions that had earlier been important for astrological reasons now came to be seen as occasions to improve planetary theories, especially in the cases of transits of Mercury and Venus across the solar disk. During this change in astronomy and cosmology, art and science initially interacted and borrowed freely from each other. But after a brief flirtation of the artists with

the new astronomy, the aims of art and astronomy diverged. If in the new astronomy the heavens retained little symbolic value, the artists found little use for it, and if the astronomers produced maps of the moon that were not realistic representations of the lunar face, they had to develop canons of representation that had little to do with art, except that the craftsman cutting the plates often served both masters. Finally, the new astronomy was increasingly driven by instrumentation. Improvements in the accuracy of determining positions and orbital elements became more and more a matter of progressive improvements of measuring instruments, so the discovery of novelty in the heavens became a function of the increasing power of telescopes. If we add changes and improvements in the instruments with which the heavens were observed to the earlier changes in which astronomical knowledge was communicated, we can say that between 1500 and 1650 astronomy acquired an entirely new technology, which became the foundation of continuing incremental improvement in this science.

Pre-Telescopic Representations of Heavenly Bodies In the vast legacy of medieval manuscripts, no realistic representations of heavenly bodies can be found.2 In a Seleucid astrological handbook on a partly conserved set of cuneiform tablets dating from the early second century b.c.,3 the planets Mercury and Jupiter are represented by simple star ﬁgures, while the lunar disk is drawn with 1. William Mills Ivins, Prints and Visual Communications (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 158 – 80, esp. 180. 2. This is not to say that no such representations were made. If they were, however, they did not survive or they were reduced to symbolic renditions in the copying process. 3. The tablets (preserved only for the signs Taurus, Leo, and Virgo) were published in Ernst Weidner, Gestirn-Darstellungen auf babylonischen Tontafeln (Vienna: Böhlau in Kommission, 1967). The tablets are also reproduced in B. L. van der Waerden, Science Awakening II: The Birth of Astronomy (Leiden: Noordhoff International, 1974), 81 and pl. 11, and Hermann Hunger, Julian Reade, and Simo Parpola, eds., Astrological Reports to Assyrian Kings (Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1992).

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more detail, reﬂecting a Babylonian version of the “man in the moon.” Similarly, on the “lion” horoscope of Antiochus I of Commagene on the summit of Nimrud Dagh in Turkey’s Taurus range, the planets Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter are depicted as stars, while the moon is shown as a crescent in the constellation of Leo.4 With the rise of astrology in the Near Eastern and Greco-Roman world, the planets, as well as the sun and the moon, were increasingly depicted as the gods with which they were astrologically connected.5 Early representations of this kind can be found in Carolingian copies of Roman calendrical and astronomical sources, such as the Codex-Calendar of 3546 and the Aratea of Germanicus.7 Especially in medieval and Renaissance astrological manuscripts, such representations can be found in great abundance.8 In addition to presenting Roman-type astrological representations, some Western manuscripts also depict the planetary gods in a more Islamic fashion (Mercury as a scribe, Venus as a woman with a stringed musical instrument, Mars as a warrior carrying a severed head, Jupiter as a scholar, and Saturn as a many-armed old man wielding weapons). These representations are derived from the Islamic astrological traditions, which in turn were ultimately based on late Babylonian astrological traditions.9 The sun and moon were always shown in similar symbolic representations. Often, theoretical blinders affected what observers saw in the heavens, and thus, whereas the discussion of spots seen on the sun is very limited in the medieval astronomical-cosmological literature, references are found in other sources, such as chronicles. In the case of the moon, despite the monthly variations in its visible appearance, early man was undoubtedly aware of the fact that the dark and bright regions of the lunar disk were a permanent feature of this celestial body. In various early traditions found in many ancient cultures, the bright and dark regions were regarded as images of creatures living on the moon. For instance, the best-known of these in the Far East are the hare and the toad in the moon.10 Around a.d. 100, the Greek historian-philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea gave a detailed account of various ancient theories on the appearance of the lunar disk in his De facie in orbe lunae.11 In Western 4. Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, L’astrologie grecque (Paris: E. Leroux, 1899), 438 –39. According to O. Neugebauer and Henry Bartlett Van Hoesen, Greek Horoscopes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1959), 14 –16, the probable date of the horoscope is 7 July 62 b.c. 5. See the relevant entries in the Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae (LIMC) (Zurich: Artemis, 1981–99): Cesare Letta, “Helios/Sol,” vol. 4.1, 592 – 625 and vol. 4.2, 366 – 85; Françoise Gury, “Selene/Luna,” vol. 7.1, 706 –15 and vol. 7.2, 524 –29; and Erika Simon, “Planetae,” vol. 8.1, 1003 –9 and 8.2, 661– 65. 6. Michele Renee Salzman, On Roman Time: The Codex-Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 5.1. MOON DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI. A drawing of the western half of the moon (as seen by a terrestrial observer) made by Leonardo between 1505 and 1508. North is at the top. Diameter of the lunar image: 18.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (“Codex Atlanticus,” fol. 674v).

7. Ranee Katzenstein and Emilie Savage-Smith, The Leiden Aratea: Ancient Constellations in a Medieval Manuscript (Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1988). For later medieval copies of this unique manuscript, cf. Mechthild Haffner, Ein antiker Sternbilderzyklus und seine Tradierung in Handschriften vom Frühen Mittelalter bis zum Humanismus: Untersuchungen zu den Illustrationen der “Aratea” des Germanicus (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1997). 8. The classic study on this topic is Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York: Pantheon, 1953). 9. Fritz Saxl, “Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Planetendarstellungen im Orient und im Okzident,” Der Islam: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur des Islamishen Orients 3 (1912): 151–77; Anton Hauber, Planetenkinderbilder und Sternbilder: Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Glaubens und Irrens (Strassburg: Heitz, 1916); and Dieter Blume, Regenten des Himmels: Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance (Berlin: Akademie, 2000). 10. Timothy Harley, Moon Lore (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1885), and Ernst Hartwig, “Der Hase in der Mondscheibe,” Veröffentlichungen der Remeis-Sternwarte zu Bamberg, vol. 1, Anhang (1923): 2 – 4. 11. English translation in Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold, Plutarch’s Moralia, 15 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 12:1–223. A German translation is in Herwig Görgemanns, Das Mondgesicht (Zürich: Artemis, 1968).

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the telescope was turned to the heavens. In a newsletter published in October 1608, the report of the new instrument included the sentence, “And even the stars that are ordinarily hidden to our eyes—are revealed by this new instrument.” 16 As others duplicated the device, they, too, turned it to the heavens. In England, Thomas Harriot looked at the moon through a six-powered instrument in August 1609, at about the same time that in Padua Galileo Galilei was making a spyglass with a magnification of about eight for the Venetian senate. That autumn, Galileo began exploring the heavens with telescopes considerably more powerful than those of others. His observations of the moon in December 1609, of the satellites of Jupiter starting in January 1610, and of the fixed stars led to the publication of Sidereus nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger), in March 1610.17 The earliest surviving illustrations of the appearances of the moon are five wash drawings, which were probably based on drawings made at the eyepiece that have not fig. 5.2. WILLIAM GILBERT’S MOON MAP. Full moon drawn by Gilbert in 1600 from naked-eye observations. North is at the top. Diameter of the original: ca. 18.5 cm. William Gilbert, De mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova (Amsterdam: L. Elzevirium, 1651), between 172 and 173. Photograph courtesy of the BL.

folklore, the best-known image is probably that of the “man in the moon,” which is encountered in numerous literary sources, for instance, William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.12 The first known realistic representations of a heavenly body, the moon, date from the fifteenth century. The brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck painted the face of the moon in three of their paintings, The Crucifixion (1420 – 25), St. Barbara (1437), and the “Knights of Christ” panel in the Ghent Altarpiece (1426 –32).13 Several drawings of the face of the moon made by Leonardo da Vinci in the first two decades of the sixteenth century survive in his notebooks (fig. 5.1).14 But the first attempt to map the moon did not come until the very end of that century, when the English physician William Gilbert of Colchester, better known for his research on magnets, included a moon map based on naked-eye observations in his book De mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova, published posthumously in 1651 (fig. 5.2).15 Gilbert’s map was the first to include names of features, including “Brittannia” and “Long Island.”

Viewing the Heavens through the Telescope Within a month after its existence had been revealed in The Hague, the instrument that would become known as

12. “This man, with lantern, dog, and bush of thorn, / Presenteth Moonshine.” William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 5.1.134 –35. In some Christian traditions, alluded to by Dante (Inferno 20.126) and Geoffrey Chaucer (Troilus and Criseyde 1.1024), the man in the moon was believed to represent Cain, the son of Adam and Eve. In other Christian traditions, the man in the moon was believed to refer to the Old Testament story of the Jew punished for gathering ﬁrewood on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32 –36). Charles R. Wicke, “The Mesoamerican Rabbit in the Moon: An Inﬂuence from Han China?” Archaeoastronomy: The Journal of the Center for Archaeoastronomy 7 (1984): 46 –55; Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “The Babylonian Man in the Moon,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 51 (1999): 91–99; and Ewen A. Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon: A History of Lunar Cartography and Nomenclature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3 –12. 13. Scott L. Montgomery, “The First Naturalistic Drawings of the Moon: Jan van Eyck and the Art of Observation,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 25 (1994): 317–20. See also idem, The Moon and the Western Imagination (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 83–97. 14. Gibson Reaves and Carlo Pedretti, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Drawings of the Surface Features of the Moon,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 18 (1987): 55 –58. 15. Suzanne Kelly, ed., The De mundo of William Gilbert, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1965); the map is illustrated in 2: 172 –73. See also Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 10 –15. 16. Ambassades du Roy de Siam envoyé à l’Excellence du Prince Maurice, arrivé à la Haye le 10. Septemb. 1608 (The Hague, 1608), 11; a facsimile reprint of the newsletter is in Stillman Drake, The Unsung Journalist and the Origin of the Telescope (Los Angeles: Zeitlin and Ver Brugge, 1976). For the invention of the telescope, see Albert Van Helden, “The Invention of the Telescope,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2d ser., 67, pt. 4 (1977): 3 – 67; published separately as The Invention of the Telescope (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977). 17. John J. Roche, “Harriot, Galileo, and Jupiter’s Satellites,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 32 (1982): 9 –51, and Ewen A. Whitaker, “Galileo’s Lunar Observations and the Dating of the Composition of ‘Sidereus Nuncius,’” Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1978): 155 – 69.

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fig. 5.3. GALILEO GALILEI’S MOON DRAWINGS (COMPOSITE). The moon in various phases (crescent phase, first quarter, waning gibbous phase, and last quarter) as drawn by Galileo with the aid of a telescope and engraved under

Galileo’s supervision. North is at the top. Size of each drawing: ca. 9 9.5 cm. Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius (Venice, 1610), 8r, 9v, and 10r. Photographs courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, D.C.

survived.18 The washes show that Galileo had a practiced hand. The four engraved illustrations (plus one duplicate) in Sidereus nuncius were farmed out to an unknown engraver, but we may assume that Galileo supervised the engraver (ﬁg. 5.3). These illustrations complement the text of Sidereus nuncius, in which Galileo argues that the moon’s surface is rough, like the earth’s. Galileo exaggerated certain features, such as the large spot (crater) just below the center, in order to make his argument, and

these illustrations, although recognizably depicting our moon, should not be taken as accurate depictions or maps of the lunar face. Selenographers have remarked, however, on the “curious accuracy” of Galileo’s verbal description of the lunar face. It is not clear whether Harriot 18. Le opere di Galileo Galilei: Edizione nazionale sotto gli auspicii di Sua Maestà il re d’Italia, 20 vols., ed. Antonio Favaro (Florence: Barbèra, 1890 –1909), vol. 3, pt. 1, ﬁgs. 48 and 50 –53. It is possible that

Lunar, Solar, and Planetary Representations to 1650

continued observing the moon after his initial attempt, but it is clear that only after reading Galileo’s book did he begin a protracted series of telescopic observations of the moon with instruments of various powers, and it has been argued that Harriot was unable to see relief on the moon’s surface before he read Galileo.19 In the case of the fixed stars, Galileo’s mapping of asterisms was meant to support his argument that nebular stars and the Milky Way were resolved by the telescope into large numbers of individual stars so small that their light mingled, giving the nebular appearance. Galileo selected two larger areas, the area around the sword and belt of Orion and the Pleiades, and two nebulae mentioned as such in the star catalogs of both Claudius Ptolemy and Nicolaus Copernicus, the nebula in the head of Orion and Praesepe in Cancer.20 Mapping even these small fields was thus extremely cumbersome and prone to error. In the case of the satellites of Jupiter, Galileo presented numerous observations, made between 7 January and 2 March 1610. Although these little figures and Galileo’s matter-of-fact verbal descriptions are repetitive, this series has a cumulative persuasiveness, and the weakness of later claims of the discovery of other satellites based on a single illustration show the wisdom of Galileo’s approach. He continued to observe the satellites after the publication of Sidereus nuncius for the purpose of using them to determine longitude at sea (a project that never succeeded because of the small field of view of the Galilean telescope), and he managed to determine the periods of the satellites and first suggested the mode of representation of predicted positions that is still used today.21 The current names of these satellites, although suggested by Johannes Kepler and published by Simon Marius in 1614, did not come into use until after the middle of the nineteenth century.22 In Galileo’s work we also see, for the first time, the faces of individual planets, Saturn (1610), Venus (1610), and Jupiter (1623). In each case, Galileo’s discoveries supported his main argument for the Copernican theory and against the Aristotelian cosmos. The rough surface of the moon (hitherto explained away as being due to “denser and lighter parts”) undermined the perfection of the heavens; the similarity of the moon and the earth helped establish the notion that the earth is a planet, as Copernicus had argued; the fact that stars remained points of light (although brighter) when magnified by the telescope, whereas planets were resolved into disks, supported the huge gap between Saturn and the fixed stars necessitated by the Copernican scheme; the satellites of Jupiter showed that there was more than one center of motion in the universe; and the phases of Venus showed that this planet (and, by implication, Mercury) went around the sun. Only the puzzling appearance of Saturn had no particu-

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lar bearing on the “Great Debate” on the merits of Copernican versus Aristotelian cosmology. It was the first of the new astronomical research questions suggested by the telescope. Saturn was first observed with a telescope in 1610 by Galileo. To his surprise, the planet appeared not as a simple globe, but rather as a central globe flanked by two round “companions.” These were not moons like those he had just discovered about Jupiter, because they virtually touched the central globe, and the appearance of the formation did not change—at least not at the rate of the configuration of Jupiter’s satellites. In 1612, Galileo noticed that the lateral companions had vanished, but he confidently predicted that they would reappear. This did indeed happen, and the lateral globes then slowly took on the appearances of “handles,” or ansae. There was no quick solution to the problem of these puzzling appearances, and it was only as telescopic astronomy was practiced by more and more astronomers, over the next several decades, that sufficient information became available to allow observers to derive the periodicity of these phenomena by the middle of the century. When the ansae again disappeared in the mid-1650s, a number of theories were put forward to explain their appearances (see fig. 5.4 for the various appearances that had been put in print by then), and it was the solution of Christiaan Huygens, published in 1659, that finally proved satisfactory: “Saturn is surrounded by a thin flat ring that does not touch it anywhere and is inclined to the ecliptic.” 23 the wash drawings preserved in the Galileo manuscripts were original and therefore made at the eyepiece of the telescope. See Elizabeth Cavicchi, “Painting the Moon,” Sky and Telescope 82 (1991): 313 –15. 19. Robert Fox, ed., Thomas Harriot: An Elizabethan Man of Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Terrie F. Bloom, “Borrowed Perceptions: Harriot’s Maps of the Moon,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 9 (1978): 117–22; Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno,’ and the ‘Strange Spottednesse’ of the Moon,” Art Journal 44 (1984): 225 –32; and idem, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 223 –53. 20. The first “nebula” is actually a loose clustering of unrelated stars; modern catalogs no longer list it as a nebula or star cluster. See Galileo Galilei, Sidereus nuncius; or, The Sidereal Messenger, trans. Albert Van Helden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 60 – 63. 21. Galilei, Opere, vol. 3, pt. 2, and 5:241– 45. 22. Following the suggestion of John F. W. Herschel in his Outlines of Astronomy (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849). See also John F. W. Herschel, Results of Astronomical Observations Made during the Years 1834, 5, 6, 7, 8, at the Cape of Good Hope: Being the Completion of a Telescopic Survey of the Whole Surface of the Visible Heavens, Commenced in 1825 (London: Smith, Elder, 1847), 415. 23. Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres complètes de Christiaan Huygens, 22 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888 –1950), 15:299; Albert Van Helden, “Saturn and His Anses,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 5 (1974): 105–21; and idem, “‘Annulo Cingitur’: The Solution

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fig. 5.4. SATURN COMPOSITE BY CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS. Telescopic views of the planet Saturn as drawn between 1610 and 1658 by Galileo Galilei (I), Christoph Scheiner (II), Giovanni Battista Riccioli (III, VIII, and IX), Johannes Hevelius (IV–VII), Eustachio Divini (X), Francesco Fontana (XI and XIII), Giuseppe Biancani (XII), and Pierre Gassendi (XIII). Size of the original: ca. 12.2 12.7 cm. Christiaan Huygens, Systema Saturnium, sive de causis mirandorum Saturni Phaenomenon (The Hague, 1659). Photograph courtesy of the John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

Galileo continued the argument against Aristotle and Ptolemy in his controversy with Christoph Scheiner about the nature of sunspots two years after his initial telescopic discoveries. Although Thomas Harriot was the earliest known observer of sunspots, he did not publish his findings. Those of Johann Albert Fabricius and his father, David, in East Frisia, were published in 1611 but drew no attention.24 Christoph Scheiner’s publication of Tres Epistolae de maculis solaribus, in January 1612, set off a debate about these phenomena in which the exact shapes of spots as well as the demonstration of their “coming to be and passing away” were crucial in his argument with Galileo about the nature of sunspots.25 Whereas Scheiner looked directly at the sun through a telescope with the aid of pieces of colored glass, Galileo used a projection technique, which was vastly superior as a research tool (and much safer as well). In his 1613 Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti, Galileo set the example for accurate depictions of heavenly phenomena (fig. 5.5). Scheiner went on to refine this method, and in 1630 he published the definitive work on sunspots, Rosa ursina, which, because of the ensuing minimum in sunspot activity, the so-called Maunder Minimum (ca.

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 5.5. SUNSPOT DRAWING BY GALILEO GALILEI. Galileo’s drawing of the solar disk with sunspots on 19 August 1612 at 2 p.m. Diameter of the original: ca. 12.4 cm. Galileo Galilei, Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro (1613), 94. Photograph courtesy of the BL.

1645 –1715), remained the standard work on sunspots until well into the eighteenth century (ﬁg. 5.6). But whereas sunspots, whose positions and shapes were evanescent phenomena—no sunspot retained its shape, and one could never be entirely sure that a spot that appeared on the eastern limb was the same that had disappeared two weeks earlier on the western limb—lunar phenomena were permanent. The purpose of Galileo’s depictions in Sidereus nuncius was to support his verbal argument that the lunar surface was not perfectly smooth and spherical, but was rough and mountainous like the to the Problem of Saturn,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 5 (1974): 155 –74. See also idem, “Saturn through the Telescope: A Brief Historical Survey,” in Saturn, ed. Tom Gehrels and Mildred Shapley Matthews (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 23 – 43. 24. Johann Albert Fabricius, Joh. Fabricii Phrysii De maculis in sole observatis, et apparente earum cum sole conversione narratio (Wittenberg: Impensis Iohan Borneri Senioris & Eliae Rehifeldii, 1611). 25. The books of Scheiner and Galileo on sunspots are included in Galilei, Opere, 3:369 –508. A partial translation of Galileo’s Istoria e dimostrazioni can be found in Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, ed. Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 87–144.

Lunar, Solar, and Planetary Representations to 1650

fig. 5.6. CHRISTOPH SCHEINER’S SUNSPOT DRAWINGS. Composite drawing of Scheiner’s sunspot observations from 11 to 23 May 1625. The horizontal line denotes the ecliptic, and the table lists the day and hour of observation with the sun’s altitude above the horizon. Diameter of the original: ca. 21 cm. Christoph Scheiner, Rosa ursina (Bracciano, 1630), 211. Photograph courtesy of the BL.

Earth’s. And for two decades depictions of the moon in printed works reﬂected this, as seen, for instance, in the images published by Christoph Scheiner in 1614 and Giuseppe Biancani in 1620.26 But as the argument about the nature of the moon receded from the research front, another aspect became central: the use of the moon in determining longitude on earth. The telescope, it was thought, made it possible to time accurately the progress of the edge of the earth’s shadow as it crossed the moon’s face during a lunar eclipse. If one could specify exact local times (determined by astronomical means) when, for instance, the advancing edge of the shadow crossed a certain spot (now seen to be a crater), one could compare this with the local time noted by an astronomer in another location for the same event. But in order to do this, a standard map was needed with a nomenclature or numbering system for the important features of the moon. As early as 1612, Thomas Harriot made a rough moon map (ﬁg. 5.7), but it remained unpublished, as did the rest of his astronomical observations. The determination of longitude, on land as well as at sea, became an important astronomical research topic in the 1630s.27 Shortly after the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a member of the

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fig. 5.7. THOMAS HARRIOT’S MOON MAP. A full moon drawn by Harriot with the aid of a telescope in about 1610. North is at the top. The numbers and letters indicate various features observed by Harriot on the lunar surface. Diameter of the original: ca. 15.1 cm. Photograph courtesy of Lord Egremont and the West Sussex Record Office, Chichester (Harriot Papers, Petworth House Archives, HMC 241/9, fol. 30).

parliament of Aix en Provence, a humanist, and a patron of learning, had already begun a project to use the varying configurations of the satellites of Jupiter to determine longitudes by means of a network of correspondents. His plan for a “bureau of longitude” failed because the positions of the satellites changed too slowly to provide the requisite precision. In the 1630s, together with the astronomer Pierre Gassendi, de Peiresc revived the idea, this time with the plan of making observations during lunar eclipses. For this purpose he began making a map of the moon’s surface, and the effort was taken over by other observers in Aix. It was finally the well-known engraver 26. This was also the case with the ancient method of lunar dichotomy, where determining the exact moment when the terminator bisected the disk of the moon could be used, it was thought, to measure the ratio of the geocentric distances of sun and moon. John William Shirley, Thomas Harriot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). For the diagram-like images of the lunar face of Scheiner and Biancani, see Christoph Scheiner and Johannes Georgius Locher, Disquisitiones mathematicae de controversiis et novitatibus astronomicis (Ingolstadt, 1614), 58, and Giuseppe Biancani, Sphaera mundi, seu Cosmographica demonstrativa ac facili methodo tradita (Bologna, 1620), 150. 27. Two drawings of the full moon made by Harriot survive: West Sussex Record Office, Harriot Papers, Petworth House Archives, HMC 241/9, fols. 28 and 30. For reproductions, see Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 18, and O. van de Vijver, Lunar Maps of the XVIIth Century (Vatican City: Specola Vaticana, 1971), fig. 3.

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50.5 centimeters (with a lunar disk of 35 cm), was published in 1645 (ﬁg. 5.9).30 Following the belief of Galileo Galilei and other early telescopic observers that the darker areas on the moon represented water, Van Langren named these, depending on their size and location, oceanus (ocean), mare (sea), sinus (gulf or bay), lacus (lake), or fretum (strait). The largest dark area in the northwestern corner of the moon was called Oceanus Philippicus, with its northern extensions Mare Austriacum and Sinus Principis. Van Langren’s lunar map contained 322 named features, of which the largest were named after members of the Habsburg and other ruling families, while many of the smaller were named after famous scholars and astronomers. The most widely distributed map of the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century was made by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius, who produced a large and sumptuous book on the study of the moon, Selenographia, in 1647. In his earlier travels, Hevelius had met Gassendi in France, and when, upon the death of de Peiresc, the “bureau of longitude” project languished, Hevelius took it up

fig. 5.8. CLAUDE MELLAN’S MOON MAP. First quarter moon as observed on 7 October 1636, drawn and engraved by Mellan. The lunar surface is illuminated from the west (as seen by a terrestrial observer). North is at the top. Size of the original: 22.3 16.8 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Ed. 32, P.119 Mellan).

Claude Mellan who produced three engravings of the moon’s face, first quarter (fig. 5.8), full moon, and last quarter (1636 –37).28 These remarkable likenesses show Mellan’s skill as well as the scientific limitations of the artistic approach. Mellan represented the moon the way it appears, with the most contrast around the terminator (the boundary between the illuminated and dark areas on the lunar disk) and little contrast toward the limb. The full moon shows relatively little contrast because there are nearly no shadows. What observers needed, however, was not so much a likeness of the moon as a map. At this point, the aims of the artist and the astronomer diverged. The first published scientific map of the moon was produced by the Dutch-Flemish cartographer Michael Florent van Langren, who in 1631 had been appointed by the Habsburg king Philip IV as royal cosmographer and mathematician.29 His moon map entitled Plenilunii lumina austriaca philippica (The luminaries of Felipe of Austria on the full moon) and measuring about 39.5 by

28. Pierre Humbert, “La première carte de la lune,” Revue des Questions Scientifiques 100 (1931): 194 –204; idem, Un amateur: Peiresc, 1580 –1637 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer et Cie, 1933), 226 –31; Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 29 –35; and Van de Vijver, Lunar Maps, figs. 4 – 6. See also William B. Ashworth, The Face of the Moon: Galileo to Apollo, exhibition catalog (Kansas City, Mo.: Linda Hall Library, 1989). 29. For recent literature on Van Langren, see Peter van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici: The Production of Globes in the Low Countries (Utrecht: HES, 1993), 263 –71, and idem, “Das ‘Plenilunium’ des Michael Florent van Langren: Die erste Mondkarte mit Namenseinträgen,” Cartographica Helvetica 11 (1995): 44 – 49. 30. The moon map is preserved in an autograph version and five printed copies. The autograph version is located in Brussels, Archives Générales. For a reproduction of this copy, see Van de Vijver, Lunar Maps, fig. 7, and Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 39, fig. 25 (only forty-eight lunar features are named). For reference to the copy in Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, see A. J. M. Wanders, Op ontdekking in het maanland (Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1950), pl. VI. For reference to the copy at the BNF, see Zdeneˇk Kopal, The Moon (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), 228, fig. 15.3; and Zdeneˇk Kopal and Robert W. Carder, Mapping of the Moon: Past and Present (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 13, fig. 1.9. For a reproduction of the copy in Edinburgh, Crawford Library of the Royal Observatory, see Van de Vijver, Lunar Maps, fig. 8; Ewen A. Whitaker, “Selenography in the Seventeenth Century,” in Planetary Astronomy from the Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics, 2 vols., ed. René Taton and Curtis Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 –95), vol. 2, pt. A, 118 – 43, esp. 130, fig. 8.8; and idem, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 41, fig. 26. For reference to the copy in San Fernando (Cádiz), Biblioteca del Instituto y Observatorio de Marina, see Julio González, “Plenilunii Lumina Austriaca Philippica: El mapa de la luna de Miguel Florencio Van Langren (1645),” Revista de Historia Naval 4, no. 13 (1986): 99 –110. For a reproduction of the copy in Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire, see Van de Vijver, Lunar Maps, fig. 9, and Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 43, fig. 27. The map was originally bound in a copy of the Selenographia sive lunae descriptio of Hevelius.

fig. 5.9. PLENILUNII LUMINA AUSTRIACA PHILIPPICA BY MICHAEL FLORENT VAN LANGREN, 1645. An annotated map of the moon by Van Langren, published in Brussels in 1645. North is at the top.

Size of the original: 50.5 39.5 cm (lunar disk, 35 cm). Photograph courtesy of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden (Collectie Bodel Nijenhuis, nr. 505-10-003).

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fig. 5.10. MOON MAP BY JOHANNES HEVELIUS, 1647. A map of the moon based on the observations of Hevelius. The lunar surface is shown realistically as illuminated from the east (i.e., between full moon and new moon). North is at the top.

Johannes Hevelius, Selenographia, sive lunae descriptio (Danzig, 1647), fig. R (between 262 and 263). Photograph courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

with Gassendi’s approval and encouragement. For several years Hevelius observed the moon during all its phases, drawing and engraving the lunar face himself and personally supervising the printing of the plates. Selenographia contained three large (28 cm) renderings of the full moon, marked P, R (ﬁg. 5.10), and Q, which illustrate the problems of lunar cartography of the time.31 Figure P shows an accurate telescopic likeness of the full moon. In order to enhance the details, Hevelius turned the image into a map, R, in which an artiﬁcial morning illumination makes the spots (craters) stand out: these features were

the most useful in timing shadow fronts in eclipses. But there was also the matter of naming the features, and Hevelius used the names of terrestrial features, in the hope of avoiding controversy. These names are presented 31. Johannes Hevelius, Selenographia, sive lunae descriptio (1647; reprinted New York: Johnson Reprint, 1967), and Mary G. Winkler and Albert Van Helden, “Johannes Hevelius and the Visual Language of Astronomy,” in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 97–116.

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fig. 5.11. GIOVANNI BATTISTA RICCIOLI’S MOON MAP, 1651. A map of the moon based on the moon maps of Van Langren and Hevelius, supplemented with the observations of Francesco Maria Grimaldi. North is at the top.

Size of the original: ca. 31.7 31.1 cm. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens, 2 vols. (Bologna: Victorij Benatij, 1651), 1:2041⁄ 2. Photograph courtesy of Special Collections and Rare Books, Wilson Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

in a list but also labeled on a map, Q, which was drawn using the conventions of terrestrial mapmaking (and engraved not by Hevelius himself, but by Jeremias Falck, an engraver with more than a passing acquaintance with cartography). In the transition from the developing astronomical to the established earthly cartographic conven-

tions, a number of features were misrepresented; for instance, so-called crater rays were represented as a chain of mountains. Hevelius’s lunar nomenclature harks back to Galileo’s argument for the earthlike nature of the moon. Hevelius’s maps were the ﬁrst to show more than half the moon’s surface, using two overlapping circles.

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And although Hevelius marked the circumference(s) in degrees, there was no attempt to establish latitude and longitude division. Hevelius also engraved small outline maps of the moon, and he used these to communicate his observations of lunar eclipses to his correspondents.32 Selenographia became the most authoritative monograph on the moon of the seventeenth century,33 and Hevelius’s nomenclature was used by many astronomers, whereas Van Langren’s nomenclature, bound as it was to the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic religion, was quickly forgotten. But Hevelius’s nomenclature was cumbersome because of its many types of characterizations: there were not only continents, seas, regions, and bays, but also rocks, swamps, marshes, and eruptions (outbreaks).34 Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a Jesuit professor at Bologna, proposed a simpler alternative nomenclature in his influential 1651 review and compilation of astronomy, Almagestum novum. Riccioli published two moon maps made by his associate Francesco Maria Grimaldi, who drew on the moon maps of Van Langren, Hevelius, and others but improved them by means of his own observations. The first is a blank map with the features accented by evening illumination (following Van Langren rather than Hevelius). The second map (fig. 5.11) shows the libration limits 35 by means of two overlapping circles (after Hevelius) and is divided into eight sectors. Here Riccioli’s proposed nomenclature was added. Riccioli used fewer physical characterizations than Hevelius (e.g., ocean, sea, land, peninsula) and named the smaller spots (craters) after philosophers and scientists. The followers of Copernicus were thrown together in the Ocean of Storm (Oceanus Procellarum).36 Riccioli’s nomenclature vied with that of Hevelius for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century replaced it because it was easier to use. It is the system we still use today, with only minor corrections and a large number of additions.

Conclusion By the middle of the seventeenth century, astronomers were well on their way to developing their own conventions for representing heavenly bodies as they were revealed by the telescope. The study of sunspots had come to a virtual stop because of the absence of these phenom-

ena during what is now referred to as the Maunder Minimum. Therefore, Scheiner’s Rosa ursina remained the definitive treatment. In the case of the moon, although there was no agreement yet on whether to use morning or evening illumination (favored, respectively, by Hevelius and Van Langren), the example of Riccioli meant that in this respect Van Langren would win out in the long run. As for the engraving, it was the continuous burin-cut method used by Mellan and followed by both Hevelius and Riccioli that won out. Hevelius’s method of representing the libration limits by means of overlapping circles was also adopted by Riccioli and was the dominant technique for more than a century. With each increase in light-gathering power of the telescope, new celestial discoveries were made (five new satellites of Saturn, for instance, between 1655 and 1684), and the individual planets were beginning to show surface features (Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn). Most important for terrestrial cartography, astronomical measuring instruments improved to allow the first accurate determination of the length of a degree and the shape of the Earth (a subject of considerable controversy until the middle of the eighteenth century), while the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites provided, for the first time, a convenient method of determining longitude on land (although they never solved the problem of calculating longitude at sea) and thus lay at the heart of the revolution in geodesy and cartography.

32. Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 50 –57, and Van de Vijver, Lunar Maps, 76 and ﬁgs. 14 –17. 33. It is interesting to note that in his world map of 1673, Novissima totius terrarum orbis tabula, John Seller included small reproductions of Hevelius’s moon maps Q and R. See Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472 –1700, 4th ed. (Riverside, Conn.: Early World, 2001), 478 –79 (no. 460) and XXXIX (pl. 12). 34. Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 45 – 46 and 51–56. 35. Due to the apparent “nodding” of the moon, caused by the axial rotation of the moon in its elliptical orbit and the position of the terrestrial observer, up to 59 percent of the lunar surface can be seen from the earth at one time or another. 36. Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum novum astronomiam veterem novamque complectens, 2 vols. (Bologna: Victorij Benatij, 1651), 1:204 – 6; Whitaker, Mapping and Naming the Moon, 60 – 68; and Van de Vijver, Lunar Maps, 77–78 and ﬁgs. 20 –21.

6 • Globes in Renaissance Europe Elly Dekker

Introduction In 1533 Hans Holbein the Younger, the foremost painter then in London, made the portrait now known as The Ambassadors (fig. 6.1).1 One of the remarkable features of this painting is the abundance of scientific instruments depicted in it. On the top shelf there is a celestial globe, a pillar dial, an equinoctial dial (in two parts), a horary quadrant, a polyhedral dial, and, on top of a book, an astronomical instrument known as a torquetum. On the lower shelf there is a terrestrial globe, a book on arithmetic, a set square and a pair of dividers, a lute with broken strings, a case of flutes, and a hymnbook.2 The objects displayed between the two men are rarely seen together in paintings. Why they were included in The Ambassadors and what message they should convey to the audience are still a matter of debate between art historians. Whatever they mean, for the history of globemaking the appearance of a pair of globes in such worldly surroundings as the London court is very telling. Holbein’s Ambassadors is not the first painting showing both a terrestrial and a celestial sphere (plate 4). In the lower right corner of The School of Athens, the wellknown fresco painted by Raphael in 1510 –11, a group of men is engaged in discussion: Euclid with a slate board and a pair of dividers, Ptolemy with a terrestrial sphere in his hand, and a third person, who is said to be the great mystical magician Zoroaster, carrying a celestial sphere.3 The important thing to note in comparing the globes painted by Raphael with those of Holbein is that those of Raphael do not seem to be real things, whereas those of Holbein certainly are.4 A feature that stands out very clearly in The Ambassadors is the difference in the way the terrestrial and the celestial globes are mounted. The celestial globe depicted by Holbein has all the accessories of a fully operative globe. It appears that its model was a celestial globe by Johannes Schöner.5 The terrestrial globe lacks a mounting that would allow one to set the sphere in agreement with one’s place on earth.6 Instead the globe is mounted on a handle, as is observed in some early armillary spheres.7 Globes mounted in this particular way have not

Abbreviations used in this chapter include: Globes at Greenwich for Elly Dekker et al., Globes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Globes and Armillary Spheres in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (Oxford: Oxford University Press and the National Maritime Museum, 1999). 1. The best study of the painting and its provenance still is the book by Mary Frederica Sophia Hervey, Holbein’s “Ambassadors”: The Picture and the Men (London: Bell and Sons, 1900). See also Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Holbein’s Ambassadors (London: National Gallery Publications, 1997), esp. 30 – 43; the information about the globes and the instruments provided in this catalog should be considered with some care. 2. The book on arithmetic is that by Peter Apian, titled Eyn newe und wolgegründete underweisunge aller Kauffmans Rechnung (Ingolstadt, 1527), and the hymn book is by Johann Walther [Walter], Geystliche gesangk Buchleyn (Wittenberg, 1525). 3. James H. Beck, Raphael: The Stanza della Segnatura (New York: George Braziller, 1993), 88 – 89; see also José Ruysschaert, “Du globe terrestre attribué à Giulio Romano aux globes et au planisphère oubliés de Nicolaus Germanus,” Bollettino dei Monumenti Musei e Gallerie Pontificie 6 (1985): 93 –104, esp. 102 – 4. 4. From the perspective of globemaking, this is a pity. Had Raphael looked around for a model for his globes, he could have chosen the pair built in 1477 by Nicolaus Germanus, then available in the Vatican; see Ruysschaert, “Du globe terrestre,” 103. Another “concept” globe, a transparent celestial globe showing the earth inside it, was painted by Raphael in one of the corners of his Stanza in the Vatican; see Kristen Lippincott, “Raphael’s ‘Astronomia’: Between Art and Science,” in Making Instruments Count: Essays on Historical Scientific Instruments, Presented to Gerard L’Estrange Turner, ed. R. G. W. Anderson, J. A. Bennett, and W. F. Ryan (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 75 – 87. It must be said that the celestial map of Raphael’s globe is fairly realistic, and the same can be said of the map of the terrestrial sphere in Donato Bramante’s fresco of 1490 –99 depicting Democritus and Heraclitus. This shows that terrestrial and celestial globes were not uncommon around 1500 anymore. For Bramante’s globe, see Jay A. Levenson, ed., Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 229. 5. The attribution is justified in Elly Dekker and Kristen Lippincott, “The Scientific Instruments in Holbein’s Ambassadors: A ReExamination,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 93 –125. See also Elly Dekker, “The Globes in Holbein’s Painting The Ambassadors,” Der Globusfreund 47– 48 (1999): 19 –52 (in English and German). 6. The maker of the model for the terrestrial globe has not yet been identified. Considering that this globe lacks a scale along the equator, it is doubtful that the model was made by a professional globemaker of similar repute to that of Johannes Schöner. 7. An example of an armillary sphere with handle is shown in Focus Behaim Globus, 2 vols. (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseums, 1992), 2:518 –19 (no. 1.17).

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nineteenth-century perspective, in which a globe was valued predominantly for the map on the surface of its sphere. In this chapter globes are considered as (mechanical) representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.8 Only when seen in this way can one hope to understand why “geographers in the early and middle years of the 16th century were concerned how best to express the relationship between the terrestrial and celestial spheres,” why “the generally accepted solution was a matching pair of terrestrial and celestial globes accompanied by a book of instruction,” and why “these remained for some 300 years the main instruments and method of geographical teaching.” 9 Readers interested simply and singly in the mappings of globes are referred to the literature cited in the list of globes in appendix 6.1.

The Legacy medieval concepts fig. 6.1. THE AMBASSADORS, PAINTED BY HANS HOLBEIN, 1533. Oil on oak. This full-length portrait was designed for the château of the Dinteville family in Polisy, a small village southeast of Paris. To the left one sees Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador to Henry VIII; on the right is his friend George de Selve. Size of the original: 207 209.5 cm. Photograph © National Gallery, London (NG 1314).

come down to us, but it makes sense to assume that such globes did exist for a short time. The terrestrial globe in The Ambassadors also attracts attention for showing the line dividing the world into two spheres of influence, as agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal in 1494. In diplomatic circles the division of the world, however indefensible, was a topic of great political importance that resulted in, among other things, one of the most daring undertakings of those days: the first circumnavigation of the world. The voyages of discovery had a great impact on globemaking, as is well illustrated by the development of the maps of the terrestrial globe. The celestial map was also eventually affected by new data gathered by early explorers. Nevertheless, the explorations alone do not explain the striking rise in popularity of both types of globe around 1500. If the history of cartography in the Renaissance teaches one thing, it is the enormous progress made at that time in understanding the various projections that can be used for mapping the surface of the earth on a plane. How, then, could the globe be so successful in competing with the much cheaper maps of the world? Or, to put it differently, what does a globe offer that a map does not? A first step toward answering this question is to adopt a definition of a globe that differs from the general

In discussing the legacy of ancient and medieval science, Lindberg made a point of explaining to his readers that scholars in the past had been “preoccupied with a problem of their own—namely, the need to comprehend the world in which they lived, within the bounds of an inherited conceptual framework that defined the important questions and suggested useful ways of answering them.” 10 What, then, was the inherited conceptual framework that the scholars of the Renaissance were part of? The overall scheme to which the discussions about the structure of the world were limited around 1500 is shown in figure 6.2. It is taken from one of the many editions of the most popular textbook in the Renaissance, the Cosmographicus liber, first published in 1524 by Peter Apian.11 With small variations, it is encountered and explained in many textbooks on Renaissance cosmography.12 One such description, for example, from The Castle of Knowledge, written by the English physician Robert 8. This definition is a free adaptation of that used for maps in the preface of HC 1:xv–xxi, esp. xvi. 9. Helen M. Wallis and Arthur H. Robinson, eds., Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900 (Tring, Eng.: Map Collector Publications in association with the International Cartographic Association, 1987), 26; Elly Dekker, “The Doctrine of the Sphere: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of Globes,” Globe Studies (English version of Der Globusfreund) 49 –50 (2002): 25 – 44. 10. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 363. 11. Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut, 1524). 12. For a good review, see S. K. Heninger, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1977), esp. 35 –38 and 41.

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codiﬁed throughout the centuries by the outline of its main circles, and demonstrated by armillary spheres. Thus in the chapter “Of the Circles and Their Names,” a number of greater and smaller celestial circles are explained. Of these various circles there are two that are directly related to the location of a place on earth and later were materialized in globes: There are yet two other great circles in the sphere, namely, the meridian and the horizon. The meridian is a circle passing through the poles of the world and through our zenith [that is, the pole of our local horizon], and it is called “meridian” because, wherever a man may be and at whatever time of year, when the sun with the movement of the ﬁrmament reaches his meridian, it is noon for him. For like reason it is called the “circle of midday.” And it is to be noted that cities of which one is farther east than the other have different meridians. The arc of the equinoctial intercepted between two meridians is called the “longitude” of the city. If two cities have the same meridian, then they are equally distant from east and from west. 15

FIG.

6.2. THE PTOLEMAIC UNIVERSE. A schematic presentation of the Ptolemaic universe from Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber (Landshut, 1524). The outermost sphere is the empyrean, habitation of God and all the elect; the tenth sphere is the prime mover; the ninth sphere, the crystalline sphere; the eighth sphere, the firmament; the seventh sphere, Saturn; the sixth sphere, Jupiter; the fifth sphere, Mars; the fourth sphere, the sun; the third sphere, Venus; the second sphere, Mercury; the first sphere, the moon; and finally the sublunary spheres of fire, air, and water-land. Size of the original: 15.4 14.3 cm. Photograph courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Recorde in 1556, reads: “The whole worlde is rounde exactlye as anye ball or globe, and so are all the principall partes of it, everye sphere severallye and joyntlye, as well of the Planetes, as of the Fixed starres, and so are all the foure Elementes. And they are aptely placed togither, not as a numbre of rounde balles in a nette, but every sphere includeth other, as they be in ordre of greatnes, beginning at the eighte sphere or firmamente, and so descending to the laste and lowest sphere, is the Sphere of the Mone: under which the foure elementes succede: first the fier, then the ayer: nexte foloweth the water: which with the earth joyntlie annexed, maketh as it were, one sphere only.” 13 This Renaissance model of the world is in many respects the same as that taught to students as part of the liberal arts in the Middle Ages and described in the popular astronomical textbook the Sphere, written by thirteenth-century author Johannes de Sacrobosco (John of Holywood or Halifax).14 In addition to describing the system of (nine) spheres, his treatise contains a description of the structure of the celestial sphere as it had been

Thus the longitude of a place on earth was clearly defined in the Middle Ages, and although Sacrobosco himself does not consider ways to determine the longitude, a method for doing so with the help of a lunar eclipse is mentioned, for instance, in the thirteenth-century commentary of Robertus Anglicus.16 Sacrobosco is less direct in his definition of latitude. Yet the elevation of the pole above the horizon is discussed, and it is shown that its value equals the distance of the zenith from the equator, which in the commentary of Robertus Anglicus is explicitly recognized as being the latitude of a place.17 It may therefore be taken for granted that from the later Middle Ages on there existed a clear notion of spherical coordinates such as longitude and latitude, although such coordinates were not yet used in mapmaking but served predominantly astronomical purposes.18 One of the characteristics of the Sphere of Sacrobosco is its emphasis on the rudiments of astronomy. The planets or wandering stars are hardly mentioned. An exception was made for the sun, and understandably so. Although the sun did not occupy the central position in the Ptolemaic world system, it played a vital role in the outline of the world at large and continued to do so in the Re13. Robert Recorde [Record], The Castle of Knowledge (London: R. Wolfe, 1556), 9 –10, quoted from Heninger, Cosmographical Glass, 34. 14. Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco and Its Commentators (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 118 –26. See also David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in HC 1:286 –370, esp. 306 –7 (fig. 18.16). 15. Thorndike, Sphere of Sacrobosco, 126. 16. Thorndike, Sphere of Sacrobosco, 244 – 45. 17. Thorndike, Sphere of Sacrobosco, 231. 18. Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 323.

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naissance world. From classical times until the discovery of compasses, the rising of the sun was used to define the east point, and its setting the west point on the horizon, and when the sun arrived “under” 19 the meridian of a place at noon, it reached its highest distance above the horizon in the south. Various circles of the Ptolemaic celestial sphere—the ecliptic, the tropics, and the colures— can be understood only in terms of the sun’s apparent annual and daily motion. In addition, an understanding of the motion of the sun is essential for understanding such geographical concepts as the zones, the climates, and the parallels; from classical times on the most direct way of finding the latitude of a place was by measuring the length of the shadow cast by the sun at noon. Therefore, the role of the sun can certainly not be ignored in discussing the Ptolemaic world. According to the simplified astronomical theory discussed by Sacrobosco, the sun and the stars—in fact, all the heavenly bodies except the earth—were endowed with two types of movement. The first, a daily motion, was generated by the outermost sphere of the universe, the socalled primum mobile, or the first mover. By it the sun and the stars were pulled round the axis of the world in twentyfour hours, rising in the east and setting in the west. The other motion was opposite to the daily rotation and around an axis through the poles of the ecliptic. This great circle was called ecliptic because “when sun and moon are on that line there occurs an eclipse of sun or moon.” 20 By convention the ecliptic is divided into the twelve signs of the zodiac, such that the signs of Aries and Libra start at the respective points of intersection between the ecliptic and the equator or equinoctial line, the great circle defined by the poles of the world. The annual motion of the sun “beneath” the ecliptic explains the varying length of the day during the seasons, and the small circles, known as the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, trace its daily motion in the summer or winter when the sun has reached the sign of Cancer or Capricorn, respectively. the contribution of ptolemy The interest in earthly and heavenly affairs was greatly enhanced during the Renaissance by the humanist movement and the revival of interest in classical authors. Two great classical works on astronomy and geography written by the Alexandrian astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy, his Almagest and his Geography, were among the sources specifically involved in the making of Renaissance celestial and terrestrial globes. The reason for this, it is often claimed, is that the Almagest contains the oldest guide for making a celestial globe, and that the Geography preserves the oldest instructions for drawing the outlines of lands and seas on the surface of a sphere.21 However, it is important to realize that the Geography was certainly not intended as a manual for the construc-

tion of terrestrial globes.22 Rather than promoting the construction of globes, Ptolemy complained of the limited scope offered by a globe in comparison with maps, and turned with zeal to explaining the mathematics involved in mapmaking.23 He definitely appears to have preferred maps to globes. Similarly it is important to realize that the Almagest was not intended as a manual on the construction of celestial globes. The globe described in the Almagest is not a common globe. Neither is the Almagest an elementary treatise on astronomy. The treatise is written for “those who have already made some progress in the field.” 24 For such readers the common globe held no secrets because it was an essential part of the study of the rudiments of astronomy, for example, as described in such treatises as Introduction to Phaenomena, written in the first century b.c. by Geminus.25 If this is so, why did Ptolemy include a description of a globe? The clue is called precession, or the “motion of the equinoxes,” the phenomenon at the base of the slow variation of the coordinates of the fixed stars over the years. In Ptolemy’s day precession was a very novel feature, the understanding of which was crucial in discussing the main theme of the Almagest, the motions of the sun and the planets. It is for this reason that a description of a relevant demonstration model, the socalled precession globe, is included in the Almagest.26 With its help, the “motion of the equinoxes” can be imitated by a rotation of the polar axis of the universe around that of the ecliptic. The only surviving globe from the Middle Ages, dating from about 1325 (app. 6.1,

19. The meridians were thought to be part of the eighth sphere! 20. Thorndike, Sphere of Sacrobosco, 125. 21. G. J. Toomer, trans. and anno., Ptolemy’s Almagest (1984; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 404 –7 (7.3), and J. L. Berggren and Alexander Jones, Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 83 – 84 (1.22). 22. This could possibly explain why no terrestrial globes from antiquity or medieval times are known and why the Islamic world seems not to have taken an interest in the terrestrial globe either. 23. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, 82 – 83 (1.20); the relevant passage is quoted in O. A. W. Dilke and eds., “The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy,” in HC 1:177–200, esp. 185. 24. Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest, 6 and 37 (1.1). 25. For Geminus, see O. Neugebauer, A History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 3 vols. (Berlin: Springer, 1975), 2:578 – 89; see also Germaine Aujac and eds., “Greek Cartography in the Early Roman World,” in HC 1:161–76, esp. 170 –71. 26. Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest, 404 –7 (8.3). The best comment on Ptolemy’s celestial globe is by Neugebauer, Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 2:890 –92 and 3:1399 (ﬁgs. 79 – 80); the interpretation of Ptolemy’s celestial globe in Dilke, “Culmination of Greek Cartography,” 181– 82, is not correct, as is noticed by Emilie Savage-Smith, “Celestial Mapping,” in HC 2.1:12 –70, esp. 43 n. 92. See also Elly Dekker, “Precession Globes,” in Musa Musaei: Studies on Scientiﬁc Instruments and Collections in Honour of Mara Miniati, ed. Marco Beretta, Paolo Galluzzi, and Carlo Triarico (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2003), 219 –35.

Globes in Renaissance Europe

no. 1), was made by following the description in the Almagest to the very letter. This globe was acquired by Nicolaus Cusanus during a visit in September 1444 to Nuremberg, together with two other instruments and sixteen manuscripts for 38 guilders.27 In this model the celestial sphere is mounted at the ecliptic poles inside an outer sphere consisting in principle of three brass rings, which represent the colures and the equator, respectively. This outer sphere, which can rotate around the axis through the ecliptic poles of the celestial sphere, represents a movable equatorial coordinate grid, because when it is rotated, the colures, the equatorial poles, and the equator shift their positions. In this way one can adapt the positions of the equatorial poles to an arbitrary epoch. The outer sphere is in principle mounted in a meridian ring at its equatorial poles such that it—and the whole system contained in it— can rotate to demonstrate the diurnal motion of the celestial sphere as usual. Only the solstitial colure of the outer sphere of the Cusanus globe has survived, but the holes in the surface of the globe show that it was used for different epochs, one of which suggests the date of ca. 1325. In the mainstream of globemaking Ptolemy’s demonstration model received no following. As a rule, Islamic and Western globes were designed for a specific epoch, meaning that the positions of the stars are correct only for one specific date. Although Ptolemy exerted little direct influence on the construction of globes, the impact of his two works in providing basic data, such as the geographical coordinates of places and the celestial coordinates of the stars to be plotted on the globe, can hardly be overestimated.28 These data were not without their shortcomings. With the Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Geography completed ca. 1406, a lengthy process of adaptation and correction of data began, the description of which lies outside the scope of this chapter. In contrast, all star catalogs used by Islamic globemakers, and by Western globemakers before 1600, are directly or indirectly derived from the original Ptolemaic star catalog published in the Almagest. This changed only around 1600, when Tycho Brahe produced a new catalog based on new observations. early (recorded) globes Notwithstanding its limitations and uncertainties, Ptolemy’s Geography provided the bulk of the data needed to make a terrestrial globe, and for that reason terrestrial globemaking initially was closely tied to this work. The first terrestrial globe we hear of is mentioned in a copy of a treatise titled “Regionum sive civitatum distantiae,” the original version of which goes back to possibly 1430 –35. The treatise starts with instructions for making a terrestrial globe, but its main aim is to describe how to make maps of the type called “Munich cosmographies.” 29 The coordinates used in these maps can be ob-

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tained only with the aid of a real terrestrial globe. We may therefore assume that such a terrestrial globe was in existence in Vienna at the time. Another early terrestrial globe is mentioned in a 1467 inventory of the library of Philip the Good. Among the objects listed is “a round globe in the form of an apple and a black leather case and a paper book with a vellum binding titled: Explanation of the Globe, in French, beginning on the second leaf with the meridians, and on the last, the sea to the East.” 30 This little globe had been made around 1440 – 44 by a man named Hobit, the court astronomer of Philip the Good, as is clear from a receipt dated January 1443 (or 31 March 1444) for an amount of money paid: “To Master Guillaume Hobit, astronomer, the sum of 78 gold ridres as much for his expenses as for his three and a half years’ work on the globe according to Ptolemy’s description.” 31 Compared to the little-known early development of terrestrial globes, the historical situation of celestial globes is decidedly better. Three objects are known from antiquity: the Farnese Atlas and two recently discovered small celestial spheres, one of which served as decoration at the top of a gnomon.32 Moreover, from a.d. 800 on-

27. Neugebauer, Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 2:578; Johannes Hartmann, “Die astronomischen Instrumente des Kardinals Nikolaus Cusanus,” Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Mathematisch-Physikalische Klasse, n.s. 10 (1919). The two other instruments are an astrolabe and a torquetum. An example of the latter instrument is shown on the right of the top shelf of The Ambassadors (ﬁg. 6.1). 28. Toomer, Ptolemy’s Almagest, 341–99 (7.5 – 8.1); Ptolemy, The Geography, trans. and ed. Edward Luther Stevenson (1932; reprinted New York: Dover, 1991), 48 –159 (2.1–7.6). 29. Dana Bennett Durand, The Vienna-Klosterneuburg Map Corpus of the Fifteenth Century: A Study in the Transition from Medieval to Modern Science (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1952), 164 –79. The term “Munich cosmographies” is used by Durand because the maps are based on cosmographic tables found in the third section of the manuscript in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (CLM 14583). On the ﬁrst terrestrial globe, see chapter 10 in this volume, note 30 (pp. 372 –73). 30. Quoted in Jacques Paviot, “La mappamonde attribuée à Jan van Eyck par Fàcio: Une pièce à retirer du catalogue de son œuvre,” Revue des Archéologues et Historiens d’Art de Louvain 24 (1991): 57– 62, esp. 58. See also Jacques Paviot, “Ung mapmonde rond, en guise de Pom(m)e: Ein Erdglobus von 1440 – 44, hergestellt für Philipp den Guten, Herzog von Burgund,” Der Globusfreund 43 – 44 (1995): 19 – 29. The use of the French word pomme or the German Apfel to indicate a model of the earth, according to Schramm, shows that at the time such models were not yet common and were associated with what resembled them most: the Reichsapfel. See Percy Ernst Schramm, Sphaira, Globus, Reichsapfel: Wanderung und Wandlung eines Herrschaftszeichens von Caesar bis zu Elisabeth II. (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1958), 180. 31. Quoted in Paviot, “La mappamonde attribuée à Jan van Eyck par Fàcio,” 59. 32. For the Farnese Atlas, see, for example, Vladimiro Valerio, “Historiographic and Numerical Notes on the Atlante Farnese and Its Celestial Sphere,” Der Globusfreund 35 –37 (1987): 97–126 (in English

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sent a higher level of abstraction. Understanding them requires knowledge of advanced mathematics. Neugebauer suspects that the excessive attention given to the stereographic projection used in the design of astrolabes effectively delayed the development of spherical trigonometry in Europe.38 Had there been globes in the Middle Ages, this might not have happened. An early drawing of a celestial globe from 1435/44 is shown in ﬁgure 6.3. It is taken from a manuscript, “Tractatus de compositione sphaeræ solidæ,” by the founder of the Viennese astronomical school, Johannes von Gmunden. After his death he left his manuscripts and instruments to the University of Vienna. Among his models was a celestial globe, which may well have had the outer characteristics of the globe drawn in ﬁgure 6.3.39 Other records show that his famous pupils Georg von Peuerbach and Johannes Regiomontanus also owned or were acquainted with the making of celestial globes.40

fig. 6.3. DRAWING OF A CELESTIAL GLOBE. The drawing is from the manuscript treatise “Tractatus de compositione sphaeræ solidæ” dated 1435/44 and connected with the work of Johannes von Gmunden. Size of the original: 29 21 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Bildarchiv, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (Codex 5415, fol. 180v).

ward many globes were produced in the Islamic world.33 Early medieval treatises on how to make such globes were based on the Islamic traditions. The treatise on the use of the celestial globe by Qusta¯ ibn Lu¯qa¯ was translated into Latin by Stephanus Arnaldus as De sphaera solida. A Spanish version of this work (1259) is included in the collection of studies known as Libros del saber de astronomía.34 And the Sphaera solida discussed in a text ascribed to John of Harlebeke in the early fourteenth century is suspected to have been compiled from texts that ultimately derive from Arabic sources.35 The earliest records on the production of celestial globes in Western Europe go back to the tenth century.36 Yet in contrast to its ﬂourishing in antiquity and in the Islamic world, globemaking was not at all successful in the Latin West. The precession globe mentioned earlier is the exception that proves the rule. It appears that in medieval times the European imagination was channeled into making astrolabes rather than globes.37 This is in fact amazing. Projections of a sphere onto a ﬂat surface usually repre-

and German); see also Germaine Aujac and eds., “The Foundations of Theoretical Cartography in Archaic and Classical Greece,” in HC 1: 130 – 47, esp. 142 – 43. For the other globe, see Ernst Künzl, “Der Globus im Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseum Mainz: Der bisher einzige komplette Himmelsglobus aus dem griechisch-römischen Altertum,” Der Globusfreund 45 – 46 (1998): 7–153 (in German and English); Ernst Künzl, with contributions from Maiken Fecht and Susanne Greiff, “Ein römischer Himmelsglobus der mittleren Kaiserzeit: Studien zur römischen Astralikonographie,” Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 47 (2000): 495 –594; Alexis Kugel, Spheres: The Art of the Celestial Mechanic (Paris: J. Kugel, 2002); and Hélène Cuvigny, “Une sphère céleste antique en argent ciselé,” in Gedenkschrift Ulrike Horak (P. Horak), 2 vols., ed. Hermann Harrauer and Rosario Pintaudi (Florence: Gonnelli, 2004), 2:345 – 81. 33. Emilie Savage-Smith, Islamicate Celestial Globes: Their History, Construction, and Use (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), and idem, “Celestial Mapping,” 42 – 49. 34. Savage-Smith, Islamicate Celestial Globes, 21–22. See also Richard Lorch, “The Sphera Solida and Related Instruments,” in Arabic Mathematical Sciences: Instruments, Texts, Transmission, by Richard Lorch, item XII (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), esp. 158. 35. Lorch, “Sphera Solida.” 36. A celestial globe is mentioned in a letter of 15 January 989 by Gerbert; see Pope Sylvester II, The Letters of Gerbert, with His Papal Privileges as Sylvester II, trans. and intro. Harriet Pratt Lattin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 184 – 85. 37. We touch here the central question: what can globemaking add to the main stream of historical inquiry in the Middle Ages? Understandably, such inquiry concentrates on what did happen, and therefore, very little work has been done on ﬁnding out why no celestial globes were made in the Middle Ages! 38. Neugebauer, Ancient Mathematical Astronomy, 2:858. 39. For the instruments, see his will in Paul Uiblein, “Johannes von Gmunden: Seine Tätigkeit an der Wiener Universität,” in Der Weg der Naturwissenschaft von Johannes von Gmunden zu Johannes Kepler, ed. Günther Hamann and Helmuth Grössing (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1988), 11– 64, esp. 61. 40. Ernst Zinner, Regiomontanus: His Life and Work, trans. Ezra Brown (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990), 29, 100, and 164.

Globes in Renaissance Europe

The Cosmographer’s Globe principles of cosmography The making of globes in the Renaissance is closely connected with the principles of cosmography as they were set forth in many sixteenth-century treatises. Some authors, such as the Italian humanist Alessandro Piccolomini, followed in outline the treatise on the sphere of Sacrobosco. Piccolomini’s emphasis on the heavenly or astronomical aspects of the universe is expressed, for instance, by the ﬁrst printed star atlas included in the second part of his book.41 Other authors, like the professor of Hebrew at Basel University, Sebastian Münster, took Ptolemy’s treatise on geography as their model and stressed the earthly or geographical elements. Münster’s emphasis on the topography of countries made him the Strabo of the sixteenth century.42 But to discuss Renaissance cosmography from either an astronomical or a geographical point of view would ignore that the essence of sixteenth-century cosmography lies precisely in the combination of the knowledge of heaven and earth. However, before discussing this, a word must be said concerning the actual making of globes. Traditionally, globes were made of either brass, silver, or wood, as is exempliﬁed by the surviving globes of,

fig. 6.4. THE OLDEST TERRESTRIAL GLOBE. This oldest surviving terrestrial globe was made in 1492 for the Nuremberg merchant Martin Behaim by Ruprecht Kolberger and painted by Georg Glockendon the Elder. Its cartography is a mixture of Ptolemaic and medieval maps and so-called portolan charts. Size of the original: diameter 51 cm; height 133 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (inv. no. WI 1826).

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for instance, Hans Dorn and Martin Behaim (fig. 6.4 and app. 6.1, nos. 3 and 4). The materials used for these so-called manuscript globes, notably brass and silver, were very expensive, and the process of engraving or painting a map on the surface of the globe was very timeconsuming. This situation completely changed at the turn of the fifteenth century, when the idea of printing segments of paper to be pasted on a sphere was born. Printed globes form part of a much larger group of printed instruments made by pasting prefabricated paper scales on wood. An example of a printed instrument other than a globe is the quadrant shown on the top shelf of The Ambassadors (fig. 6.1). Such instruments were included in books, the best example of which is Peter Apian’s Instrument Buch published in the vernacular in Ingolstadt in 1533. Printed instruments and globes were much cheaper than their brass counterparts.43 And although special manuscript globes continued to be made for the very rich (see pp. 155 –57), the new way of production made it possible to serve a much wider audience. In the history of globemaking the best and most famous example of early globe printing is connected with a 41. Alessandro Piccolomini, De la sfera del mondo . . . De le stelle fisse (Venice, 1548); see also Deborah Jean Warner, The Sky Explored: Celestial Cartography, 1500 –1800 (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1979), 200. 42. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographei, oder Beschreibung aller Länder (Basel, 1550; reprinted [Munich: Kolbl], 1992). 43. Prices of maps: from 1569 until 1593 Christoffel Plantijn bought 277 copies of Mercator’s world map of 1569 for prices ranging from two guilders to 2 guilders 8 stuivers, and then decreasing to 1 guilder 10 stuivers. Plantijn sold these maps initially for 2 guilders 10 stuivers and later for 3 guilders. Prices of atlases: in 1599 Plantijn bought copies of Mercator’s atlas in three volumes for 19 guilders each. In 1587 he sold Mercator a copy of Lucas Jansz. Waghenaar’s Spieghel der zeevaerdt (1585) for 4 guilders 10 stuivers. See Léon Voet, “Les relations commerciales entre Gérard Mercator et la maison Plantinienne à Anvers,” in Gerhard Mercator, 1512 –1594: Festschrift zum 450. Geburtstag, Duisburger Forschungen 6 (Duisburg-Ruhrort: Verlag für Wirtschaft und Kultur W. Renckhoff, 1962), 171–232, and idem, “Uitgevers en Drukkers,” in Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus, ed. Marcel Watelet (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1994), 133 – 49. Prices of printed globes: in 1517 Lorenz Behaim paid 21⁄2 guilders for a printed celestial globe 28 centimeters in diameter and an accompanying booklet by Johannes Schöner; see Sven Hauschke, “Globen und Wissenschaftliche Instrumente: Die europäischen Höfe als Kunden Nürnberger Mathematiker,” in Quasi Centrum Europae: Europa kauft in Nürnberg, 1400 –1800, by Hermann Maué et al. (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2002), 365 – 89, esp. 365. It is not stated how the globe was mounted, but since brass was expensive, it is likely that the globe was mounted in a simple wooden meridian ring and a wooden stand. Printed globes 37 centimeters in diameter by Gemma Frisius, mounted in a wooden meridian ring, were offered in 1568 by Plantijn for 12 guilders a pair, that is, 6 guilders each. When the globe was mounted in a brass meridian ring, the price of Gemma’s globe increased to 8 guilders 6 stuivers. The records of the Plantijn office show that from 1566 until 1576 Plantijn sold eighteen pairs of globes 42 centimeters in diameter by Mercator. For these globes he asked

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fig. 6.5. TERRESTRIAL GLOBE GORES. A sheet with the first printed gores (woodcut) for a terrestrial globe, attributed to Martin Waldseemüller, ca. 1507.

Size of the original: 24 38 cm. Photograph courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

small treatise published by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller in 1507: Cosmographiae introdvctio.44 Along with this book, the first printed terrestrial globe gores, now attributed to Waldseemüller, were published (fig. 6.5 and app. 6.1, no. 8). On the back of a fold-out illustration in the book, the authors explain to their readers: “We propose in this booklet to write a sort of introduction to the cosmography which we have illustrated in solid form [a globe] as well as on a flat surface [a map]. It is quite reduced in solid form, of course, because of the limited space, but more detailed on the flat surface.” 45 Clearly, in the development of cartography in the early Renaissance, the idea of the sphericity of the earth and the idea of projecting the sphere onto a plane were of equal importance. Another early set of globe gores used as an illustration in a book are those attributed to Louis Boulengier and found in a version of Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae introdvctio (app. 6.1, no. 11). According to Wieser, a treatise by Schöner, Luculentissima quaeda¯ terrae totius descriptio (Nuremberg, 1515), also closely followed Waldseemüller’s book and likewise was accompanied by printed globe gores. Two mounted copies and some fragment gores of Schöner’s printed terrestrial globe of ca. 1515 have been preserved.46 A charter was granted for eight years for Schöner’s book with the cosmographic globe—“cum Globis Cosmographicis”—which shows that in this case, too, the mounted globe served as an il-

lustration for the book.47 Schöner was the ﬁrst to apply the new technique of using gores to make a printed ceprices varying from 12 guilders each in 1566 to 221⁄2 guilders or more after 1576; see Peter van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici: The Production of Globes in the Low Countries (Utrecht: HES, 1993), 72 –74. Prices of manuscript globes: the globe made around 1550 by Jakob Stampfer with a diameter of 14 centimeters was acquired for 124 guilders (see appendix 6.1, no. 55, and ﬁg. 6.8). The production of two globe cups by Jamnitzer received an advance amount of 1,479 gulden; see Ursula Timann, “Goldschmiedearbeiten als diplomatische Geschenke,” in Quasi Centrum Europae, 216 –39, esp. 225. Finally, even more costly were clockwork-driven celestial globes; see Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Kaiser Rudolfs II., 2 vols., exhibition catalog (Freren: Luca, 1988), 1:562. 44. Martin Waldseemüller, Die Cosmographiae Introductio des Martin Waldseemüller (Ilacomilus) in Faksimiledruck, ed. and intro. Franz Ritter von Wieser (Strassburg: J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1907), and idem, The Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in Facsimile, ed. Charles George Herbermann (1907; reprinted Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1969). 45. The translation is from Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 28. 46. Appendix 6.1, no. 13, and Franz Ritter von Wieser, MagalhâesStrasse und Austral-Continent auf den Globen des Johannes Schöner (1881; reprinted Amsterdam: Meridian, 1967), esp. 19 –28. Fragments of Schöner’s terrestrial globe gores of ca. 1515 printed on vellum survive. These fragments were used as binding material in the portfolio containing the Waldseemüller world maps and are now in the Jay Kislak Collection of the Library of Congress. They match the terrestrial globe listed in the appendix as no. 13 but represent a state that differs from the one listed as no. 23 (kind communication by John R. Hébert and John W. Hessler). 47. Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 31.

Globes in Renaissance Europe

lestial globe (fig. 6.6 and app. 6.1, no. 12).48 His activities in Nuremberg show that the design of globe gores was generally known before the method as such was published by Henricus Glareanus in his 1527 treatise on geography.49 After a short early period during which printed globe gores were used as illustrations for treatises on cosmography, makers of mounted printed globes started to produce manuals especially written for use in making these globes. Such globe manuals emphasized the mathematical aspects of the astronomical phenomena and the geographical features involved. gemma frisius’s globe manual The most interesting early globe manual is De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae decque vsu globi by Gemma Frisius, which was published for the first time in Louvain in 1530.50 This manual occupies a special place in the history of the development of globe design. The manual appeared the year after Gemma published a new edition of Peter Apian’s Cosmographicus liber (1529) at the request of an Antwerp publisher, Roeland Bollaert.51 Earlier, in 1527, Bollaert had published an edition of Schöner’s manuel on the use of the celestial globe. And because Schöner could not meet the demands for his own printed globes, Gaspard van der Heyden, a goldsmith of Louvain, was invited in 1526/27 by Bollaert to produce a new printed celestial globe, the first in a series published in Louvain. As was shown by Van der Krogt, this now lost celestial globe was presumably published together with a terrestrial globe by Franciscus Monachus (François de Malines).52 This explains why Bollaert did not publish a new edition of Schöner’s book, the Luculentissima, with the terrestrial globe. The descriptive geography in the latter treatise does not conform to the map on Monachus’s globe. Therefore Monachus wrote his own description in a letter to accompany his now lost terrestrial globe.53 In contrast to the terrestrial globe mounted on a simple handle, as is depicted in The Ambassadors, early terrestrial globes were mounted in the same way as the Behaim globe—in a meridian ring that was supported, in turn, by a stand with a horizon ring. The same construction is seen in the terrestrial globe pictured on the title page of Schöner’s Luculentissima and on the title page of Apian’s Cosmographicus liber.54 Thus around 1530 there were two treatises available in Louvain with clear ideas on the construction of globes, both of which were printed by Bollaert in Antwerp: one on the celestial globe by Schöner and the other on the terrestrial globe by Apian, following Schöner. Schöner’s manual on the celestial globe was especially influential in shaping the ideas of Gemma Frisius in globemaking, as the latter fully acknowledged in his

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globe manual of 1530. Gemma believed, however, that his own treatise had more to offer to his readers, a notion that he repeated again when he explained the use of his globe. But to make sure that no one doubted the true meaning of his debt to and respect for Schöner, he assured his readers: “This is not to be put to the ignorance of the author or to my arrogance; for often it happens that one cannot do everything, and it is easier to add some-

48. Aspects of the first printed globe by Johannes Schöner are discussed in Dekker and Lippincott, “Scientific Instruments,” and Dekker “Globes in Holbein’s Painting.” One set of Schöner’s surviving celestial globe gores of ca. 1515 is printed on paper and lacks the main celestial circles (fig. 6.6). Of the other set of gores only fragments printed on vellum survive. Both sets are part of the portfolio containing the Waldseemüller world maps and are now in the Jay Kislak Collection of the Library of Congress. The fragments were used as binding material. These two sets represent different states and both differ from the celestial globe listed in the appendix as no. 24 (see Elizabeth M. Harris, “The Waldseemüller World Map: A Typographic Appraisal,” Imago Mundi 37 [1985]: 30 – 53, esp. 38, and Dekker, “Globes in Holbein’s Painting,” 22 –23). 49. Henricus Glareanus, D. Henrici Glareani poetæ lavreati De geographia liber vnvs (Basel, 1527), chap. 19; see Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 26, esp. fig. 1.3. 50. Gemma Frisius, De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae deq[ue] vsu globi ab eodem editi: Item de orbis diuisione, & insulis, rebusq[ue] nuper inuentis (Louvain, 1530); see also Fernand van Ortroy, Bio-Bibliographie de Gemma Frisius (1920; reprinted Amsterdam: Meridian, 1966), 189 –91. I have used a facsimile edition: Gemma Frisius, De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (1553), intro. C. A. Davids (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1992). The details of this edition are described by Van Ortroy, Bio-Bibliographie, 198 –201; see also Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 75 –77. 51. More than forty editions of this work by Apian were published in the sixteenth century, and most were edited and enlarged by Gemma. See Fernand van Ortroy, Bibliographie de l’oeuvre de Pierre Apian (1902; reprinted Amsterdam: Meridian, 1963). As is noted by Schöner, Apian himself never published another edition of this early work after 1524; only in 1562 was a new edition considered by his son Philipp; see Christoph Schöner, Mathematik und Astronomie an der Universität Ingolstadt im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1994), 405. 52. Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 41– 48, esp. 44. 53. Franciscus Monachus, De orbis sitv ac descriptione . . . (Antwerp, 1526/27). The text is reproduced in Lucien Gallois, De Orontio Finæo gallico geographo (Paris: E. Leroux, 1890), 87–105 (app. III). 54. A picture of the terrestrial globe on Schöner’s title page is shown in Focus Behaim Globus, 2:672. A picture of the terrestrial globe on Apian’s title page is shown in Hermine Röttel and Wolfgang Kaunzner, “Die Druckwerke Peter Apians,” in Peter Apian: Astronomie, Kosmographie und Mathematik am Beginn der Neuzeit, ed. Karl Röttel (Buxheim: Polygon, 1995), 255 –76, esp. 262. According to Murschel and Andrewes, there are at least three different states of the first edition. The first state can be recognized by the complete pillar sundial in the picture with the globe. In the two later states only the base of this dial is seen; see Andrea Murschel, trans. and rev., “Translations of the Earliest Documents Describing the Principal Methods Used to Find the Longitude at Sea,” intro. William J. H. Andrewes, in The Quest for Longitude: The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 4 –6, 1993, ed. William J. H. Andrewes (Cambridge: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University, 1996), 375 –92, esp. 379 and n. 18.

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fig. 6.6. CELESTIAL GLOBE GORES. The first printed gores (woodcut) for a celestial globe, attributed to Johannes Schöner, ca. 1515. The gores are part of the portfolio containing the Waldseemüller world maps, which once belonged to Schöner

himself. Diameter of the mounted globe: 28 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Kislak Collection at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

thing to things already known than to find and discover the muses.” 55 “Adding” to the ideas of others is characteristic of the scientific oeuvre of Gemma. But in doing so, important ideas occurred to him, too. The best-known “addition” in his globe manual is the method for finding the longitude by means of clocks. In globemaking his habit of adding things was crucial for the design of globes during the following four centuries. Although no example has survived, the overall design of his cosmographic globe can be grasped from his manual:

cles of the common sphere, but in between them we have also drawn the regions, islands, mountains and rivers, with their names, with the utmost diligence and care as was possible. And moreover, to clarify the use of the globe, we have distributed over the surface several bright stars, not all of them, but only the most notable ones that are of the greatest importance to astronomers and cosmographers. 56

Such a globe, or spherical body, we have recently very carefully designed; and made it to contain not only the main circles, drawn on its curved surface, such as the equator, the tropics, and the parallels, and other cir-

Clearly, the cosmographic globe combined three elements: ﬁrst, the main circles of the armillary sphere as 55. Gemma, De principiis astronomae & cosmographiae (1553), 29 – 30. The translations are from Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 76 –77 (based on a French edition). 56. This description is a free rendering of the text in Gemma, De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (1553), 25 –26.

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fig. 6.6. (continued)

these were known from Sacrobosco’s treatise; second, the outlines of the lands and seas of the terrestrial globe proper; and third, the sphere of the fixed stars, which is expressed through the addition of a number of stars on the globe in between the lands and seas (see fig. 6.7). However, this is not yet complete, because in order to make the most of the globe a number of accessories had to be added, such as a meridian ring, an hour circle with a pointer, a horizon ring, a quadrant of altitude, a semicircle of position, and a so-called spherical gnomon. Most of these accessories were part of the celestial globes made, for example, by Schöner, from 1517 on, as we can see in The Ambassadors (fig. 6.1), where there is a meridian ring with an hour circle on top, a stand with a horizon ring, a quadrant of altitude, and a circle of position. The purposes of such accessories was to solve a series of astronomical problems, such as finding the times of the ris-

ing and setting of the sun throughout the year and fixing the limits of the twelve houses of the heavens. What is really new in Gemma’s approach is that he added to a terrestrial globe a number of elements properly belonging to a celestial globe, such as the hour circle and a selection of stars. In this process he created a completely new instrument that combined in one model the very inner part (the terraqueous globe) and the outer parts (the eighth sphere of the stars and the sphere of the first mover) of the Ptolemaic universe as it is depicted in so many textbooks (see fig. 6.2). In addition, the phenomena caused by the sun’s diurnal and annual motion could be demonstrated with the help of Gemma’s spherical gnomon. This made his globe eminently suitable for explaining geography as it was understood by Ptolemy: [In world cartography] the first thing that one has to investigate is the earth’s shape, size, and position with

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fig. 6.7. DEPICTION OF A COSMOGRAPHIC GLOBE. This picture of the cosmographic globe by Gemma Frisius is from the title page of his De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (Louvain, 1530). The picture shows the terrestrial sphere adorned with stars and a number of accessories, among which the hour circle on top of the meridian ring is the most notable. Size of the original: 20.5 15 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam (Ned. Inc 347 2). respect to its surroundings [i.e., the heavens], so that it will be possible to speak of its known part, how large it is and what it is like, and moreover [so that it will be possible to specify] under which parallels of the celestial sphere each of the localities in this [known part] lies. From this last, one can also determine the lengths of nights and days, which stars reach the zenith or are always borne above or below the horizon, and all the things that we associate with the subject of habitations. 57

One might well argue that the design of the mounting of the terrestrial globe by Behaim is not very different from the mounting proposed by Gemma (compare ﬁgs. 6.4 and 6.7). However, the terrestrial globe of Behaim does not possess an hour circle. The idea behind a

mounting like that of the Behaim globe is to be able to set the globe up to correspond with the situation of a specific city in the world. This process of “rectification” forms the main content of the short chapter on globes included by Apian in his Cosmographicus liber.58 It explains the instruments shown with the terrestrial globe on the title page. To rectify a globe, one has to ascertain four things. First, that the globe is in a horizontal position (by using a plumb line). Second, that the horizon corresponds to the four parts of the world, so that the meridian ring is aligned with the north-south line. Apian describes three methods for finding the meridian line. Third, that the pole is elevated as many degrees above the horizon as corresponds with the latitude of the location of the user of the globe. And fourth, that the user’s location is below the fixed brass meridian ring so that its zenith will agree with the zenith of the fixed horizon of the globe. The basic parts of the mounting of Behaim’s terrestrial globe, such as the mobile meridian ring and the fixed horizon ring, may well have been part of the design of the pair of globes made in 1477 in Rome by the most prolific producer of manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography, Nicolaus Germanus.59 According to a 1481 inventory of the Vatican library, there was once an “Octava sphera” (a celestial globe) and a “Cosmographia” (a terrestrial globe) exhibited in the Pontificia (library).60 It is important for our discussion that both globes are mentioned again in an inventory of 1487: “A sphere with a horizon ring with land and sea according to Ptolemy. / A sphere showing the heavens with its poles and obliquity.” 61 This shows that the globes of Nicolaus Germanus were mounted in a stand with a horizon ring, possibly in the same way as is seen in Behaim’s surviving globe of 1492. Until now most attention has been devoted to the map laid out on the surface of the Behaim globe. The present horizon ring was added to the globe in 1510, and its inscription tells us how this ring is to be understood: “The ring is called the horizon and shows the rising and the setting of the sun and the 12 signs.” 62 Here, as before, the mo57. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, 58 (1.1). 58. I used the Dutch edition of Apian’s Cosmographicus liber, De Cosmographie vã Pe. Apianus, ed. Gemma Frisius (Antwerp, 1537), xxi verso–xxij recto. 59. The globes are referred to in bills dated 1477, the Latin text of which are in Ruysschaert, “Du globe terrestre,” 95 –97; for English translations, see Józef Babicz, “The Celestial and Terrestrial Globes of the Vatican Library, Dating from 1477, and Their Maker Nicolaus Germanus (ca 1420 – ca 1490),” Der Globusfreund 35 –37 (1987– 89): 155 – 68, esp. 161– 62. 60. Ruysschaert, “Du globe terrestre,” 97. 61. Ruysschaert, “Du globe terrestre,” 98 (my italics). 62. Roland Schewe, “Das Gestell des Behaim-Globus,” in Focus Behaim Globus, 2 vols. (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseums, 1992), 1:279 – 88, esp. 283.

Globes in Renaissance Europe

tion of the sun is an important clue to understanding a globe. For finding the place of the sun in the zodiac during the year, the horizon rings of celestial globes were provided with a scale of the zodiac alongside a calendar, which was already seen in the drawing of a stand shown in “Tractatus de compositione sphaeræ solidæ” (1435/44) (fig. 6.3). This feature of the celestial globe was also adopted by Gemma for the design of his cosmographic globe.63 With the place of the sun in the zodiac known for a specific day of the year, a whole range of cosmographic problems could be demonstrated and solved. But for this purpose an hour circle with an index had to be added on top of the meridian ring—as Gemma did on his cosmographic globe—and one more step in rectifying the globe had to be carried out: the index had to be set to local time, as measured through the diurnal motion of the sun. This was done by bringing the place of the sun in the ecliptic, drawn on the surface of the sphere, under the brass meridian ring in the south and setting the index of the hour circle at twelve o’clock. Once set, all the phenomena having to do in one way or another with the sun’s daily motion could be explained. The addition of the hour circle to terrestrial globes must have appealed to globemakers, because from 1530 until late in the nineteenth century most terrestrial globes were provided with this bit of time-related equipment. Considering the mixture of concepts underlying the cosmographic globe designed by Gemma, a manual explaining its uses was not superfluous. The first part of this globe manual, titled “De principiis cosmographiæ,” treats the principles of cosmography: the circles of the sphere, the zones, the climates, the parallels, the longitude and latitude of a place, the names of the various parts of the world (Amphiscii, Heteroscii, Periscii, Antipodes), the winds, and some general notions. The usefulness of the globe in demonstrating the main circles of the celestial sphere is not difficult to see, but its importance for finding one’s place on earth is something that was initially accepted only by astronomers. The concepts underlying great circles such as the equinoctial line (or equator) and the meridian line, and the methods for measuring geographical coordinates such as latitude and longitude, were astronomical. To be able to find a place on earth in this mathematical way, one had to be acquainted with the motion of the sun, moon, or stars. Seen from this perspective, it is not difficult to understand why globe manuals are filled with astronomical problems and why instruments are so often encountered in the early treatises on cosmography. And although the determination of the longitude of a place by the observation of an eclipse in two places was something that remained beyond the practical possibilities of most enthusiasts, the globe served to a great extent to overcome the conceptual difficulties involved.

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In the second part of his globe manual, “De vsv globi,” Gemma discusses the known methods for finding one’s place on earth. And, as usual, he adds a few new ones— for instance, his famous method of finding the longitude with the help of a timepiece.64 This part of the book unmistakably supports the opinion, advocated by Ptolemy in his Geography, that geographical data derived by using mathematical and astronomical methods are to be preferred to those provided by the accounts of travelers.65 The voyages of discovery at the close of the fifteenth century made this awareness even stronger. As Gemma explains: “The longitudes of many regions, especially of those which the Spanish have discovered, are uncertain or completely unknown to us. For nothing certain can be determined from the winding paths of these voyages, as confirmed by Ptolemy in the first book of his Cosmographia.”66 The third and last part of the globe manual of Gemma, “De orbis diuisione,” is a descriptive geography, the discussion of which is outside the scope of this chapter. It may well be that this was the most interesting part for many of his readers. the production of cosmographic globes The cosmographic approach to globemaking initiated by Gemma Frisius was followed in particular by Gerardus Mercator, who also added a selection of stars to the terrestrial sphere (see fig. 6.10). His globe should therefore be labeled a cosmographic globe. Other examples of cosmographic globes are the Poculum cosmographicum made around 1550 by the goldsmith Jakob Stampfer of Zurich, in which the design of Gemma is applied to a cup in the shape of a globe (fig. 6.8), and the so-called St. Gallen globe (plate 5), which follows Gemma’s design in all its details.67 The selection of stars engraved on the surface of the cosmographic globe did not really suffice for astrological applications. Gemma, and after him Mercator, designed a separate celestial globe for this purpose (app. 6.1, nos. 34 and 35). This production of a celestial globe alongside a cosmographic one made the use of stars on the latter apparently superfluous in the eyes of globemakers working 63. Gemma, De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (1553), 27. 64. Gemma, De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (1553), 64 – 65. 65. Berggren and Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography, 28 (1.4). 66. Gemma, De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (1553), 64; translation from Murschel and Andrewes, “Translations of the Earliest Documents,” 390. 67. For Stampfer, see appendix 6.1, no. 55, and for the St. Gallen globe, see Franz Grenacher, “Der sog. St.-Galler Globus im Schweiz. Landesmuseum,” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 21 (1961): 66 –78.

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the year, and were maintained in the design of the terrestrial globe for these reasons until far into the nineteenth century. So it came about that from the Renaissance onward the dominant construction in globemaking consisted of a pair of globes, each of which had a mobile sphere mounted in a stand with a number of accessories, notably a movable meridian ring, a fixed horizon ring, and an hour circle. The motions to be demonstrated by this common pair of globes were dictated by the Ptolemaic world system of the first mover and the annual motion of the sun around the earth. In the common pair of terrestrial and celestial globes the diurnal motion of the first mover is reflected by the mobility of both spheres around the axis of the world. For that reason the spheres are always turned from east to west, in tune with the Ptolemaic world picture. When the sphere of a terrestrial globe is turned around, it is either to bring the local horizon of a place in accord with that of the globe or to simulate the daily motion of the sun. When the sphere of a celestial globe is turned around, it is to simulate the daily motion of the stars. The annual motion of the sun around the earth is presented by two design features. The ecliptic is presented on the terrestrial sphere (as part of the superimposed celestial sphere) and on the celestial sphere (as part of the eighth sphere, to which it properly belongs). And the position of the sun in the zodiac throughout the year is displayed graphically on the horizon rings of both globes. This makes it clear what a globe offers that a map does not.

The Use of Globes

fig. 6.8. A CUP OF GILT SILVER IN THE SHAPE OF A COSMOGRAPHIC GLOBE. The cup was made around 1550 by Jakob Stampfer, a goldsmith from Zurich, for the burgomaster of Constance, Thomas Blarer. From him it was acquired in 1555 by Bonifacius Amerbach, who in turn bequeathed it to his friend Theodor Zwinger in 1564. Size of the original: diameter 14 cm; height 38 cm. Photograph by Maurice Babey, courtesy of the Historisches Museum, Basel (inv. nr. 1882.103).

later in the sixteenth century, because most makers omitted the stars from the terrestrial sphere. What was retained, however, was the superimposed celestial sphere and the hour circle. These parts had proved their value in explaining, for instance, the climates and parallels in terms of the length of daylight on the longest day of

“The utility, the enjoyment and the pleasure of the mounted globe, which is composed with such skill, are hard to believe if one has not tasted the sweetness of the experience. For, certainly this is the only one of all instruments whose frequent usage delights astronomers, leads geographers, conﬁrms historians, enriches and improves legists, is admired by grammarians, guides pilots, in short, aside from its beauty, its form is indescribably useful and necessary for everyone.” 68 If we are to believe this claim expressed by Gemma Frisius in his globe manual, there existed in the sixteenth century hardly any profession that would not beneﬁt from the globe. He may well have been right. Often globes and armillary spheres are shown in the portraits of scholars and navigators. These associations quickly turned the globe into a symbol of learning and seafaring. And in the paintings of many an emperor or queen, a globe is presented as the

68. Gemma, De principiis astronomiae & cosmographiae (1553), 28; translation from Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 77.

Globes in Renaissance Europe

symbol of their worldly powers.69 From these observations, at least three potential groups of users can be distinguished: first, there were intellectuals engaged in teaching and publishing books on science; second, there were so-called practitioners who had an interest in the use of globes that was triggered by their profession—navigators, astrologers, and physicians, etc.; and third, there were the mighty and the rich— emperors, princes, dukes, and popes, with their servants the diplomats and bishops, and the well-to-do patricians and merchants. In the rest of this chapter I consider a few particulars of these various users and conclude with a short discussion of the use of the globe as a symbol. education The uses of demonstration models in university education is a phenomenon that cannot be viewed separately from the trend to hire specialists for teaching mathematics, astronomy, and geography at universities. In medieval times every master had to be able to teach every part of the curriculum. At the beginning of the semester, the lectures were divided by lot. Thus teaching the liberal arts could be and was done by any master who happened to be around. All these masters often did in teaching was to read certain textbooks to their students. As Schöner pointed out, such a system did not encourage a trend toward specialization among teachers.70 In the course of the fifteenth century, this situation changed. An early example of a professional teacher was Johannes von Gmunden, whom we have mentioned before. From 1414 until 1434 he lectured in astronomy and mathematics at the University of Vienna, and for his lectures he used a variety of models, among which were an armillary sphere and a celestial globe. Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the impact of humanism helped to establish special chairs for teaching mathematics (which included astronomy and geography) in Cracow and Ingolstadt. Other universities in central Europe were to follow these examples.71 The impact of the humanist movement in teaching was of course felt in many ways. Here it may suffice to note that the use of models such as celestial and terrestrial globes helped to put into practice the humanist’s emphasis on the importance of understanding. It is not a coincidence that the first records of the use of a terrestrial globe in teaching is associated with Conrad Celtis, the famous humanist and founder of the Collegium der Poeten und Mathematiker at the University of Vienna in 1497. Celtis himself owned a terrestrial and a celestial globe, both of which he used for educational purposes during his cosmographic lectures.72 Demonstration models were also used at the University of Ingolstadt, where Celtis had been lecturing in 1492 and in vain had tried to create an independent chair in mathematics. The records of the arts

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faculty there show that in 1487 a sphaera was available; in 1496/97 there was a sphaera mundi, and in 1511 a corpus spericum.73 Also, outside Germany there is evidence of the use of globes in education, although at a much later date. In a rare picture drawn by a student in the margin of his notebook, the Jesuit priest J. C. Boulenger is shown using a globe during a lecture in 1588 (ﬁg. 6.9).74 The use of three-dimensional models provided, among other things, a better understanding of problems related to spherical trigonometry. In general, lack of mathematical training had been a barrier for many in understanding the details of astronomy and geography. For instance, in a letter dated 3 March 1581 to Wolfgang Haller, a minister in Zurich, Mercator explains that he had followed a course on the theory of the planets by his honored countryman Gemma Frisius, but that the course had done him little good because he had not learned the necessary geometry in advance.75 The educational scope of three-dimensional demonstration models also included popular science as it developed in the sixteenth century. One of the booklets published in 1509 by Johann Grüninger mentions this purpose explicitly in the title: Globus Mundi: Declaratio sive de-

69. The symbolic meaning of globes is discussed by Schramm, Sphaira, Globus, Reichsapfel; Catherine Hofmann et al., Le globe & son image (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1995); Jan Mokre, “Immensum in parvo—Der Globus als Symbol,” in Modelle der Welt: Erd- und Himmelsgloben, ed. Peter E. Allmayer-Beck (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1997), 70 – 87; and Kristen Lippincott, “Globes in Art: Problems of Interpretation and Representation,” in Globes at Greenwich, 75 – 86. 70. See Schöner, Mathematik und Astronomie, 24 –96, esp. 62 – 63, and, for a general history of the early universities, see Olaf Pedersen, The First Universities: Studium Generale and the Origins of University Education in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 71. See note 39 and Schöner, Mathematik und Astronomie, 66 –71. It is not clear what type of armillary sphere was used by von Gmunden. Most early surviving three-dimensional models consist of a static sphere mounted on a handle; later spheres could be turned around in an adjustable meridian ring and a stand with a horizon ring, such as is used for the majority of globes made in Western Europe. The earliest armillary sphere of this kind is in the Museum for the History of Science, Oxford, and datable to sometime around 1425. 72. Ernst Bernleithner, in “Kartographie und Globographie an der Wiener Universität im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” Der Globusfreund 25 –27 (1978): 127–33, esp. 128, quotes from an announcement for lectures on the eight books of Ptolemy’s Geography: “Because I taught the solid spheres of heaven and earth, and old maps, and new teachings.” Bernleithner does not mention his source explicitly. Independent evidence on Celtis’s globes is given in his will, dated 24 January 1508 and published in Conrad Celtis, Der Briefwechsel des Konrad Celtis, collected, edited, and with commentary by Hans Rupprich (Munich: C. H. Beck’sche, 1934), 604 –9, esp. 605. 73. Schöner, Mathematik und Astronomie, 155 –56. 74. François de Dainville, “Die Anschauungen der Globusliebhaber,” Der Globusfreund 15 –16 (1967): 193 –223, esp. 196 –97, ﬁg. 58. 75. Gerardus Mercator, Correspondance Mercatorienne, ed. Maurice van Durme (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1959), 166.

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fig. 6.9. J. C. BOULENGER WITH GLOBE. A drawing by a student of the Jesuit priest J. C. Boulenger, made during his lectures at Clermont College at Paris in 1588, viewing a globe and holding a pair of dividers. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Latin 10822, fol. 261v).

scriptio mundi et totius orbis terrarum, globulo rotundo comparati ut spera solida, qua cuivis etiam mediocriter docto ad oculum videre licet antipodes esse, quorum pedes nostris oppositi sunt (Terrestrial globe: Explanation or description of the world and the whole earth, prepared as a round globe corresponding to a massive sphere, whereby anyone can see, even those without advanced education, that there are antipodes whose feet are placed precisely opposite ours).76 The promoter par excellence of popular science inside and outside the university was Peter Apian, who had studied in Leipzig from 1516 until 1519 and later at the University of Vienna. His complete oeuvre is interspersed with all sorts of demonstration models of wood and paper in two and three dimensions to overcome mathematical barriers. One example is the model labeled “De speculo cosmograph[iae]” (Cosmographic mirror), described in his Cosmographicus liber of 1524 (see ﬁg. 3.11).

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

This paper instrument consists of a base plate, a volvelle with a printed map of the earth, and another movable part shaped as the rete of an astrolabe. In addition, around the north pole there is a small hour circle with an index arm and another index arm with a latitude scale, and both can rotate around the center. This instrument was included in all sixty or more editions of the book and must have been familiar to every student of the liberal arts in the sixteenth century. It was also added to a number of sixteenth-century editions of Sacrobosco’s Sphere.77 With the help of Apian’s paper instrument, a variety of cosmographic problems could be solved: locating a place on earth once the geographical longitude and latitude of a place was known; familiarizing students with the use of spherical coordinates; working out the relation between local times at different places, in which case the instrument served as an analog computer; or ﬁnding where on earth the sun appears at the zenith on certain days of the year to explain the concept of the zones. Later in the century, these problems became a standard part of globe manuals. The so-called Ingolstadt gores, attributed to Peter Apian and dated around 1527, which served as an illustration in his later works on cosmography, are another example.78 From an inventory of 1585 it appears that during his life Apian owned a celestial globe by Johannes Schöner, and several instruments and spheres of wood, for use in education. In 1585 these latter instruments were apparently in poor condition, and therefore it was thought best that they be burnt.79 Many early Renaissance globes were probably lost in a similar way during the sixteenth century, for instance, the globes used by the Spanish mathematician and cosmographer Juan Bautista Gesio, who died in 1580. In his will “a terrestrial copper globe, much used and not worth any money,” is mentioned together with “two celestial spheres and one terrestrial globe of paper, much worn, ‘which instruments have been taxed and estimated at very low value, because they are almost all much used (ill treated), broken and damaged, and for that reason they have not yet been sold.’” 80 76. Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 28. 77. Owen Gingerich, “Astronomical Paper Instruments with Moving Parts,” in Making Instruments Count: Essays on Historical Scientiﬁc Instruments Presented to Gerard L’Estrange Turner, ed. R. G. W. Anderson, J. A. Bennett, and W. F. Ryan (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), 63 –74. 78. See appendix 6.1, no. 20, and Rüdiger Finsterwalder, “Peter Apian als Autor der sogenannten ‘Ingolstädter Globusstreifen’?” Der Globusfreund 45 – 46 (1998): 177– 86. 79. Wilhelm Füssl, “‘Vil nit werth’? Der Nachlass Peter Apians im Streit der Erben,” in Peter Apian: Astronomie, Kosmographie und Mathematik am Beginn der Neuzeit, ed. Karl Röttel (Buxheim: Polygon, 1995), 68 –79, esp. 75. 80. Ursula Lamb, “Nautical Scientists and Their Clients in Iberia (1508 –1624): Science from Imperial Perspective,” Revista da Universi-

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navigation Globes also appear to have been extremely useful in navigation.81 From the very moment that navigators started to cross deep waters, a new and better approach to navigation was needed. Well into the eighteenth century, position finding at sea continued to be based predominantly on directions and distances, but world navigators needed an understanding of the projection of the earth’s spherical surface on a plane when plotting the results of their dead reckoning on a map. Moreover, where possible, they needed to develop methods to find and check the position of a ship in terms of the spherical coordinates of latitude and longitude. The need to find reliable ways to determine this latitude and longitude was a problem for navigators and mapmakers alike. Small wonder, then, that instruction in navigation included cosmography and the use of the globe. To apply the newly developed science of navigation one had to learn how to find one’s latitude by the so-called regiment of the sun, or the regiment of the Pole Star. To measure the variation of the compass one had to know how to determine the meridian line by solar observations, and to find the longitude of a place eclipses had to be understood. In addition, a navigator needed a sound knowledge of the doctrine of the sphere and the motions of the sun, the moon, and the stars. The first textbooks describing the regiment of the sun were in fact combined with a Portuguese translation of the 1488 edition of Sacrobosco’s treatise the Sphere.82 Another treatise of the sphere, Tratado da sphera (1537), enlarged with the first book of Ptolemy’s Geography and other matters of navigational interest such as a discussion of rhumb lines, was published by Pedro Nunes, professor of mathematics at Coimbra University, one of the founders of nautical science, and, from 1529 until his death, royal cosmographer to the king of Portugal. Although very little is known about the actual use of globes in this early period, as early as 1497 a terrestrial globe by John Cabot, the discoverer of Newfoundland, is recorded in England.83 The presence of globes in navigational circles of Portugal and Spain is known from 1518, when Ferdinand Magellan presented his plan concerning the Moluccas, explaining, “Jorge [Reinel] . . . constructed among others a globe and a world map . . . ; these works had not been made by the arrival of the father, Pedro, who put the finishing touches and correctly situated the Moluccas.” 84 Upon the return of the expedition, a globe (now lost) was made showing an itinerary that would have proved that the Moluccas lay in the Spanish zone.85 According to Denucé, this globe and map served as models for all other cartographic products made, for instance, by Diogo Ribeiro, the first official cosmographer of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, appointed in 1523.86

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The sphericity of the earth became a matter of concern for finding one’s way across the oceans, and it introduced new ideas in navigation. Questions arose, such as What is the shortest route between two points on the sphere? or What is the path traced by a ship sailing a constant course? The latter track, called a rhumb line or loxodrome, was not a straight line on a common plane map, nor did it coincide with a great circle on the globe. In 1537 the loxodromes as lines drawn on a globe were discussed by Nunes, and only four years later, in 1541, Gerardus Mercator presented them on his cosmographic globe (fig. 6.10 and app. 6.1, no. 39).87 The depiction of rhumb lines on Mercator’s globe was the first step in a process that ultimately resulted in the creation of his famous world map of 1569 “ad vsvm nauigantium” (for the use of navigators) in the projection that now carries his name. In retrospect, maps in this projection turned out to be far more important for the navigator than the presence of loxodromes on globes.88 However important the concept of loxodromes is, it played a minor part in the practice of position finding at sea. The globe had more to offer for great circle sailing. The trick was to rectify the

dade de Coimbra 32 (1985): 49–61; reprinted in Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire, by Ursula Lamb, item IX (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), esp. 56. 81. The history of early navigation has been described extensively in the literature. See the relevant chapters in this volume and the references cited there. For globes in particular, see Elly Dekker, “The Navigator’s Globe,” in Globes at Greenwich, 33 – 43. See also David Watkin Waters, The Art of Navigation in England in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Times, 2d ed. (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1978), 130, 140, 157, 193 –97, and 207– 8. 82. Joaquim Bensaúde, L’astronomie nautique au Portugal à l’époque des grandes découvertes, 2 vols. (Bern: M. Drechsel, 1912 –17; reprinted Amsterdam: Meridian, 1967), 1:70 and 168 –74. 83. Helen Wallis, “Globes in England Up to 1660,” Geographical Magazine 35 (1962 – 63): 267–79, esp. 267– 69; see also Edward Luther Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes: Their History and Construction Including a Consideration of Their Value as Aids in the Study of Geography and Astronomy, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 1:53. 84. Jean Denucé, Magellan: La question des Moluques et la première circumnavigation du globe (Brussels, 1911), 205 – 6; see also Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes, 1:81– 82. 85. Ursula Lamb, “The Spanish Cosmographic Juntas of the Sixteenth Century,” Terrae Incognitae 6 (1974): 51–64; reprinted in Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire, by Ursula Lamb, item V (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), esp. 55. 86. Denucé, Magellan, 206. 87. Pedro Nunes [Nuñez], Tratado em defensam da carta de marear (Lisbon, 1537). This book was published together with Nunes’s treatise on the sphere. See also Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici, 65 – 67. 88. Heinrich Averdunk and J. Müller-Reinhard, “Gerhard Mercator und die Geographen unter seinen Nachkommen,” Petermanns Mitteilungen, Ergänzungsheft, 182 (1914): esp. 3 –35 and 65 –75, and Gerardus Mercator, Gerard Mercator’s Map of the World (1569), intro. B. van ’t Hoff (Rotterdam: Maritiem Museum, 1961). See ﬁgure 10.12 in this volume.

fig. 6.10. COSMOGRAPHIC GLOBE GORES. A sheet of the facsimile gores made from the original set of printed gores (copper-engraved) for a cosmographic globe of 1541 by Gerardus Mercator. The sheet shows loxodromes drawn for thirty-two compass directions and also a number of stars. (See

also p. 1360.) Diameter of the mounted globe: ca. 42 cm. Photograph copyright Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels (Section des cartes et plans, III t.).

Globes in Renaissance Europe

terrestrial globe for the ship’s position so that the actual position of the ship would be found on top, at the zenith. With the help of the quadrant of altitude, the course for the ship’s destination could subsequently be determined. The usefulness of globes at sea has been a matter of debate among historians. Considering that there are no records to show that globes were actually employed at sea for position finding, this debate will not easily be resolved. Sixteenth-century navigators were divided among themselves on the matter of the globe’s usefulness at sea, especially in England. William Borough did not advise the use of globes at sea, estimating that it was too difficult to manipulate them. Others, such as Robert Hues and John Davis, strongly defended the merits of the globe for navigation purposes. As a result of Davis’s enthusiasm in particular, the first pair of printed globes was published in London by Emery Molyneux in 1592.89 At the request of William Sanderson, a wealthy merchant and financier of the publication of the Molyneux globes, Thomas Hood, the “Mathematicall Lecturer in the Citie,” wrote a treatise concerning the use of the globes. As Waters observed: “The need for such a treatise was real enough, for the globes were now, as Hood put it, ‘in the handes of many with whome I have to do.’” 90 In 1587 Hood had already been commissioned by Thomas Smith and John Wolstenholme, city financiers and promoters of marine enterprise, to give public lectures in the Leadenhall on the application of mathematics to navigation. Hood’s popular treatise on the use of globes, written in dialogue form, was overshadowed two years later, in 1594, when a manual on globes was published by Robert Hues, a mathematician and geographer who had accompanied Thomas Cavendish on his voyage around the world in 1586 – 88.91 Hues wrote in Latin for educated readers interested in navigation, witness of which is his chapter on rhumbs and their use, the first one with instructions for their practical use at sea. His manual was translated into Dutch to accompany a new pair of globes published by Jodocus Hondius in Amsterdam in 1597.92 Hondius had engraved the Molyneux globes and was well acquainted with navigation circles in London. In text following the title of this Dutch translation of Hues’s manual, the use of globes in navigation is strongly advocated: “In this treatise not only the use of the globe is discussed for astronomy, geography and comparable pleasant arts: But mainly for Seafaring, for which an explanation is given of the rhumbs and their use.” 93 By then John Davis had published his Seamans Secrets, which also included a chapter on globes.94 Thus around 1600 a number of globe manuals in the vernacular were available to teach the use of globes at sea. Still, only highly skilled navigators like Davis succeeded to make good use of globes in position finding. Most navigators preferred more practical methods for finding their

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way across the ocean. As a result, the prospect of the terrestrial globe as a navigational tool diminished, then came to an end sometime around 1650. This is not to say that loxodromes also disappeared from the surface of globes. To the contrary, loxodromes continued to be included on terrestrial globes and served as an icon symbolizing the significance of navigation for globemaking rather than the other way around. astrology Alongside his well-known treatises on astronomy and geography, Ptolemy wrote a third work, which also enjoyed a quasi-biblical authority: Tetrabiblos (Mathematical treatise in four books). In the introduction to this work, the author explains that next to the study of “the aspects of the movements of sun, moon, and stars in relation to each other” (astronomy proper) and to the earth (geography), there is another astronomy (astrology) “in which by means of the natural character of these aspects themselves we investigate the changes which they bring about in that which they surround.” 95 The use of celestial globes to find the right moment for acting or decision making according to astrological doctrine had already been proposed in the early fourteenth century by John of Harlebeke, who criticized Ptolemy’s description of the celestial globe in the Almagest because he had not intimated “how this instrument might be brought to perfection so that it could be put to everyday uses, i.e. (finding) ascendants, equations of the houses, and other things necessary in this application (i.e. astrology).” 96 The use of the globe for astrological purposes 89. For Molyneux’s globe, see Helen Wallis, “The First English Terrestrial Globe,” Der Globusfreund 11 (1962): 158 –59 (in English and German), and idem, “‘Opera Mundi’: Emery Molyneux, Jodocus Hondius and the First English Globes,” in Theatrum Orbis Librorum: Liber Amicorum Presented to Nico Israel on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Ton Croiset van Uchelen, Koert van der Horst, and Günter Schilder (Utrecht: HES, 1989), 94 –104. 90. Waters, Art of Navigation, 185–96, quotations on 186 and 189–90. 91. Robert Hues, Tractatvs de globis et eorvm vsv (London, 1594). An English translation was published by John Chilmead: Robert Hues, A Learned Treatise of Globes: Both Cœlestiall and Terrestriall. With Their Several Uses (London, 1639). This English edition was also published as Tractatus de globis et eorum usu: A Treatise Descriptive of the Globes Constructed by Emery Molyneux, and Published in 1592, ed., with annotated indexes and introduction, by Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1889). 92. For Hondius’s globes, see Van der Krogt, Globi Neerlandici. 93. Robert Hues, Tractaet: Ofte Handelinge van het Gebruijck der Hemelscher ende Aertscher Globe, ed. and trans. Jodocus Hondius (Amsterdam, 1597), title page (my italics). 94. John Davis, The Seamans Secrets (London: Thomas Dawson, 1595), pt. 2. 95. Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, ed. and trans. Frank Egleston Robbins (1940; reprinted Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3. 96. Lorch, “Sphera Solida,” 156.

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fig. 6.11. CELESTIAL GLOBE FROM STÖFFLER’S WORKSHOP. The globe was made in 1493 in the workshop of Johannes Stöffler, an astronomer and instrumentmaker who was professor of mathematics at the University of Tübingen. The metal grid surrounding the globe is for astrological purposes such as making horoscopes. Size of the original: diameter 49 cm; height 107 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (inv. no. WI 1261).

was still current in the second half of the seventeenth century when Joseph Moxon discussed the practice in his treatise on globes.97 By then, however, astrology was on the decline as a serious scientific subject, and by the eighteenth century no more was heard of the astrological usefulness of globes. The most notable of the globemakers of the sixteenth century—Johannes Stöffler, Johannes Schöner, Gemma Frisius, and Gerardus Mercator—all practiced astrology and through the production of their celestial globes helped to promote it. Astrology is the key to understanding the celestial globe made by Johannes Stöffler.98 This globe stands out because of the device added to it for finding the astrological houses for a given place and time of birth (fig. 6.11). Its use simplified the complicated calculations needed to

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

prepare a horoscope or to determine, say, the right moment for marriage. The globe by Stöffler was made for the bishop of Constance, Daniel Zehender, who certainly was not alone in his interest in astrology. A prominent figure in this respect was Philipp Melanchthon, who studied in Tübingen where Stöffler was professor of mathematics and astronomy from 1507. Under Stöffler’s influence, as he acknowledged on several occasions, Melanchthon acquired, in addition to a knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and geography, a strong belief in astrology.99 Between 1535 and 1545, Melanchthon lectured about the Tetrabiblos, and he prepared a Latin translation of it that was published in 1553 alongside the second Greek edition by Joachim Camerarius.100 With Johannes Schöner, a most prolific author in astrology, Melanchthon is said to have selected a favorable astrological moment for the foundation of the gymnasium in Nuremberg (later the Melanchthon Gymnasium), where Schöner was professor in mathematics from 1526.101 And although there is no documentary evidence that Melanchthon used a globe for astrological purposes, he was so well acquainted with globemakers such as Schöner and Mercator that it is almost unthinkable that he would not have possessed one or more of their globes. Astrology is also at the background of the celestial globes of Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator.102 Gemma is often considered a mathematician, astronomer, or geographer. On his celestial globe, however, he calls himself medicus ac mathematicus, in that order. His medical association explains why Gemma published a celestial globe for astrological applications a year after his cosmographic globe.103 Medicine and astrology were closely linked according to the macrocosmic/microcosmic theory of the elements and humors. And Mercator appears to have followed Gemma’s example. On both globes the astrological nature of many stars has been indicated in terms

97. Joseph Moxon, A Tutor to Astronomy and Geography; or, An Easie and Speedy Way to Know the Use of Both the Globes, Cœlestial and Terrestrial (London, 1659, 1670, 1674, and 1686), 122 –35. I used the facsimile of the 1674 edition dedicated to Samuel Pepys (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968). 98. See appendix 6.1, no. 5, and Günther Oestmann (with contributions by Elly Dekker and Peter Schiller), Schicksalsdeutung und Astronomie: Der Himmelsglobus des Johannes Stoefﬂer von 1493, exhibition catalog (Stuttgart: Württembergisches Landesmuseum, 1993). 99. Oestmann, Schicksalsdeutung und Astronomie, 8 and 18 n. 43. 100. Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, xi. 101. Thorndike, Magic and Experimental Science, 5:393. 102. See appendix 6.1, nos. 35 and 58, and Annelies van Gijsen, “De astrologie,” in Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus, ed. Marcel Watelet (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1994), 220 –33. A French edition of this book appeared as Marcel Watelet, ed., Gerard Mercator, cosmographe: Le temps et l’espace (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator Paribas, 1994). 103. The celestial globe of Gemma is discussed in Elly Dekker, “Uncommonly Handsome Globes,” in Globes at Greenwich, 87–136, esp. 87–91.

Globes in Renaissance Europe

of the corresponding nature of the planets. The astrological information on Gemma’s globe included data from a fourteenth-century Arabic tradition. In contrast, the data used by Mercator stems from contemporary sources, such as the Greek edition of the Tetrabiblos edited and translated by Joachim Camerarius (first published in Nuremberg in 1535) and the De supplemento almanach of Hiëronymus Cardanus (Girolamo Cardano) (first published in Milan in 1538 and reprinted in Nuremberg in 1543). Additional astrological information, such as the astrological houses and their relation to the planets, was provided on the horizon ring of Mercator’s celestial globe. It is clear that Mercator’s celestial globe would have eminently suited the demands of a student of astrology. The use of planetary positions in astrology called for precise positions of the fixed stars, because the locations of the planets were determined by their distance from one or two fixed stars. For this reason Mercator’s celestial globe was also to be preferred above others at the time because, next to up-to-date information about the nature of the stars and planets, the positions of the stars were fixed according to a new theory of precession published by Nicolaus Copernicus in his De revolutionibus of 1543. Mercator was the first among the globemakers to have used this theory.104 Small wonder, then, that the mathematician, geographer, and occult philosopher John Dee, a good friend of Mercator, was very pleased to have in his library as early as 1555 “Two Globes of Gerardus Mercator’s best making on which were my divers reformations, both Geographical and Celestial.” 105 What these “reformations” were is not known, but they may well have been astrological. In 1558 Dee was taken into the service of the court of Queen Elizabeth I and called upon to calculate astrologically a suitable day for her coronation.106 Astrology was very popular, and not only among the nobility. The citizens of Nuremberg, such as humanists Lorenz Behaim and Willibald Pirckheimer, were also greatly interested in it. It was for astrology that in 1517 Behaim bought a printed celestial globe and an accompanying booklet by Johannes Schöner for which he paid 21⁄2 gulden.107 The activities of Johannes Schöner and Joachim Camerarius have already been mentioned. Proof of astrological interest is also evident in the beautiful pair of gilt globes made in 1566 by the mathematician and astronomer Johannes Prätorius and the goldsmith Hans Epischofer (app. 6.1, nos. 75 and 76). These globes are part of a collection of instruments that were ordered by the physician Melchior Ayrer to serve the astrological interests of his medical profession.108 globes at court Last but not least among the users of globes were those who could afford grand and richly decorated globes. “Globes of copper, bronze or silver,” as Girolamo Ruscelli

155

explains in his translation of Ptolemy’s Geography, “such as princes would desire to possess, to be fine, durable and rare should be plated, that is, the circles, the letters, the outlines of the countries should first be engraved and then there should be added gold or silver plating.” 109 In the sixteenth century such globes could indeed be found in the cabinets of the nobility and in the collections of wealthy merchants. Well-known examples are the clockwork-driven globes with inlaid enamel made by Georg Roll and Johann Reinhold for Rudolf II in Prague and his brother, Archduke Ernst.110 These globes consist of a small terrestrial globe placed below a larger celestial globe, with either an armillary sphere or an ornament on top of the meridian ring around the celestial globe. Another treasure in Rudolf’s “Kunstkammer” (these “cabinets of curiousities” were also called “Wunderkammern”) was a silver clockwork-driven celestial globe carried by Pegasus that was made by Gerhard Emmoser in 1579.111 The globes of Roll and Reinhold and of Emmoser are part of a clockmaker’s tradition rather than a mapmaking tradition. As the workmanship required for making such precious globes is at the periphery of the world of the cosmographer, the craftsmen often copied the actual mappings from simple models. The globes of Roll and Reinhold and of Emmoser, for instance, as far as their mapping is concerned, are copies of the simple printed globes produced by the French mathematician François Demongenet, who was not really at the head of the profession of globemaking.112 Many a goldsmith can also be found among the makers of precious globes. Particularly precious are the socalled chalices or drinking globe-cups made by Stampfer in Basel (fig. 6.8) and Abraham Gessner in Zurich (fig. 6.12).113 Of Gessner’s globe-cups, sixteen have been preserved. All chalices consist of a terrestrial globe, made out 104. Elly Dekker, “Conspicuous Features on Sixteenth Century Celestial Globes,” Der Globusfreund 43 – 44 (1995): 77–106 (in English and German), esp. 79 – 80. 105. Wallis, “Globes in England,” 271. 106. Eric John Holmyard, Alchemy (1957; reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 205. 107. Hauschke, “Globen und Wissenschaftliche Instrumente,” 365. 108. Focus Behaim Globus, 2:637– 45. 109. Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes, 1:153. 110. Prag um 1600, 1:562 – 63. 111. Prag um 1600, 1:552. For clockwork globes and spheres, see Hans von Bertele, Globes and Spheres (Lausanne, 1961). The most detailed discussion on the clockwork of mechanical globes is by John H. Leopold, Astronomen, Sterne, Geräte: Landgraf Wilhelm IV. und seine sich selbst bewegenden Globen (Lucerne: J. Fremersdorf, 1986). 112. See Elly Dekker, “The Demongenet Tradition in Globe Making,” in Globes at Greenwich, 69 –74. 113. For Stampfer and Gessner, see Eva-Maria Lösel, Zürcher Goldschmiedekunst: Vom 13. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Berichthaus, 1983), 42 –53. For the globe by Stampfer, see appendix 6.1, no. 55; for Gessner’s globes, see appendix 6.1, nos. 108 –9, 112 –14, 131, 139, 140, 153, 167– 68, and 170 –74.

156

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 6.12. A CUP OF GILT SILVER IN THE SHAPE OF A TERRESTRIAL GLOBE. The cup was made in 1587 by Abraham Gessner, a goldsmith from Zurich.

Size of the original: diameter 18 cm; height when assembled: 54 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (inv. no. KK 1182).

of two hemispheres that can be taken apart, which is often carried by a ﬁgure representing Atlas. The small armillary sphere (or celestial globe) on top of his terrestrial globes reminds the user of the cosmos at large. In the period under study, large parts of Europe were governed by the emperor Charles V, whose interest in the sciences is illustrated by his ﬁnancial support for the printing of Peter Apian’s Astronomicum Caesareum (1540).114 There are no documents recording that Charles V owned particularly luxurious globes, but it seems probable that he had a pair of Mercator’s globes for which Mercator had written a manual titled “Declaratio insigniorum utilitatum quae sunt in globo terrestri, coelesti, et annulo astronomico.” 115 It is certain that Mercator made a small terrestrial globe for Charles V to be included in a crystal celestial globe on top of a grand planetary clock. The latter was made by Giovanni Gia-

nelli, a clockmaker from Milan.116 In a letter written by Mercator to Melanchthon on 23 August 1554, Mercator 114. Schöner, Mathematik und Astronomie, 417. 115. Averdunk and Müller-Reinhard, “Gerhard Mercator,” 35 – 40, and Robert W. Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps: Bio-bibliographies of the Cartographers of Abraham Ortelius, 1570 (Chicago: For the Newberry Library by Speculum Orbis Press, 1993), 376 – 406, esp. 384 – 85. 116. Peter H. Meurer, “Ein Mercator-Brief an Philipp Melanchthon über seine Globuslieferung an Kaiser Karl V. im Jahre 1554,” Der Globusfreund 45 – 46 (1997–98): 187–96. In Walter Ghim’s Vita Mercatoris it is said that Mercator “constructed by order of the Emperor two small globes, one of purest blown crystal and one of wood. On the former, the planets and the more important constellations were en graved with a diamond and inlaid with shining gold.” A. S. Osley, Mercator: A Monograph on the Lettering of Maps, etc. in the 16th Century Netherlands with a Facsimile and Translation of His Treatise on the Italic Hand and a Translation of Ghim’s Vita Mercatoris (New York:

Globes in Renaissance Europe

tells how he was summoned by Charles V to Brussels with this globe, how he admired the planetary clock driven by more than seven hundred geared wheels, and how they discussed such problems as finding the longitude.117 Now one can only guess about the details of Gianelli’s planetary clock. It might have been of the type made in 1555 by Philipp Immser in cooperation with Emmoser.118 Like Stöffler’s celestial globe (fig. 6.11), the one on top of Immser’s machine has a structure for finding the astrological houses. Immser, a pupil of Stöffler and from 1531 until 1557 professor of mathematics and astronomy in Tübingen, initially intended his planetary clock for the astrologically minded Pfalzgraf Ottheinrich. However, the duke died before the clock was finished, so in the end it was bought by Emperor Ferdinand I, a brother of Charles V. Very large globes were also made. One, a brass celestial globe of 1502 with a diameter of 69 centimeters, is of unknown provenance.119 The largest globe of the sixteenth century, however, is the terrestrial globe with a diameter of a little over 2 meters attributed to Egnazio Danti from Florence and dating from 1567.120 It can still be seen decorating the Guardaroba Nuova in the Palazzo Vecchio of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, for whom it was made. But not all grand globes were made for courtly surroundings. The terrestrial and celestial globes made by Philipp Apian and Heinrich Arboreus respectively in 1576 and 1575, with a diameter of 76 centimeters apiece, were destined to adorn the newly founded library of Duke Albrecht V in 1576.121 And the St. Gallen globe shown in plate 5, which is 121 centimeters in diameter, was acquired in 1595 by abbot Bernhard II for his monastery in St. Gallen.

157

and the humanist movement not only created a new way of looking at the world; it also changed the customary patterns of thinking about worldly power. New continents were discovered with different ﬂoras and faunas, and new and strange people were actually found living in the torrid zones, which had been believed to be uninhabitable and intemperate by the ancient philosophers. To learn about these new regions and to discover their scope for trade was a goal worthy of merchants’ investments. To learn about these new people and to understand how life proceeded in remote places of the world became a goal worthy of princely and scholarly aspiration. All this ﬁtted well into the patterns of another new world opened up by the humanist movement. Thus a new culture came into being in which the globe stood out as a symbol on a variety of levels. It induced fanciful constructions such as that of Duke Cosimo of Florence, who, according to Giorgio Vasari, “wished to put together once and for all these things both of heaven and of earth, absolutely exact and without errors, so that it might be possible to see and measure them separately and all together, according to the pleasure of those who delight in this most beautiful profession [cosmography] and study it.” 122 It is against this background that one must understand the widespread application of the globe in art as a symbol for power and learning, as well as for navigation. This also applies to the widespread presence of globes in the cabinets of princely and bourgeois collectors, in many an Italian studiolo, and in the libraries of universities.123 Conversely, it created a whole new market to make printed globes for students and scholars and expensive manuscript globes for the very rich. This explains why the the artist’s contribution to globemaking in the Renaissance can be seen as next to the successes of the conven-

globes as symbols In his classic work Sphaira, Globus, Reichsapfel, Schramm showed that in antiquity the globe served as a symbol for the universe and was used as an attribute of the gods, especially Zeus. Roman emperors were depicted with it to express both their worldly power and their divine aspirations. This pagan, imperial sphere was converted into a truly Christian symbol by placing a cross on top of it. The Christian orb was carried by God the Father and by Christ, as many paintings testify. It also became one of the main insignia of emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. This regal orb, or Reichsapfel as it became known in the Renaissance, still represented the symbolic values attached to it in the Middle Ages, although its use was no longer limited to the Roman emperor. Although the association of globes with power in the Renaissance followed the patterns established in earlier centuries for the most part, the actual image of the world was dramatically changed. The voyages of exploration

Watson-Guptill, 1969), 183 –94, esp. 186. On Giovanni Gianelli, see Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes, 1:135 –36. 117. Meurer, “Ein Mercator-Brief,” 193. 118. The planetary clock with globe by Philip Immser is in Vienna, Technisches Museum für Industrie und Gewerbe, inv. no. 11.393. It is described by Oestmann in Schicksalsdeutung und Astronomie, 31–34. 119. See appendix 6.1, no. 7, and Adolphe Chapiro, Chantal MeslinPerrier, and Anthony John Turner, Catalogue de l’horlogerie et des instruments de précision: Du début du XVI e au milieu du XVII e siècle (Paris, 1989), 116 –21. 120. See appendix 6.1, no. 78, and Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes, 1:158 – 63. 121. Alois Fauser, Ältere Erd- und Himmelsgloben in Bayern (Stuttgart: Schuler Verlagsgesellschaft, 1964), 48 –51 and ﬁgs. 5 and 6; see also Alois Fauser, Kulturgeschichte des Globus (Munich: Schuler Verlagsgesellschaft, 1973), 84 –91. 122. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 2 vols., trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, intro. and notes David Ekserdjian (London: David Campbell, 1996), 2:893. 123. David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors & Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), esp. 75 –102.

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The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

tional map and instrumentmakers. Together they stood at the base of a whole new industry that still prospers today.

Renaissance Globes: Humanism Materialized Although editions of the Sphere of Sacrobosco were still common in the sixteenth century, the work did not enjoy the same popularity as it had during the Middle Ages.124 As the impact of the translations of Ptolemy’s Geography and the voyages of discovery was felt more and more, other treatises with more details of interest to geography and navigation became more prominent. Peter Apian’s Cosmographicus liber is only one example of the new generation of university textbooks. Paper volvelles, or working illustrations with movable parts, which form so vivid a part of Apian’s book and the many additions to it made by Gemma Frisius in later editions, appear to be a common feature of such new textbooks. The importance of astronomical phenomena for finding the geographical latitude and longitude of a place on earth encouraged the design and use of instruments. Even the most geographical of the books on Renaissance cosmography, that of Sebastian Münster, bears testimony to this. The result of this development was that although the main contents of the new treatises were very much the same as that of Sacrobosco’s Sphere, they had, first, a much better feeling for science, and, second, contents that were understood by a much larger number of people. Also, new solutions to old problems—such as the method for determining lunar distance introduced by Johannes Werner (1514) and the horological method for finding the longitude developed by Gemma Frisius (1530)—and new instruments were added to those already known. The production and use of globes was certainly instrumental in this respect. If Schöner is correct in his assessment that cosmography and instrumentmaking were without doubt the two most important topics in teaching mathematics in the circle of Conrad Celtis, the making of globes might well be interpreted as humanism materialized.125 Although such a claim on behalf of the humanist movement may seem exaggerated, the specialists who came to the fore in this movement distinguished themselves in two ways: either they were well versed in mathematics, and therefore well equipped to apply the relevant knowledge to practical applications, or they were able to make complicated instruments and models. The sixteenth century was a very cosmographic century in which most efforts were directed toward understanding what had come down from antiquity and the Middle Ages. And all cosmographers would have agreed with Hues: “I hold it very superfluous to goe about to prove that a Globe is of a figure most proper and apt to expresse the fashion of the Heavens and Earth as being most agreeable to nature,

easiest to be understood, and also very beautifull to behold.” 126 In the sixteenth century, astrology was still a vital part of astronomy, which made itself felt especially in the demands for accurate positions of the stars and the planets. It is for such reasons that globemakers, beginning with Gerardus Mercator, were quick to apply the new theory of precession published by Copernicus in 1543 in De revolutionibus. This underlines the point made by Goldstein that in the sixteenth century “the motion of the starry sphere was a recognized problem in the astronomical community whereas geocentrism was not.” 127 However, it would be wrong to see the use of Copernicus’s theory about the starry sky as an indication that globemakers adhered to the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus about the world as a whole. The mixture of concepts underlying the common Ptolemaic globe came under attack only in the eighteenth century. As George Adams wrote: “Though globes have ever been considered as the best instruments for conveying general ideas of astronomy and geography, yet have they always been mounted in a way that must perplex and confuse the learner, and furnish him with ideas that are altogether false, and contrary to the nature of things.” 128 It was especially the design of the common globe as it had been established during the Renaissance that was criticized, because by definition every place is always in the zenith of it’s horizon, and the place and horizon always move together; but in the common globes the broad paper circle is only the horizon in one situation, that is, when the place is in the zenith; after having rectified the globe to the latitude, the moment you move the globe, the broad paper circle is no longer the horizon. . . . As if it were to multiply confusion, a circle is laid down on the terrestrial globe to represent the ecliptic, and used as such in solving problems upon the common globes, though it involves the pupil in numerous absurdities: thus having marked the sun’s place in the ecliptic, and rectified

124. Francis R. Johnson, “Astronomical Text-Books in the Sixteenth Century,” in Science Medicine and History: Essays on the Evolution of Scientiﬁc Thought and Medical Practice Written in Honour of Charles Singer, 2 vols., ed. Edgar Ashworth Underwood (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 1:285 –302. 125. Schöner, Mathematik und Astronomie, 257. 126. Hues, Tractatus de globis et eorum usu, 16. 127. Bernard R. Goldstein, “Historical Perspectives on Copernicus’s Account of Precession,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 25 (1994): 189 –97, esp. 189. 128. George Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy, Considered in It’s [sic] Present State of Improvement: Describing, in a Familiar and Easy Manner, the Principal Phenomena of Nature; and Shewing, That They All Co-operate in Displaying the Goodness, Wisdom, and Power of God, 5 vols. (London: R. Hindmarsh, 1794), 4: 197.

Globes in Renaissance Europe the globe to the latitude, then turn the globe, and the sun and earth have a diurnal motion together. 129

This criticism signaled the beginning of the decline of the traditional design of the Ptolemaic globe. But it was another century before it gave way to the modern globe that conforms to the Copernican hypothesis in which the sun is in the center of the universe and the diurnal motion is explained by the rotation of the earth around its own axis.130 The reason for this delay is clear: for an understanding of the visible world, a geocentric globe is preferable. Even Copernicus always bore in mind that

159 For us who are borne by the earth, the sun and the moon pass by, And the stars return on their rounds, and again they drop out of sight.131

129. Adams, Natural and Experimental Philosophy, 4:198 –99. 130. Elly Dekker, “The Copernican Globe: A Delayed Conception,” Annals of Science 53 (1996): 541– 66. 131. Nicolaus Copernicus, On the Revolutions, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki, trans. and with commentary by Edward Rosen (London: Macmillan, 1978), 51.

160

appendix 6.1 List of Globes and Globe Gores Made in Europe from 1300 until 1600 Globe, authora

Dateb

M /Pc

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

1. Celestial, anonymous

Ca. 1325

Bernkastel-Kues, St. Nikolaus Hospital (Cusanusstift)

Hartmann (1919), 28 – 40; Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:508 –9

2. Celestial, anonymous

Ca. 1450

Bernkastel-Kues, St. Nikolaus Hospital (Cusanusstift)

Hartmann (1919), 42 –50; Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:509

3. Celestial, Hans Dorn

1480

Cracow, Museum of the Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego

Ameisenowa (1959); Zakrzewska (1965), 7– 8

4. Terrestrial, Martin Behaim

1492

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Ravenstein (1908); Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 1:173 –308 and 2:745 – 46; see also ﬁg. 6.4

5. Celestial, Johannes Stöfﬂer

1493

Stuttgart, Württembergisches Landesmuseum

Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:516 –18; Oestmann (1993b); see also ﬁg. 6.11

6. Terrestrial (Laon globe), anonymous

Ca. 1500

Paris, precise location unknown

Stevenson (1921), 1:51–52; Raemdonck (1968), 11

7. Celestial, anonymous

1502

Ecouen, Musée National de la Renaissance Château d’Ecouen

Duprat (1973), no. 210; Chapiro, Meslin-Perrier, and Turner (1989), 116 –21

8. Terrestrial gores, Martin Waldseemüller

Ca. 1507

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, James Ford Bell Library

Shirley (2001), 28 –29 (no. 26); see also ﬁg. 6.5

9. Terrestrial (Hunt-Lenox globe), anonymous

Ca. 1510

New York Public Library

Stevenson (1921), 1:73 –74; Yonge (1968), 81 and 82

10. Terrestrial (Jagiellonian globe), anonymous

Ca. 1510

7.3

Cracow, Museum of the Uniwersytetu Jagiellon´skiego

Stevenson (1921), 1:74 –75; Zakrzewska (1965), 8 –9; Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:668 –70

11. Terrestrial gores, Louis Boulengier

Ca. 1514

New York Public Library

Shirley (2001), 43 (no. 38)

12. Celestial gores, Johannes Schöner

Ca. 1515

Washington, D.C., Library of Congress

See ﬁg. 6.6

13. Terrestrial, Johannes Schöner

Ca. 1515

Frankfurt, Historisches Museum; Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek

Kratzsch (1984), 6 and 16 –17; Dolz (1994), 10 –13; Glasemann (1999), 13 –14

14. Terrestrial, Johannes Schöner

1520

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:673 –74

15. Terrestial, Nicolaus Leopold of Brixen

1522

Present location unknown

Oberhummer (1926); Muris and Saarmann (1961), 73 –76

16. Celestial, Nicolaus Leopold of Brixen

1522

Present location unknown

Oberhummer (1926); Muris and Saarmann (1961), 73 –76

17. Celestial, anonymous

Ca. 1525

Private collection

Brink and Hornbostel (1993), 152

161

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

18. Terrestrial (Green globe), anonymous

Ca. 1525

BNF

Stevenson (1921), 1:76 –77; Duprat (1973), no. 211

19. Celestial (after Johannes Schöner), anonymous

Ca. 1525

17.5

Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

Duprat (1973), no. 110 (attributes the globe incorrectly to Oronce Fine and dates it 1553); Dekker (1999b)

20. Terrestrial gores, Peter Apian

Ca. 1527

10.5

BNF

Shirley (2001), 50 (no. 43); Finsterwalder (1998)

21. Terrestial, Robert de Bailly

1530

New York, Pierpont Morgan Library

Stevenson (1921), 1:105 – 6; Yonge (1968), 4 –5

22. Celestial, Caspar Vopel

1532

Cologne, Kölnisches Stadtmuseum

Zinner (1967), 578

23. Terrestrial, Johannes Schöner

Ca. 1533

Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek

Kratzsch (1984), 6 and 18 –19

24. Celestial, Johannes Schöner

Ca. 1533

Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek; London, Royal Astronomical Society (on loan to the Science Museum)

Kratzsch (1984), 6 and 20 –21; Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:524 –25; Lamb and Collins (1994), 20

25. Celestial (probably originally part of clockwork-driven armillary sphere), attributed to workshop of Julien and Guillaume Coudray and Jean Du Jardin

1533

Montreal, Stewart Museum

Dahl and Gauvin (2000), 38 – 42 and 152 –53

26. Terrestrial gores, anonymous

Ca. 1535

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Nicolai Collection

Van der Krogt (1985 – 86), 111; Shirley (2001), 79 – 81 (no. 71)

27. Terrestrial (gilt globe), anonymous

Ca. 1535

BNF

Muris and Saarmann (1961), 109 –10; Duprat (1973), no. 212; Fauser (1973), 64 – 67

28. Terrestrial (wooden globe), anonymous

Ca. 1535

BNF

Duprat (1973), no. 213

29. Terrestrial (Nancy globe), anonymous

Ca. 1535

Nancy, Musée Historique Lorrain

Stevenson (1921), 1:101–2; Duprat (1973), no. 209

30. Terrestrial (marmor [marble] globe), anonymous

Ca. 1535

Gotha, Schloßmuseum

Horn (1976), 13 –18

31. Celestial, Caspar Vopel

1536

Cologne, Kölnisches Stadtmuseum

Dekker (1995), 95

32. Terrestrial, Caspar Vopel

1536

Tenri, Tenri Central Library

Shirley (2001), 82 (no. 73); Kawamura, Unno, and Miyajima (1990), 177

33. Terrestrial gores (fragment), Caspar Vopel

1536

Bath (UK), The American Museum in Britain

Shirley (2001), 82 – 83 (no. 74)

162

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

34. Cosmographic, Gemma Frisius, Gaspard van der Heyden, and Gerardus Mercator

Ca. 1536

Vienna, Collection of Rudolf Schmidt (on loan to the Österreichsische Nationalbibliothek)

Van der Krogt (1993), 53 –55 and 410 –11; Wawrik and Hühnel (1994), 14 –16

35. Celestial, Gemma Frisius, Gaspard van der Heyden, and Gerardus Mercator

1537

London, National Maritime Museum

Van der Krogt (1993), 55 –57 and 411–12; Dekker (1999a), 87–91 and 341– 42

36. Celestial gores, Georg Hartmann

1538

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Nicolai Collection

Fauser (1964), 97; Van der Krogt (1985 – 86), 104

37. Celestial gores (after Caspar Vopel)

Ca. 1540

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Nicolai Collection

Van der Krogt (1985 – 86), 112

38. Terrestrial (crystal, part of a triumphal column attributed to Giulio Romano)

Ca. 1540

Ca. 5

Florence, Museo degli Argenti

Soly (1999), 488

39. Cosmographic, Gerardus Mercator

1541

London, National Maritime Museum

Raemdonck (1968); Van der Krogt (1993), 62 – 67 and 413 –15; Dekker (1999a), 91–95 and 412 –13; see also ﬁg. 6.10

40. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Caspar Vopel)

1541

Washington, National Museum of American History

Stevenson (1921), 1:113; Zinner (1967), 579; not recorded in Yonge

41. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Caspar Vopel)

1541

London, Science Museum

Zinner (1967), 579

42. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Caspar Vopel)

1542

UK, Private collection

Lamb and Collins (1994), 80

43. Terrestrial gores, Alonso de Santa Cruz

1542

Parchment sheets; 79 144 overall

Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, Sveriges Nationalbibliotek

Stevenson (1921), 1:121–22

44. Terrestrial, Eufrosino della Volpaia

1542

New York Historical Society

Stevenson (1921), 1:117–20; Yonge (1968), 62

45. Terrestrial, Caspar Vopel

1542

Cologne, Kölnisches Stadtmuseum

Private communication

46. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Caspar Vopel)

1543

Copenhagen, Nationalmuseet

Kejlbo (1995), 43 – 47 and 208 –9

47. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Caspar Vopel)

1543

Washington, D.C., Library of Congress

Yonge (1968), 99

163

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

48. Terrestrial, Caspar Vopel

1544

Salzburg, Carolino Augusteum Salzburger Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte

Allmayer-Beck (1997), 141– 42 and 353

49. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Caspar Vopel)

1544

Formerly in the collection of Jodoco Del Badia of Florence; present location unknown

Stevenson (1921), 1:115 –16

50. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Caspar Vopel)

1545

Munich, Deutsches Museum

Fauser (1964), 137

51. Celestial, Jacob Rabus

1546

Harburg, Fürstl. OettingenWallerstein’sche Sammlung

Fauser (1964), 119

52. Celestial gores, Georg Hartmann

1547

8.4

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Nicolai Collection

Fauser (1964), 97; Van der Krogt (1985 – 86), 104

53. Terrestrial gores, Georg Hartmann

1547

8.4

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Nicolai Collection

Van der Krogt (1985 – 86), 103 – 4; Shirley (2001), 79 and 82 (no. 72)

54. Terrestrial, French, anonymous

Ca. 1550

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 100 –101 and 200 –201

55. Cosmographic globe-cup, Jakob Stampfer

Ca. 1550

Basel, Historisches Museum

Kish (1969 –71); Nagel (1995); Lösel (1983), 295e; see also ﬁg. 6.8

56. Celestial and terrestrial (part of clockwork-driven armillary sphere by Pierre de Fobis)

Ca. 1550

C 15.5 T8

Formerly Rothschild Collection; exhibited in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kunstkammer

King and Millburn (1978), 76 –77; Allmayer-Beck (1997), 136 and 333; Christie, Manson and Woods (1999), 304 – 8; Kugel (2002), 144 –51

57. Terrestrial (Lécuy or Rouen globe), anonymous

Ca. 1550

25.5

BNF

Duprat (1973), no. 214; for the date, see Dörﬂinger (1973), 95 –96

58. Celestial, Gerardus Mercator

1551

London, National Maritime Museum

Raemdonck (1968); Van der Krogt (1993), 67 and 413 –15; Dekker (1999a), 91–95 and 413 –15

59. Terrestrial gores, François Demongenet

1552

Ca. 9

New York Public Library

Stevenson (1921), 1:147– 48; Yonge (1968), 90; Shirley (2001), 106 (no. 93)

60. Celestial gores, François Demongenet

1552

Ca. 9

New York Public Library

Stevenson (1921), 1:147– 48; Yonge (1968), 90

61. Terrestrial, Jacques de la Garde

1552

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 199 –200

164

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

62. Terrestrial globe, attributed to Jacques de la Garde

Ca. 1552

6.2

Present whereabouts unknown

Kugel (2002), 46 – 49

63. Celestial (part of a planetary clock), Philipp Immser

1554/61

Vienna, Technisches Museum

Oestmann (1993b), 31–34; Allmayer-Beck (1997), 338

64. Celestial, Tilemann Stella

1555

Weissenburg, Römermuseum

Dekker (1995), 96

65. Terrestrial gores, Antonio Floriano

Ca. 1555

Rotterdam, Maritiem Museum

Van der Krogt (1984), 125 –26

66. Terrestrial, Paolo Forlani

Ca. 1560

Cambridge, Whipple Museum of the History of Science

Dekker and Van der Krogt (1993), 20 –21

67. Terrestrial gores, François Demongenet

Ca. 1560

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Nicolai Collection

Van der Krogt (1985 – 86), 107– 8; Shirley (2001), 120 –21 (no. 105)

68. Terrestrial, François Demongenet

Ca. 1560

Rome, Museo Astronomico e Copernicano

Calisi (1982), 70

69. Celestial gores, François Demongenet

Ca. 1560

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Nicolai Collection; Vienna, Collection Rudolf Schmidt

Van der Krogt (1985 – 86), 109; private communication

70. Celestial, François Demongenet

Ca. 1560

Rome, Museo Astronomico e Copernicano

Calisi (1982), 69

71. Terrestrial (part of a table clock), Jean Naze

Ca. 1560

6.5

Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Kassel

Kummer (1983), 55; Mackensen (1982), 150 –51

72. Terrestrial of Erik’s “Reichsapfel,” Cornelis Verweiden

1561

Not known

Stockholm, Kungliga Slottet, Husgera˚dskammaren

Schramm (1958), 145

73. Celestial (part of a planetary clock), Eberhard Baldewein and Hermann Diepel

1561/2

Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Kassel

Leopold (1986), 61– 64; Mackensen (1982), 118 –21

74. Celestial, Johannes Prätorius

1565

Vienna, Sammlung des Fürsten von Lichtenstein

Allmayer-Beck (1997), 165, 166, and 345

75. Terrestrial, Johannes Prätorius and Hans Epischofer

1566

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:638 – 40

76. Celestial, Johannes Prätorius and Hans Epischofer

1566

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:637–38

77. Celestial (part of planetary clock), Eberhard Baldewein and Hermann Diepel

1566/7

Dresden, Staatlicher MathematischPhysikalischer Salon

Leopold (1986), 65 –70

165

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

78. Terrestrial, Egnazio Danti

1567

204

Florence, Palazzo Vecchio

Del Badia (1881); Muris and Saarmann (1961), 145

79. Terrestrial, Johannes Prätorius

1568

Dresden, Staatlicher MathematischPhysikalischer Salon

Dolz (1994), 19 –21

80. Terrestrial globe inside a (clockwork) celestial globe by Christian Heiden

1570

T 10.5 C9

Vienna, Schatzkammer des Deutschen Ordens

Leopold (1986), 76 – 85

81. Terrestrial, Francesco Basso

1570

Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale

Muris and Saarmann (1961), 145

82. Terrestrial globe, anonymous

Ca. 1570

Private collection

Dekker and Van Laere (1997), 13 –14 (1.10); Dekker (1999a), 70, table 7.1, PCI; Kugel (2002), 50 –55

83. Terrestrial globe, anonymous

Ca. 1570

Present whereabouts unknown

Dekker (1999a), 70, table 7.1, PCII

84. Terrestrial, Giulio Sanuto and Livio Sanuto

Ca. 1570

Berlin, Staatsbibliothek

Dekker and Van der Krogt (1993), 32; Woodward (1987)

85. Celestial, Giovanni Antonio Vanosino

Ca. 1570

Vatican City, Vatican Museum

Hess (1967), 407– 8; Manoscritti cartograﬁa (1981), 61; Dekker (1999a), 72 –73

86. Celestial (part of the Strassbourg clock), Isaac Habrecht (I)

1570

Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux-Arts

Beyer, Bach, and Muller (1960); Oestmann (1993a), 92 –97 and pls. 23 –24

87. Celestial globe, attributed to Vicenzo de’ Rossi

Ca. 1570

Present whereabouts unknown

Kugel (2002), 30 –32

88. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere), Josiah Habrecht

1572

Copenhagen, Nationalmuseet

Kejlbo (1995), 72 –75 and 190 –91

89. Celestial (clockwork is lost), Eberhard Baldewein

1574/75

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kunstkammer

Leopold (1986), 88 –92; Allmayer-Beck (1997), 324; Kugel (2002), 152 –57

90. Celestial (with clockwork), Eberhard Baldewein

1575

London, British Museum (loan from a private collection)

Leopold (1986), 93 –102

91. Celestial, Christoph Schissler

1575

Sintra, Palácio Nacional

Reis (1990)

92. Celestial, anonymous

1575

Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale

Fiorini (1899), 187

93. Celestial globe, anonymous

Ca. 1575

Not known Angers, Museé d’Angers

Private communication

94. Terrestrial, anonymous

1575

Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale

Fiorini (1899), 187

95. Cosmographic (St. Gallen globe), anonymous

Ca. 1575

121

Zurich, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum

Grenacher (1961); Fauser (1973), 96 and 99; see also plate 5

166

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

96. Celestial, Heinrich Arboreus

1575

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

Fauser (1964), 50 –51; Fauser (1973), 88 –91; Wolff (1989)

97. Terrestrial, Philipp Apian

1576

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

Fauser (1964), 48 – 49; Fauser (1973), 84 – 87; Wolff (1989)

98. Terrestrial gores, Mario Cartaro

1577

Chicago, Newberry Library

Shirley (2001), 160 – 61 (no. 137)

99. Terrestrial, Mario Cartaro

1577

Rome, Museo Astronomico e Copernicano

Calisi (1982), 70

100. Celestial, Mario Cartaro

1577

Florence, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza; Rome, Museo Astronomico e Copernicano

Calisi (1982), 70 and 72; Miniati (1991), 42; Dekker (2004), 118 –20

101. Celestial (with clockwork), Gerhard Emmoser

1579

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Leopold (1986), 104 –11

102. Celestial globe, anonymous

1579

Milan, Museo Bagatti Valsecchi

Private communication

103. Cosmographic (Murad III), attributed to workshop of Gerardus Mercator

1579

Private collection; present whereabouts unknown

Christie, Manson and Woods (1991)

104. Celestial (Murad III), attributed to workshop of Gerardus Mercator

1579

Private collection; present whereabouts unknown

Christie, Manson and Woods (1991)

105. Terrestrial globe, anonymous

1579

Milan, Museo Bagatti Valsecchi

Private communication

106. Terrestrial, anonymous (formerly attributed to Hans Reimer)

Ca. 1580

2.5

Munich, Schatzkammer der Residenz

Fauser (1964), 120 –21; Fauser (1973), 92 –95

107. Celestial, anonymous (formerly attributed to Hans Reimer)

Ca. 1580

2.5

Munich, Schatzkammer der Residenz

Fauser (1964), 121; Fauser (1973), 92 –95

108. Terrestrial globe-cup with a small armillary sphere on top, Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1580

Present whereabouts unknown

Schmidt (1977), 18 –20; Lösel (1983), 196 –97p; Kugel (2002) 60 – 67

109. Terrestrial globe-cup with a small armillary sphere, attributed to Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1580

18.5

Copenhagen, Nationalmuseet

Kejlbo (1995), 103, 105 – 8, 188 – 89; Lösel (1983), 1960

110. Terrestrial, anonymous

Ca. 1580

Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum

Kummer (1980), 99 –101

111. Terrestrial globe, anonymous

Ca. 1580

2.5

Present whereabouts unknown

Kugel (2002), 56 –59

167

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

112. Terrestrial globe-cup with a small armillary sphere by Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1580

Height, 41.5

Nancy, Musée Lorrain

Lösel (1983), 198z

113. Terrestrial globecup (small sphere missing) by Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1580 M (a plate underneath the pedestal has 1569 engraved on it)

Height, 35; diameter, 15

London, British Museum

Lösel (1983), 198a1

114. Terrestrial globecup with a small armillary sphere by Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1580

Genève, Musée de l’Histoire des Sciences

Kugel (2002), 72

115. Celestial globe (with clockwork), attributed to Johann Reinhold

Ca. 1580

Present whereabouts unknown

Kugel (2002), 158 –165

116. Celestial globe (part of an armillary sphere), anonymous

Ca. 1580

13.5

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

Focus Behaim Globus (1992), 2:549; Dekker (1999a), 74 n.16

117. Celestial globe, anonymous

Ca. 1580

Present whereabouts unknown

Kugel (2002), 32 –34

118. Celestial (with clockwork), anonymous

Ca. 1580

Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum

Kummer (1980), 101–3

119. Celestial, anonymous

Ca. 1580

Kaiserslautern, Pfalzgalerie

Kummer (1992), 110 –11

120. Celestial (with clockwork) by Jost Bürgi

1582

Paris, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM)

Duprat (1973), no. 41; Leopold (1986), 125 –35

121. Celestial (with clockwork) and terrestrial, Johann Reinhold and Georg Roll

1584

C 21 T9

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kunstkammer

King and Millburn (1978), 83 – 84; Prag um 1600 (1988), 1:562 – 63; Allmayer-Beck (1997), 136 and 348

122. Celestial (with clockwork), Johann Reinhold and Georg Roll

1584

Not known

London, Victoria and Albert Museum

King and Millburn (1978), 84; Prag um 1600 (1988), 562

123. Celestial (with clockwork) and terrestrial, Johann Reinhold and Georg Roll

Ca. 1584

C 21 T9

St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum

Prag um 1600 (1988), 562

124. Celestial, attributed to Giovanni Battista Fontana

Ca. 1585

Innsbruck, Schloß Ambras

Dekker (1995), 97; Allmeyer-Beck (1997), 333

168

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

125. Terrestrial gores, attributed to Gerard de Jode

Ca. 1585

73.5

BNF

Shirley (2001), 176 –78 (no. 156); Van der Krogt (1993), 253 –57 and 416; see also ﬁg. 44.44

126. Celestial (with clockwork), Jost Bürgi

Ca. 1585

Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek

Leopold (1986), 113 –18; Dolz (1994), 80 – 81

127. Celestial (Kassel I, with clockwork), Jost Bürgi

Ca. 1585

Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Kassel

Leopold (1986), 119 –25; Mackensen (1982), 131–33

128. Celestial (with clockwork) and terrestrial, Johannes Reinhard and Georg Roll

1586

C 21 T 10

Dresden, Staatlicher MathematischPhysikalischer Salon

King and Millburn (1978), 85; Dolz (1994), 82 – 85

129. Celestial (part of armillary sphere), Petrus Aspheris

1586

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 149 –51

130. Celestial, Jacob Floris van Langren and his sons

1586

32.5

Linköping, Stifts- och Landesbiblioteket

Van der Krogt (1993), 423 –24 and 429

131. Terrestrial globecup with a small armillary sphere, Abraham Gessner

1587

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kunstkammer

Allmayer-Beck (1997), 72 and 335; Lösel (1983), 196n; see also ﬁg. 6.12

132. Terrestrial, Johann Reinhold

1588

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 104 –5 and 202 –3

133. Celestial (with 1588 clockwork) and terrestrial, Johann Reinhold and Georg Roll

C 21 T 10

Paris, Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM)

Duprat (1973), no. 160; Prag um 1600 (1988), 562

134. Celestial (with clockwork) and terrestrial, Johann Reinhold and Georg Roll

1589

C 21 T 10

Naples, Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte

Zinner (1967), 493; Prag um 1600 (1988), 562

135. Terrestrial globecup, Lenhart Krug

1589

Steiermark, private collection

Allmayer-Beck (1997), 341; Kugel (2002), 74 –77

136. Terrestrial, Jacob Floris van Langren and his sons

1589

32.5

London, National Maritime Museum; Rome, Museo Astronomico e Copernicano

Van der Krogt (1993), 421–22 and 429; Dekker (1999a), 397–99

137. Celestial, Jacob Floris van Langren and his sons

1589

32.5

London, National Maritime Museum

Van der Krogt (1993) 423 –24 and 429; Dekker (1999a), 399 – 401

138. Terrestrial, Jacob Floris van Langren and his sons

1589

52.5

Amsterdam, Nederlands Scheepsvaartmuseum

Van der Krogt (1993), 430 –33

169

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

139. Terrestrial globecup with small armillary sphere on top, Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1590

15.5

Basel, Historisches Museum

Stevenson (1921), 1:200; Zinner (1967), 321; Lösel (1983), 197r

140. Terrestrial globecup with a small celestial globe on top, Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1590

Height 46; diameter unknown

Ribeauvillé (Rappoltsweiler Rathaus, just north of Colmar)

Stevenson (1921), 1:200; Zinner (1967), 321; Lösel (1983) 197q

141. Terrestrial and celestial, attributed to Charles Whitwell

Ca. 1590

6.2

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 101–3 and 203 – 4

142. Celestial, attributed to Jost Bürgi

Ca. 1590

Formerly Rothschild Collection

Christie, Manson and Woods (1999), 302 –3

143. Cosmographic (part of Ptolemaic sphere by Antonio Santucci)

Ca. 1590

Ca. 60

Florence, Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza

Miniati (1991), 104; Dekker (2004), 80 – 84

144. Celestial, anonymous

Ca. 1590

Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Kassel

Mackensen (1982), 135

145. Terrestrial, Emery Molyneux

1592

Sussex, Petworth House

Wallis (1962); Van der Krogt (1993), 460 – 63

146. Celestial, Emery Molyneux

1592

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum; Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Kassel

Mackensen (1982), 128; Van der Krogt (1993), 460 – 63

147. Terrestrial, Antonio Spano

1593

New York, Pierpont Morgan Library

Yonge (1968), 60 and 61

148. Celestial, Jacob Floris van Langren and his sons

1594

32.5

Frankfurt, Historisches Museum

Holbrook (1983), 69 –73; Van der Krogt (1993), 424 –26 and 429; Glasemann (1999), 15 –20

149. Celestial (Kassel II, with clockwork), Jost Bürgi

Ca. 1594

Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Kassel

Leopold (1986), 135 – 44; Mackensen (1982), 137

150. Celestial (with clockwork), Jost Bürgi

1594

Zurich, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum

Leopold and Pechstein (1977); Leopold (1986), 176 – 85

151. Celestial (part of an astronomical clock by Isaac Habrecht [I])

1594

Not known

Copenhagen, Rosenborg Slot

Kejlbo (1995), 77– 81 and 190

152. Terrestrial (part of an armillary sphere by Ottavio Pisani)

Ca. 1595

8.5

Private collection

Kummer (1992), 105

153. Terrestrial globecup with a small armillary sphere by Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1595

Height, 52; diameter unknown

Plymouth, City Museum and Art Gallery

Lösel (1983), 197s

154. Terrestrial gores, Jodocus Hondius the Elder

Before 1597

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek

Van der Krogt (1993), 462 – 63

170

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

155. Terrestrial, Christoph Schissler and Amos Neuwaldt

1597

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 104, 106 –7, and 204 – 6

156. Celestial, Christoph Schissler and Amos Neuwaldt

1597

Private collection; present whereabouts unknown

Private communication

157. Terrestrial, Jodocus Hondius

1597

Lucerne, Historisches Museum

Van der Krogt (1993), 464 – 66 and 472

158. Celestial, Jodocus Hondius

1597

Lucerne, Historisches Museum

Van der Krogt (1993), 468 –70 and 472

159. Celestial gores, Jodocus Hondius

Before 1598

Van der Krogt (1993), 462 – 63

160. Terrestrial, Jodocus Hondius

After P April 1597

Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek Strasbourg, Maison de l’Oeuvre Notre-Dame

161. Celestial gores, Willem Jansz. Blaeu

1597

Cambridge Mass., Harvard University, Houghton Library

Warner (1971); Van der Krogt (1993), 492 –93 and 496

162. Terrestrial, Jacob Floris van Langren and his sons

After 1597 P

52.5

Wrociaw, Muzeum Archidiecezjalne

Van der Krogt (1993), 433 –34

163. Celestial, Carolus Platus

1598

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 206 – 8

164. Terrestrial, Willem Jansz. Blaeu

1599

Rome, Biblioteca Angelica

Van der Krogt (1993), 488 –90 and 495

165. Celestial, Jodocus Hondius

1600

Amsterdam, Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum; London, National Maritime Museum

Van der Krogt (1993), 470 and 472; Dekker (1999a), 362 – 63

166. Terrestrial, Jodocus Hondius

1600

Salzburg, Carolino Augusteum Salzburger Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte

Van der Krogt (1993), 466 and 471

167. Terrestrial globecup with a small celestial globe by Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1600

Height, 59.5; diameter unknown

Los Angeles, County Museum of Art

Lösel (1983), 198w

168. Terrestrial globecup with a small celestial globe by Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1600

Height, 55; diameter 19

Basel, Historisches Museum

Lösel (1983), 198x

169. Terrestrial globecup, Christoph Jamnitzer

Ca. 1600

Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Van der Krogt (1984), 159 – 61

170. Terrestrial globecup with a small celestial globe on top, Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1600

Wolfegg, Schloß Wolfegg

Stevenson (1921), 1:199 –200; Zinner (1967), 321; Fauser (1973), 116 –19; Lösel (1983), 197v

Van der Krogt (1993), 466 and 471

171

appendix 6.1 (continued ) Globe, authora

Dateb

M /P c

Size d (cm)

Locationse

Referencesf

171. Terrestrial globecup with a small celestial globe, Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1600

T 17 C6

Steiermark, private collection

Allmayer-Beck (1997), 335; Schmidt (1977), 17–18; Kugel (2002), 68 –73

172. Terrestrial globecup with a small celestial globe on top, Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1600

Basel, Historisches Museum

Stevenson (1921), 1:200; Zinner (1967), 321; Lösel (1983), 197t

173. Terrestrial globecup with a small celestial globe on top, Abraham Gessner 174. Terrestrial globecup with a small armillary sphere, Abraham Gessner

Ca. 1600

Zurich, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum

Stevenson (1921), 1:200 –201; Zinner (1967), 321; Lösel (1983), 198y

Ca. 1600

Height 49; diameter unknown

Zurich, Schweizerisches Landesmuseum

Zinner (1967), 321; Lösel (1983), 197u

175. Terrestrial gores, Joannes Oterschaden

Ca. 1600

Amsterdam, Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum

Van der Krogt (1984), 212 –13; Shirley (2001), 252 (no. 237)

176. Terrestrial, Joannes Oterschaden

Ca. 1600

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 438 –39

177. Celestial, Joannes Oterschaden

Ca. 1600

London, National Maritime Museum

Dekker (1999a), 439 – 41

178. Celestial gores, Joannes Oterschaden

Ca. 1600

Amsterdam, Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum

Van der Krogt (1984), 213

179. Terrestrial, Christoff Schniepp

Ca. 1600

BNF

Duprat (1973), no. 187; for the date, see Wawrik (1978), 160 – 61

180. Terrestrial (Helmstedt), anonymous

Ca. 1600

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek

Haase (1972), 57–59 and 71

181. Celestial (Helmstedt), anonymous

Ca. 1600

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek

Haase (1972), 57–59 and 71

a This list does not include the small (brass) terrestrial globes in armillary spheres, with a few exceptions. For instance, an exception was made for the printed terrestrial spheres made by Caspar Vopel, if only because a good inventory of Vopel’s globes is still a desideratum. The entries of Vopel’s globes and also those of the gores and globes of François Demongenet included in the list are provisional in anticipation of the deﬁnite study of the production of these makers. b Sometimes dates in old inventories have been adapted by recent research, and where possible the publication concerned is included in the entry of the globe. c Manuscript (M) or printed (P). d The diameters of globes quoted in the literature can vary considerably. Therefore, with a few exceptions, values have been rounded off in the list. e As a rule, only one or two locations are provided for printed copies. However, more locations are often given in the quoted literature. For example, the globes of Mercator in the National Maritime Museum are mentioned speciﬁcally because this pair has been described in more detail than elsewhere, but the locations of all known globes by Mercator are recorded by Van der Krogt (1993). f For some of the globes there exists a considerable literature, of which only the most recent publications are mentioned in the list. The references for this column are as follows:

Allmayer-Beck, Peter E., ed. 1997. Modelle der Welt: Erd- und Himmelsgloben. Vienna: Brandstätter. Ameisenowa, Zoﬁa. 1959. The Globe of Martin Bylica of Olkusz and Celestial Maps in the East and in the West. Trans. Andrzej Potocki. Wrociaw: Zakiad Narodowy imienia Ossolin´skich.

Beyer, Victor, Henri Bach, and Ernest Muller. 1960. “Le globe céleste de Dasypodius.” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de la Cathédrale de Strasbourg, ser. 2, no. 7, 103 –39. Brink, Claudia, and Wilhelm Hornbostel, eds. 1993. Pegasus und die Künste. Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag.

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appendix 6.1 (continued ) Calisi, M. 1982. Il Museo Astronomico e Copernico. Rome. Chapiro, Adolphe, Chantal Meslin-Perrier, and Anthony John Turner. 1989. Catalogue de l’horlogerie et des instruments de précision: Du début du XVIe au milieu du XVIIe siècle. Paris. Christie, Manson and Woods. 1991. The Murad III Globes: The Property of a Lady, to Be Offered as Lot 139 in a Sale of Valuable Travel and Natural History Books, Atlases, Maps and Important Globes on Wednesday 30 October 1991. London: Christie, Manson and Woods. Christie, Manson and Woods. 1999. Works of Art from the Collection of the Barons Nathaniel and Albert von Rothschild, Thursday 8 July 1999. London: Christie, Manson and Woods. Dahl, Edward H., and Jean-François Gauvin. 2000. Sphæræ Mundi: Early Globes at the Stewart Museum. [Sillery]: Septentrion; [Montreal]: McGill-Queen’s University. Dekker, Elly. 1995. “Conspicuous Features on Sixteenth Century Celestial Globes.” Der Globusfreund 43 – 44, 77–106 (in English and German). Dekker, Elly (with contributions by Silke Ackermann, Jonathan Betts, Maria Blyzenski, Gloria Clifton, Ann Lean, and Kristen Lippincott). 1999a. Globes at Greenwich: A Catalogue of the Globes and Armillary Spheres in the National Maritime Museum. Oxford: Oxford University Press and the National Maritime Museum. ———. 1999b. “The Globes in Holbein’s Painting The Ambassadors,” Der Globusfreund 47– 48, 19 –52 (in English and German). ———. 2004. Catalogue of Orbs, Spheres and Globes. Florence: Giunti. Dekker, Elly, and R. van Laere. 1997. De verbeelde wereld: Globes, atlassen, kaarten en meetinstrumenten uit de 16de en 17de eeuw. Brussels: Kredietbank. Dekker, Elly, and Peter van der Krogt. 1993. Globes from the Western World. London: Zwemmer. Del Badia, Jodoco. 1881. “Egnazio Danti: Cosmografo, astronomo e matematico, e le sue opere in Firenze.” La Rassegna Nazionale 6, 621–31, and 7, 334 –74. Dörﬂinger, Johannes. 1973. “Der Gemma Frisius-Erdglobus von 1536 in der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek in Wien,” Der Globusfreund 21–23, 81–99. Dolz, Wolfram. 1994. Erd- und Himmelsgloben: Sammlungskatalog. Dresden: Staatlicher Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon. Duprat, Gabrielle. 1973. “Les globes terrestres et célestes en France.” Der Globusfreund 21–23, 198 –225. Fauser, Alois. 1964. Ältere Erd-und Himmelsgloben in Bayern. Stuttgart: Schuler Verlagsgesellschaft. ———. 1973. Kulturgeschichte des Globus. Munich: Schuler Verlagsgesellschaft. Finsterwalder, Rüdiger. 1998. “Peter Apian als Autor der sogenannten ‘Ingolstädter Globusstreifen’?” Der Globusfreund 45 – 46, 177– 86. Fiorini, Matteo. 1899. Sfere terrestri e celesti di autore italiano, oppure fatte o conservate in Italia. Rome: La Società Geograﬁca Italiana. Focus Behaim Globus. 1992. 2 vols. Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseums. Glasemann, Reinhard. 1999. Erde, Sonne, Mond & Sterne: Globen, Sonnenuhren und astronomische Instrumente im Historischen Museum Frankfurt am Main. Schriften des Historischen Museums Frankfurt am Main, vol. 20. Frankfurt: Waldemar Kramer. Grenacher, Franz. 1961. “Der sog. St.-Galler Globus im Schweiz. Landesmuseum.” Zeitschrift für Schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte 21, 66 –78. Haase, Yorck Alexander. 1972. Alte Karten und Globen in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. Wolfenbüttel.

Hartmann, Johannes. 1919. “Die astronomischen Instrumente des Kardinals Nikolaus Cusanus.” Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, MathematischPhysikalische Klasse, n.s. 10. Hess, Jacob. 1967. “On Some Celestial Maps and Globes of the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30, 406 –9. Holbrook, Mary. 1983. “Beschreibung des Himmelsglobus von Henricus, Arnoldus und Jacobus van Langren und eines Planetariums von H. van Laun im Historischen Museum zu Frankfurt am Main.” Der Globusfreund 31–32, 69 –77. Horn, Werner. 1976. Die alten Globen der Forschungsbibliothek und des Schloßmuseums Gotha. Gotha: Forschungsbibliothek. Kawamura, Hirotada, Kazutaka Unno, and Kazuhiko Miyajima. 1990. “List of Old Globes in Japan.” Der Globusfreund 38 –39, 173 –77. Kejlbo, Ib Rønne. 1995. Rare Globes: A Cultural-Historical Exposition of Selected Terrestrial and Celestial Globes Made before 1850 – Especially Connected with Denmark. Copenhagen: Munksgaard/ Rosinate. King, Henry C., and John R. Millburn. 1978. Geared to the Stars: The Evolution of Planetariums, Orreries, and Astronomical Clocks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kish, George. 1969 –71. “An Early Silver Globe Cup of the XVIth Century.” Der Globusfreund 18 –20, 73 –77. Kratzsch, Konrad. 1984. Alte Globen. Weimar: Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der Klassischen Deutschen Literatur in Weimar. Krogt, Peter van der. 1984. Old Globes in the Netherlands: A Catalogue of Terrestrial and Celestial Globes Made Prior to 1850 and Preserved in Dutch Collections. Trans. Willie ten Haken. Utrecht: HES. ———. 1985 – 86. “The Globe-Gores in the Nicolai-Collection (Stuttgart).” Der Globusfreund 33 –34, 99 –116. ———. 1993. Globi Neerlandici: The Production of Globes in the Low Countries. Utrecht: HES. Kugel, Alexis. 2002. Spheres: The Art of the Celestial Mechanic. Paris: J. Kugel. Kummer, Werner. 1980. “Liste alter Globen im Bundesland Hessen und aus einer Sammlung in Ingelheim in Rheinhessen.” Der Globusfreund 28 –29, 67–112. ———. 1983. “Liste alter Globen im Bundesland Hessen und aus einer Sammlung in Ingelheim in Rheinhessen, 2: Teil.” Der Globusfreund 31–32, 15 – 68. ———. 1992. “Liste alter Globen im Bundesland RheinlandPfalz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.” Der Globusfreund 40 – 41, 89 –117. Lamb, Tom, and Jeremy Collins, eds. 1994. The World in Your Hands: An Exhibition of Globes and Planetaria from the Collection of Rudolf Schmidt. Leiden: Museum Boerhaave; London: Christie’s. Leopold, John H. 1986. Astronomen, Sterne, Geräte: Landgraf Wilhelm IV. und seine sich selbst bewegenden Globen. Lucerne: J. Fremersdorf. Leopold, John H., and Klaus Pechstein. 1977. Der kleine Himmelsglobus 1594 von Jost Bürgi. Lucerne: Fremersdorf. Lösel, Eva-Maria. 1983. Zürcher Goldschmiedekunst: Vom 13. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Berichthaus. Mackensen, Ludolf von. 1982. Die erste Sternwarte Europas mit ihren Instrumenten und Uhren: 400 Jahre Jost Bürgi in Kassel. 2d ed. Munich: Callwey. Manoscritti cartograﬁci e strumenti scientiﬁci nella Bibliotheca Vaticana, secc. XIV–XVII. 1981. Vatican City: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana.

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appendix 6.1 (continued ) Miniati, Mara, ed. 1991. Museo di storia della scienza: Catalogo. Florence: Giunti. Muris, Oswald, and Gert Saarmann. 1961. Der Globus im Wandel der Zeiten: Eine Geschichte der Globen. Berlin: Columbus. Nagel, Fritz. 1995. “Der Globuspokal.” In Bonifacius Amerbach, 1495 –1562: Zum 500. Geburtstag des Basler Juristen und Erben des Erasmus von Rotterdam. Ed. Holger Jacob-Friesen, Beat R. Jenny, and Christian Müller, 83 – 86. Basel: Schwabe. Oberhummer, Eugen. 1926. “Die Brixener Globen von 1522 der Sammlung Hauslab-Liechtenstein.” Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Denkschriften 67, no. 3. Oestmann, Günther. 1993(a). Die astronomische Uhr des Strassburger Münsters: Funktion und Bedeutung eines Kosmos-Modells des 16. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Verlag für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik. Oestmann, Günther (with contributions by Elly Dekker and Peter Schiller). 1993b. Schicksalsdeutung und Astronomie: Der Himmelsglobus des Johannes Stoefﬂer von 1493. Exhibition catalog. Stuttgart: Württembergisches Landesmuseum Stuttgart. Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Kaiser Rudolfs II. 1998. 2 vols. Exhibition catalog. Freren: Luca Verlag. Raemdonck, J. van. 1968. “Les sphères terrestre et céleste de Gérard Mercator.” Annales du Cercle Archéologique du Pays de Waas 5 (1872 –75): 259 –324. Reprinted in Les sphères terrestre & céleste de Gérard Mercator, 1541 et 1551: Reproductions anastatiques des fuseaux originaux gravés par Gérard Mercator et conservés à la Bibliothèque royale à Bruxelles. Preface by Antoine de Smet. Brussels: Editions Culture et Civilisations. Ravenstein, Ernest George. 1908. Martin Behaim: His Life and His Globe. London: George Philip and Son. With a reconstruction of the gores. Reis, António Estácio dos. 1990. “The Oldest Existing Globe in Portugal.” Der Globusfreund 38 –39, 57– 65 (in English and German). Schmidt, Rudolf. 1977. “Katalog: Erd- und Himmelsgloben, Armillarsphaeren, Tellurien Planetarien.” Der Globusfreund 24, 1–52.

Schramm, Percy Ernst. 1958. Sphaira, Globus, Reichsapfel: Wanderung und Wandlung eines Herrschaftszeichens von Caesar bis zu Elisabeth II. Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann. Shirley, Rodney W. 2001. The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472 –1700. 4th ed. Riverside, Conn.: Early World. Soly, Hugo, ed. 1999. Charles V, 1500 –1558, and His Time. Antwerp: Mercatorfonds. Stevenson, Edward Luther. 1921. Terrestrial and Celestial Globes: Their History and Construction Including a Consideration of Their Value as Aids in the Study of Geography and Astronomy. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wallis, Helen. 1962. “The First English Terrestrial Globe.” Der Globusfreund 11, 158 –59 (in English and German). Warner, Deborah Jean. 1971. “The Celestial Cartography of Giovanni Antonio Vanosino da Varese.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34, 336 –37. Wawrik, Franz. 1978. “Der Erdglobus des Johannes Oterschaden.” Der Globusfreund 25 –27, 155 – 67. Wawrik, Franz, and Helga Hühnel. 1994. “Das Globenmuseum der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek.” Der Globusfreund 42, 3 –188. Wolff, Hans. 1989. “Das Münchener Globenpaar.” In Philipp Apian und die Kartographie der Renaissance, 153 – 65. Exhibition catalog. Weissenhorn: A. H. Konrad. Woodward, David. 1987. The Holzheimer Venetian Globe Gores of the Sixteenth Century. Madison: Juniper. Yonge, Ena L. 1968. A Catalogue of Early Globes Made prior to 1850 and Conserved in the United States: A Preliminary Listing. New York: American Geographical Society. Zakrzewska, Maria N. 1965. Catalogue of Globes in the Jagellonian University Museum. Trans. Franciszek Buhl. Cracow. Zinner, Ernst. 1967. Deutsche und niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11.–18. Jahrhunderts. 2d ed. Munich: Beck.

7 • The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean Corradino Astengo

Introduction Medieval nautical charts were adequate for the needs of the navigators of the day, who sailed the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of Europe along well-established routes that were in part determined by the nature of local winds and currents and never led to ships’ losing sight of land for more than two or three days.1 Yet in addition to being important working tools, these charts were also the documents that recorded the first achievements of Atlantic exploration, indicating newly discovered archipelagos and the gradually emerging features of the coast of Africa. Ultimately, the conquest of the oceans made navigation by the stars a necessity, and thus indications of latitude—along with the equator and the Tropics—were added to the old rhumb line charts, gradually transforming them into flat gridded charts that, even though nonisogonic (and therefore inadequate to the needs of oceangoing navigators), would remain in use for more than a century.2 From as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, Portugal and Spain had public bodies—known, respectively, as the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratación—responsible for drawing up these large nautical world charts, which recorded each new geographical discovery and thus made regular changes to the image of the world.3 Within the Mediterranean area itself, ships continued to ply the same routes, and, for a century at least, the shipping trade suffered no ill effects from the opening of ocean routes. Changes, however, were felt— especially during the course of the sixteenth century: merchant galleys tended to disappear, and the large galleons gradually lost out to a significant number of small sailing ships that made frequent stops and carried all kinds of merchandise (clear proof of extended economic well-being in the area).4 The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were also a period of almost uninterrupted war within the Mediterranean area, with not only such large-scale battles as those of Djerba and Lepanto, but also continuous raids, skirmishes, and acts of piracy (the latter leading to extensive patrols to protect merchant shipping). In such a situation, the need for expert navigators and adequate equipment was obvious. Sailing routes tended to hug the

coast, and thus sailing them required special techniques and capacities—as Juan de Escalante de Mendoza recognized when he distinguished between sailors plotting courses for coastlines (de costa y derrota) and those for deep seas (de altura y escuadría), each group with their own skills and aptitudes.5 For more than two centuries the large cities and smaller ports of the Mediterranean continued the medieval tradition of producing manuscript portolan charts and atlases organized around the distribution of wind rhumbs.6 These charts were generally produced in small family workshops; the traditional art of making charts and images for navigation was handed down from generation to Abbreviations used in this chapter include: Carte da navigar for Susanna Biadene, ed., Carte da navigar: Portolani e carte nautiche del Museo Correr, 1318 –1732 (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1990). 1. John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649–1571 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 87–101. 2. Joaquim Bensaúde, L’astronomie nautique au Portugal à l’époque des grandes découvertes, 2 vols. (Bern: M. Drechsel, 1912 –17; reprinted Amsterdam: N. Israel and Meridian, 1967), and W. G. L. Randles, “De la carte-portulane méditerranéenne à la carte marine du monde des grandes découvertes: La crise de la cartographie au XVI e siècle,” in Géographie du monde au Moyen Aˆge et à la Renaissance, ed. Monique Pelletier (Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S., 1989), 125 –31, esp. 128. The author defines this change as a mariage contre nature. 3. David Turnbull, “Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 5 –24, esp. 7. 4. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972 –73), 306 –12. 5. Juan de Escalante de Mendoza, Itinerario de navegación de los mares y tierras occidentales, 1575 (Madrid: Museo Naval, 1985), 47. 6. “Nonetheless, manuscript cartography continued to prosper; indeed, judging from the material that has come down to us, one could say that it flourished as never before. Instead of demand dropping as a result of the availability of printed maps, it increased. All that changed was the character of such cartography.” Giuseppe Caraci, “Cimeli cartografici sconosciuti esistenti a Firenze,” Bibliofilia 28 (1927): 31–50, esp. 48. The term “portolan chart,” although vehemently avoided by some historians (see Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Portulans and the Byzantine World,” in Travel in the Byzantine World, ed. R. J. Macrides [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002], 59 –71, esp. 59), is used here to provide continuity from its use in volume 1 of the History of Cartography series.

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generation.7 And the charts these family workshops produced reveal a real sense of continuity, with the Mediterranean maintaining its central position in the world even after the opening of the Atlantic and the waters beyond. Large world charts are rare and limited to the early decades of the sixteenth century. Generally, output comprised numerous charts and atlases that, as in the Middle Ages, showed only the Mediterranean area 8 and nautical atlases that included only a small world chart or dedicated just a few small sheets to the oceans and continents beyond Europe while continuing to focus on the Mediterranean, which was covered by larger and more numerous charts. Charts of a single area—such as the Black Sea, the Aegean, or the Adriatic—were also a rarity. The reader was therefore given a picture of the Mediterranean as a unit; more than a simple, unified physical site with a common climate, the area was portrayed as a common locus of human activity, a unit held together by a fine weave of sea routes. And a key component here was less the sea itself than the people who plied it—who, in spite of the conflicts and hostilities that riddled the region, did not hesitate to move from one place to another if that gave them a better chance to practice their art or craft.9 This was certainly true of cartographers, who during these two centuries were continually on the move from one Mediterranean port to another in search of new patrons or customers. However, except in some very rare cases, this free movement did not lead to ready exchanges with cartographers charting other areas. For example, in Spain there was a sharp separation between the cartography of the Casa de la Contratación, which focused on the New World and the production of large world charts, and the work of the Catalan cartographers, who maintained the traditional focus on the Mediterranean. The same thing can be seen in France, with an equally sharp division between the work of the so-called École du Ponent and that of the cartographic workshops of Marseilles and Toulon: very few cartographers seem to have moved from one school to the other, switching their attention from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, or vice versa.10 This particular feature of contemporary cartography suggests that a discussion of Mediterranean nautical charts should not deal with them according to national groups but rather look at them as a whole, covering all the charts produced in the cities and ports of the Mediterranean (which, as we have already seen, tended to focus their attention on that sea alone). The fact that a nautical chart or atlas was produced in one of these ports must have reassured possible customers as to its quality, and this may explain why there are traces that show cartographers frequently moving from one of these cities to another but not choosing to live and work in the cultural capitals of the day (e.g., Florence), where

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they might have encountered many more potential clients. The extensive mobility of Mediterranean cartographers appears, in fact, to have been largely due to an unending search for better markets for their products and, even more important, for more favorable working conditions. Such conditions were often determined by the policies of local governments, which might vary from direct public control (leading to the creation of family monopolies and the emigration of excluded talent) to a more open, laissez-faire regime (favoring new input of energy from outsiders).11 The period under discussion, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, could be said to have opened with the so-called Map of Columbus (fig. 7.1) and to have closed with Filippo Francini’s atlas of 1699. The former—whose exact date and attribution are matters of debate 12— undoubtedly comes from sometime around the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth and is a perfect example of the transitional phase of Mediter7. Giovanna Petti Balbi, “Nel mondo dei cartografi: Battista Beccari maestro a Genova nel 1427,” in Columbeis I (Genoa: Università di Genova, Facoltà di Lettere, Istituto di Filologia Classica e Medievale, 1986), 125 –32. 8. Nordenskiöld popularized the phrase “area of the normal portolan,” indicating the geographic area described on portolan charts and represented on medieval nautical charts. It usually included the entire Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and a small part of the Red Sea. The coast of the Atlantic varied, extending in the south to the Canaries and in the north to “Cabo Finisterre” or to Denmark, with complete representation of Britain and in some cases southern Scandinavia (A. E. Nordenskiöld, Periplus: An Essay on the Early History of Charts and SailingDirections, trans. Francis A. Bather [Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt & Söner, 1897], 16 –17 and 45). We have chosen to use “area of the Mediterranean,” meaning this larger geographic region. 9. Braudel, Mediterranean, 276. See also Alberto Tenenti, “Il senso del mare,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 12, Il mare, ed. Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1991), 7–76. 10. Among the exceptions one should mention there are, for example, Diogo Homem, who moved to Venice after a period of work in Lisbon, and Pierre Collin of St. Malo, who drew up an atlas in Marseilles in 1642. 11. This is why the chapter is divided according to centers of production rather than families of cartographers, which would have risked reducing it to a mere list of names. In fact, once one goes beyond the two family dynasties of the Maggiolo and the Oliva, there are a host of individual cartographers (or, at most, father-son pairs) who are best seen in reference to the place where they worked. 12. At the Cairo International Geography Conference, Charles de La Roncière attributed an anonymous chart—(FrP1bis)—to Christopher Columbus, claiming it must have been the very one the navigator used to convince the Spanish sovereigns during the siege of Granada. Charles de La Roncière, La carte de Christophe Colomb (Paris: Les Éditions Historiques, Édouard Champion, 1924); idem, “La carte de Christophe Colomb,” in Congrès international de géographie, Le Caire, avril 1925: Compte rendu, 5 vols. (Cairo: L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire pour la Société Royale d’Égypte, 1925 –26), 5:79 – 83; idem, “Une carte de Christophe Colomb,” Revue des Questions Historiques, 3d ser., 7 (1925): 27– 41; and idem, “Le livre de chevet et la carte de Christophe Colomb,” Revue des Deux Mondes, 8th period, 5

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The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 7.1. THE MAP OF COLUMBUS. An anonymous, undated nautical chart produced toward the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century. La Roncière identifies it as the map used by Christopher Columbus to outline his project of exploration to the Spanish sovereigns (Charles de La

Roncière, La carte de Christophe Colomb [Paris: Les Éditions Historiques, Édouard Champion, 1924]). Size of the original: 70 110 cm. Photograph courtesy of the BNF (Rés. Ge AA 562).

ranean cartography, when it had to take account of the Atlantic: in fact, it not only covers the area of the Mediterranean but also stretches south as far as the Zaire River (Congo) and west beyond the Atlantic archipelagos. However, it still shows the Septem Civitatum Insula—the mythical Island of the Seven Cities—while the small circular mappamundi on the neck of the parchment continues to reﬂect the Ptolemaic worldview and, though recording the results of Bartolomeu Dias’s expedition, does not go beyond the tripartite division (the three continents of the Old World) traditional in medieval cartography. Francini’s 1699 atlas (AW9),13 on the other hand, is a visually appealing work that is really a demonstration

Cristoforo Colombo,” Rendiconti della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, 6th ser., 1 (1925): 749 –73; Giuseppe Caraci, “Una carta attribuita a Colombo,” Rivista Geografica Italiana 32 (1925): 280 – 87; idem, “Sulla data della pretesa carta di Colombo,” in Atti del X Congresso Geografico Italiano (Milan, 1927), 1:331–35; Cesare de Lollis, “La carta di Colombo,” La Cultura, 1925 –26, 749 –75; and Camillo Manfroni, “La carta di Colombo,” Rivista Marittima 58 (1925): 705 –13. La Roncière’s claim was heavily criticized and then discarded. However, in 1952 Destombes returned to the question in Marcel Destombes, “Une carte interessant les études colombiennes conservée à Modène,” in Studi colombiani, 3 vols. (Genoa: S.A.G.A., 1952), 2:479 – 87. His examination of an anonymous chart fragment in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena led him to point out several similarities between that work and the Paris chart, and finally to attribute both to Bartholomew Colombus. More recently, Pelletier has argued that one cannot rule out an attribution to the admiral or his brother, while Luzzana Caraci has argued that the chart was produced in an Italian workshop between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Monique Pelletier, “Peut-on encore affirmer que la BN possède la carte de Christophe Colomb?” Revue de la Bibliothèque Nationale 45 (1992): 22 –25, and Ilaria Luzzana Caraci, “A proposito della cosiddetta ‘carta di Colombo,’” in Oriente Occidente: Scritti in memoria di Vittorina Langella, ed. Filippo Bencardino (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1993), 121– 47. 13. The code for this chart (AW9) is found in appendix 7.1, a preliminary list of manuscript charts and atlases made in Mediterranean workshops in the period 1500 –1700.

(1931): 423 – 40, esp. 432 – 40. The scholar based his argument on a series of factors, the most important of which was that the legend to the chart contains the solecism de ibi instead of inde—a form that the author argues could be found only in a postil added by Columbus. However, it is not found as infrequently as he assumed, given that it can also be found in the so-called Usodimare Letter: see Alberto Magnaghi, Precvrsori di Colombo? Il tentativo di viaggio transoceanico dei Genovesi Fratelli Vivaldi nel 1291 (Rome: Società Anonima Italiana Arti Graﬁche, 1935), 31 n. 5. The lively debate that followed involved a number of Italian scholars: Roberto Almagià, “Una carta attribuita a

The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean

of nothing other than cartography as an exercise in style. Hence, it can quite justly be considered symbolic of the end of this centuries-old type of cartography.

Extant Works The number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nautical charts and atlases that have survived to the present day is almost four times as great as that of similar works dating from the previous two centuries (see appendix 7.1 for a complete list of charts of the Mediterranean in public collections, 1500 –1700). Campbell has counted a total of about 180 such charts from the Middle Ages, and, in spite of the difficulties in dating anonymous works that fall on the borderline between the two periods, his list appears to be as complete as possible.14 Things are very different when one tries to list the works dating from the first two centuries of the modern period. The number of those in public collections alone exceeds 650 —and, given that a number of works are scattered among numerous small museums and libraries (and some may therefore slip through the net), it is impossible to give an exact figure.15 There are also those in private collections; again, although we know there are at least one hundred, an exact figure is impossible because of many collectors’ reluctance to advertise the treasures in their possession. One should also bear in mind that, for some time now, at least three or four such charts have gone up for auction each year—and perhaps as many again change hands privately. According to Campbell, the number of extant medieval charts represents a small fraction of those actually produced. Many of those used on board ship were ultimately destroyed by wear and tear, humidity, and saltwater, and many of those consulted in the safety of dry land were decimated by goldsmiths, tailors, gluemakers, and bookbinders, who were all eager to recycle their parchment.16 The same would, of course, be true for the nautical charts produced in the early centuries of the modern period. However, it remains to be seen whether the output of that period really was four times as great as that of the Middle Ages or—for some reason—the survival rate for these later charts was much higher. It is, in fact, possible that from the second half of the sixteenth century onward there was a gradual decline in the output of those unadorned charts produced for shipboard use, which were simply thrown away when worn to tatters, and a proportional increase in the output of decorative charts, which may have had various purposes but certainly remained ashore and were looked after with more care. The trend toward small-volume merchant shipping meant there was practically no need for nautical charts of the Mediterranean as a whole; on short coastal voyages from one port to another, what counted was the personal experience of captains and pilots.

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At the same time, there was a sharp upturn in the number of people buying ornamental charts. Although, as the annotations to these charts make clear, their purchasers were often those who worked the sea, it seems highly unlikely that these decorative charts could have been used for actual navigation; not a single extant chart of this kind bears traces of such use, and the large water stains on some of the surviving charts are not necessarily proof that they were kept on board ship for a long time.17 Indeed, given that such stains are normally accompanied by moth holes and the damage caused by rodents, they seem to indicate neglectful maintenance ashore rather than use on board a ship.18 The domestic conditions of the period—together with the action of parasites and the inaction of men—form the main explanation for the disappearance of such works as the “sailor’s chart,” which Baldassare Maggiolo sold to Don Carlo, second-born son of Prince Giovanni Andrea Doria, in 1592,19 or the entire output of Cornelio, Nicolò, and Cornelio II Maggiolo, who were the official cartographers to the Republic of Genoa in the seventeenth century. The references in contemporary archives are the only traces of these charts.20 The destruction of charts from both the medieval and early modern periods has continued well into this century. During the bombing raids of the Second World War the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan lost two charts by Jacopo Russo (dating from 1564 and 1588), plus charts by Matteo Prunes, Pierre Bernard, and Joan Oliva (dating from 1594, 1623, and 1634, respectively). The Biblioteca Ambrosiana in the same city lost Vesconte Maggiolo’s 1524 chart of the Mediterranean and his famous two-sheet world chart of 1527.21 During the same period the Bayeri14. Tony Campbell, “Census of Pre-Sixteenth-Century Portolan Charts,” Imago Mundi 38 (1986): 67–94. 15. Corradino Astengo, Elenco preliminare di carte ed atlanti nautici manoscritti: Eseguiti nell’area mediterranea nel periodo 1500 –1700 e conservati presso enti pubblici (Genoa: Istituto di Geografia, 1996). 16. Tony Campbell, “Portolan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500,” in HC 1:371– 463, esp. 373. The following are only some of the numerous fragments of nautical charts that have been recovered from book bindings: ItJ1, ItMn1, ItSs1, ItBr2, and ItSv2. 17. Compare John Coyne, “Hooked on Maps,” Mercator’s World 1, no. 4 (1996): 20 –25, esp. 24, caption to the illustration. 18. That these now highly prized objects were not always held in great regard by those who owned them can be seen from the 1563 atlas by Jaume Olives that was purchased by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in 1803 (ItMi2ter): on the recto of the first folio, which has come away from the original binding, an unknown hand has jotted down a few calculations and also copied a recipe for cassia water. 19. Cornelio Desimoni, “Elenco di carte ed atlanti nautici di autore genovese oppure in Genova fatti o conservati,” Giornale Ligustico di Archeologia, Storia e Belle Arti 2 (1875): 41–71, esp. 62 – 63. 20. Arturo Ferretto, “I cartografi Maggiolo oriundi di Rapallo,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria 52 (1924): 53 – 83, esp. 74 – 82. 21. Paolo Revelli, “Cimeli cartografici di archivi di stato italiani distrutti dalla guerra,” Notizie degli Archivi di Stato 9 (1949): 1–3.

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sches Armeemuseum in Munich lost all its early charts, including a 1511 work by Salvat de Pilestrina and an anonymous (probably Catalan) work generally dated from the beginning of the sixteenth century. More recently, a six-chart atlas by Julianus Grafﬁngnia disappeared from the Marseilles Bibliothèque Communale St. Charles some decades ago.22 Numerous works mentioned as being in private collections before 1940 have since disappeared: the Pietro Russo chart that Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo mention as being in the collection of Conte Merenda of Forlì has been missing since the Second World War,23 and the entire collection of the Florentine family of Orsini has disappeared without a trace. However, there are also works that were long considered lost but have suddenly come to light: the Baldassare Maggiolo chart that Desimoni and Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo mentioned as being in the collection of an unnamed private library in Ventimiglia reappeared after a century as one of the lots at the Macoïr-Bailly auction in Paris, while the Battista Agnese atlas mentioned by Placido Zurla as being the property of Abbé Celotti was declared by Wagner to have been lost and only recently has been identiﬁed as the atlas that formerly belonged to Prince Lobanov Rostovski and is now in St. Petersburg (RP2).24 So there is perhaps hope that other works given up as lost will eventually make their reappearance.

Customers and Patrons Sometimes nautical charts and atlases were commissioned directly; but perhaps it was more usual for the cartographic workshops to produce them at their own expense, in the hope of subsequently ﬁnding a purchaser. That this practice was common is clear from those atlases of Battista Agnese in which the framed section or scroll that would have borne the owner’s coat of arms or heraldic device has been left blank. Wagner lists thirteen such works, to which should be added the Ambraser Atlas (AW1); the number is high enough to rule out any suggestion of mere coincidence.25 There are other atlases in which the recto of the second sheet has been left totally blank, ready for a coat of arms or the inscription of the owner’s name.26 It is possible that even in cases where there is a coat of arms or name, these were added only after the work had been purchased or received as a gift. Yet for all their blanks, Agnese’s works are those that provide us with the most information on their illustrious purchasers or recipients. One atlas—ﬁnely illuminated and with a splendid turquoise-encrusted binding—bears the arms of Charles V on the last sheet; 27 another contains not only a portrait of the emperor and the coats of arms of Castile and Aragon but also the inscription “Philippo Caroli Aug. F. optimo princ. Providentia,” and hence is held to have been a gift from Charles to his son, the fu-

ture Philip II.28 A third Agnese atlas bears the English coat of arms in one scroll and in another a dedication to Henry VIII—“Henricus octavus dei gratia Angliae, Franciae et Hiberniae rex fidei defensor”—while the inside back cover contains a setting for a small compass decorated with a wind rose (with the names given in English).29 Other works bear coats of arms or inscriptions revealing that they were the property of such illustrious contemporary figures as Cosimo I de’ Medici (ItFi13); Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio (ItBo11); and Admiral Gaspard de Coligny (FrC1), or of highranking prelates such as Heronimus Rouffault, Abbot of St. Vaast (USW1); Cardinal Guido Ascanio Sforza of Santa Fiora (ItTo5); Sebastian, Archbishop of Mainz; 30 and Adolph von Schaumburg, Archdeacon of Cologne.31 22. The work is signed “Julianus Graffingnia . . . 1568.” It would therefore be the oldest nautical atlas compiled in Marseilles. See J. Albanès, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France: Départements-Tome XV, Marseille (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit, 1892), 317. The news is also given in Marcel Destombes, “François Ollive et l’hydrographie marseillaise au XVIIe siècle,” Neptunia 37 (1955): 12 –16. 23. Gustavo Uzielli and Pietro Amat di S. Filippo, Mappamondi, carte nautiche, portolani ed altri monumenti cartografici specialmente italiani dei secoli XIII–XVII (Rome: Società Geografica Italiana, 1882; reprinted Amsterdam: Meridian, 1967), 280. 24. RP2. Bibliothèque d’un Amateur et à divers: Voyages Atlas Histoire Généalogie . . . 7 novembre 1993 (Paris: B. Clavreuil, 1993), 29, item 133. See also Desimoni, “Elenco di carte,” 62; Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo, Mappamondi, 154; Placido Zurla, Di Marco Polo e degli altri viaggiatori Veneziani (Venice: Giacomo Fuchs, 1818), 368; Henry Raup Wagner, “The Manuscript Atlases of Battista Agnese,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 25 (1931): 1–110, esp. 99 –100; and Battista Agnese, Vollständige Faksimile-Ausgabe des Portolan-Atlas des Battista Agnese (1546) aus dem Besitz der Russischen Nationalbibliothek in St. Petersburg, ed. Arthur Dürst (Disentis: Desertina; Graz: Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt; Moscow: Avtor, 1993), including the supplement by Tamara P. Woronowa, Der Portolan-Atlas des Battista Agnese von 1546 aus der Russischen Nationalbibliothek Sankt Petersburg, 25. 25. Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases.” 26. The recto of the first folio was generally glued to the front board of the binding. However, as we shall see, nautical atlases usually comprised a series of double sheets, so it would be more correct to speak of the right half of the first double sheet. 27. The atlas once belonged to Baron Edmond Rothschild. See Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 61– 62. 28. USPo2. Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 74, and V.A. Malte-Brun, “Note sur un Portulan donné par Charles-Quint à Philippe II,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 11 (1876): 625 –31. 29. V7. Roberto Almagià, Monumenta cartographica Vaticana, 4 vols. (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944 –55), 1:68, and Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 77–78. Here again it is difficult to say whether the work was commissioned or whether the coat of arms, dedication, and English names for the various winds were all added at a later stage. 30. Formerly in the collection of Conte Alex Mörner (Espelunda). Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 87. The tome seems to have been given to the archbishop by Christopher Haller of Hallerstein. 31. Harff a/Erft, Schloss-Bibliothek. Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 69.

The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean

fig. 7.2. COAT OF ARMS OF THE DORIA FAMILY. Nautical atlas attributed to Francesco Ghisolfi, second half of the sixteenth century. Size of the original: ca. 33 23 cm. Biblioteca Universitaria, Genoa (MSS. G. V. 32, fol. 2r). Authorization granted by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

Particular mention should be made of the atlas that Tommaso Campeggio, Bishop of Feltre, gave to the famous humanist Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, in 1541.32 Other atlases bear the crests of such aristocratic families as the Tron, Sommaja, Barberini, and HohenloheNeuenstein—who may well have come into possession of them long after they were actually produced. As for those charts and atlases in which the scroll panel was left blank, one can either assume that they were bought by nonnoble families or explain the absence of a heraldic device as the result of mere negligence. The Medici family seems to have been the owners of a number of works by Francesco Ghisolﬁ, who is considered to have been Agnese’s pupil.33 The Riccardiana atlas 3616 (ItFi30) may bear an unidentiﬁed coat of arms on the front cover (which is then repeated in the middle of the decorative border running down the left and right sides of each page), but it is known to have belonged to Cosimo I, who presented it as a gift to his son Francesco (as can be seen from the curious dedication in Latin play-

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ing on the words Cosmo and Cosimo). Another Riccardiana atlas, 3615 (ItFi29), however, has a Medici coat of arms on its frontispiece—probably that of Cardinal Ferdinand de’ Medici—while another (UKO8) bears a parted crest with the arms of the Medicis and the House of Austria and seems to have been one of the wedding gifts at the marriage of Francesco de’ Medici to Joanna (Giovanna) of Austria in 1565.34 One should also mention the atlas that bears the Doria coat of arms (fig. 7.2) and is claimed to have been the property of Giovanni Andrea Doria.35 Finally, there is an atlas whose inside cover bears a long autograph annotation by its owner Andrea Baldi (FrP20). This is dated 11 May 1560 from “li Gerbi”— and so was written the very day after the Christian fleet of Philip II of Spain conquered the island of Djerba. Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo mention a chart in the Galleria Colonna that was the work of the Ancona cartographer Bartolomeo Bonomi (or Bonomini) and was, it is claimed, used by the admiral of the papal fleet, Marcantonio Colonna, during the Battle of Lepanto.36 However, this appears to be a family legend, given that this chart of the central Mediterranean is nothing more than a single sheet from a complete nautical atlas; 37 it appears to have been framed in 1897 by a member of the Colonna family eager to commemorate the illustrious feats of his ancestor. The inscription to the chart makes it clear that it was produced in Ancona, but the date is illegible; Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo’s proposal of 1570 was perhaps suggested by a desire to link the chart even more closely with the Battle of Lepanto, yet that date is totally untenable. Nevertheless, the chart, though unlikely to have been used in that glorious undertaking, has probably been in the Colonna family since the sixteenth century. As I have already mentioned, archive material records that in

32. Sotheby’s, Sammlung Ludwig: Eight Highly Important Manuscripts, the Property of the J. Paul Getty Museum, London, Tuesday 6th December 1988 at 11 AM (London: Sotheby’s, 1988), 76 – 81. 33. Paolo Revelli, ed., Cristoforo Colombo e la scuola cartografica genovese, 3 vols. (Genoa: Stabilimenti Italiani Art Grafiche, 1937), 2: 407 and 423. 34. H. P. Kraus (firm), Fifty Mediaeval and Renaissance Manuscripts (New York, 1958): 109 –11. 35. ItGe2. Giuseppe Piersantelli, L’atlante di carte marine di Francesco Ghisolfi (Ms. della Biblioteca universitaria di Genova) e la storia della pittura in Genova nel Cinquecento (Genoa: Edizioni de “L’Assicurazione e la Navigazione,” 1947), 8. 36. ItRo19. Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo, Mappamondi, 146 and 296, and Francesco Bonasera, La cartografia nautica anconetana (secoli XV–XVI) (Cagli: Ernesto Paleani, 1997), 221–24. 37. This fact would seem to further invalidate the tradition that claims it was used during the Battle of Lepanto. For the organization and command of such an expedition it would undoubtedly have been more useful to have a chart of the whole Mediterranean (including the eastern area). The chart actually comes to an end in the very area where the battle was fought.

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1592 Prince Giovanni Andrea Doria’s second son, Carlo, commissioned one “sailor’s chart” and two “navigating compasses” (probably two portolan charts) from Baldassare Maggiolo.38 Several works by the Cretan cartographer Giorgio Sideri, known as Il Callapoda, bear the names and coats of arms of illustrious figures. Examples are the 1561 chart that belonged to “Ant. Calbo Duca C [of Candy]” (ItVe33) and the 1563 atlas owned by “Giovanni Michiel consigliere in Creta” (ItVe11), while Sideri’s 1562 atlas is inscribed as “appertaining to the noble Venetian family of the Emo for their passage to Constantinople” (UKL19). And the atlas produced in 1646 by Friar Nicolò Guidalotti of Mondavio is dedicated to the knight Giovanni Soranzo, “knight and bailiff to the Venetian community in Constantinople” (ItVe7). Such dedications in manuscript works can be safely taken to mean the atlas belonged to— or was actually commissioned by—the dedicatee. This is particularly true when a dedication is to an obscure figure such as “Signor Giovanni Tatti, fiorentino” (in Giovanni Battista Cavallini’s “Teatro del Mondo Marittimo”); where the more famous names are concerned, there is a chance that the cartographer was trying to mimic the contemporary trend in printed works. For example, Giovanni Francesco Monno’s “Arte della vera navegatione” (a navigational treatise, portolano, and nautical atlas) bears a dedication to Onorato II Grimaldi, but it does not appear to have ever actually belonged to that nobleman, while Guglielmo Saetone produced two copies of his “Stella guidante di pilotti e marinari” (a portolano and nautical atlas), dedicating both to Ippolito Centurione— even though he presented only one of them to the great Genoese admiral and kept the other for himself.39 There are cases in which one can follow the chain of changing ownership. The 1583 atlas by Joan Martines passed from “Charles Howard hig. Admyral of England,” to “W.L. Burghly” (William Cecil, Lord Burghley), then to “Charles Bailly gouverneur de la Bay d’udson,” and subsequently into the hands of the famous explorer “Pierre Esprit Radisson” before becoming the property of a certain “Morpin” and then returning to Radisson (USCh7). However, with the exception of the first annotation of ownership, all owners are continental and not near the Mediterranean, which is rather puzzling. The nautical chart that Joan Riczo Oliva drew up in 1588 seems to have become the property of Giovanni Fasoni, functionary of the ducal House of Savoy, in 1594,40 and one cannot rule out that it may have occasionally served some political-administrative purpose as well as being a source of geographical information. On the other hand, a political-military purpose is clear in the nautical chart of Sardinia drawn up by Joan Oliva in Leghorn (Livorno) in 1629 and in another chart of the island of

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

Elba that may be attributed to the same cartographer; both of them figure among the twenty-eight various maps in a dossier put together for Cardinal Richelieu when plans were being drawn up for an attack on Spanish territories within the Mediterranean.41 The first sheet of the five-chart atlas that Joan Oliva drew up in Messina in 1594 bears the inscription “I H S Mar. / D.F. Luperçío de Arbizu / 1594” (USCh9)—and thus appears to have belonged to Luperzio Arbizu, knight of the Order of Malta, who the year before had taken over command of the galley Capitana.42 Given that the date of the inscription of ownership coincides with that in which the work was produced, it seems likely that Arbizu either commissioned this splendid illuminated volume himself or received it as a gift (fig. 7.3). In effect, there are very few works that can be directly linked to the Knights of Malta. Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo mention an anonymous four-chart atlas bearing the Cross of Malta on a cardboard binding—possibly dating from the sixteenth century, this work was at the time in a private library (the Sola-Busca-Serbelloni) 43—and there is a six-chart atlas drawn up in Marseilles by Augustin Roussin that bears an elaborate coat of arms over a Maltese cross on the recto of the first sheet (USB1). Charts and atlases bearing the cross of the Order of Santo Stefano are more common. For two of these works one can identify the knight who was their owner. On Pietro Cavallini’s 1676 atlas one reads “Del Cav I. F. P. Domenico Fabroni di pistoia, 1 Aprile 1676,”44 and in a 1688 atlas by the same cartographer there is the inscription “This chart belongs to the knight Guglielmo Lanfranchi, Governor of His Highness’s fleet of Galleys.”45

38. Desimoni, “Elenco di carte,” 62 – 63. 39. ItA1 and ItMi5. Gaetano Ferro, “L’Atlante portolanico di Guglielmo Saetone conservato ad Albissola,” Bollettino della Società Geografica Italiana 94 (1957): 457–77. 40. Stefano Grande, “Attorno ad una nuova carta nautica di Giovanni Riczo Oliva,” Rivista Geografica Italiana 21 (1914): 481–96. The chart was then in the possession of Carlo Pangella. 41. Tony Campbell, ed., “Chronicle for 1980,” Imago Mundi 33 (1981): 108 –14, esp. 112, and idem, “Chronicle for 1991,” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 131– 40, esp. 137–38. 42. Codice Diplomatico del Sacro Militare Ordine Gerosolimitano oggi di Malta . . . , 2 vols. (Lucca: Salvatore e Giandomenico Marescandoli, 1733 –37), 2: 278 –79. 43. Uzielli and Amat di S. Filippo, Mappamondi, 263. 44. Giuseppe Caraci, “Inedita Cartographica—I. Un gruppo di carte e atlanti conservati a Genova,” Bibliofilia 38 (1936): 149 – 82, esp. 166 – 67. 45. ItPi3. This was “the famous Pisan Knight of Santo Stefano who played a leading role in the naval undertakings of the late seventeenth century.” Danilo Barsanti, “Le carte nautiche,” in Piante e disegni dell’Ordine di S. Stefano nell’Archivio di Stato di Pisa, ed. Danilo Barsanti, F. Luigi Previti, and Milletta Sbrilli (Pisa: ETS Editrice, 1989), 161– 66, esp. 166.

The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean

fig. 7.3. BINDING OF A NAUTICAL ATLAS WITH THE COAT OF ARMS OF THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA. 1594 atlas by Joan Oliva, which belonged to Luperzio de Arbizu, Knight of Malta. Size of the original: 38.8 25.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago (Ayer MS. Map 24).

Such decorated works beﬁtted the rank of aristocrats and knights, who may occasionally have taken them on board ship in order to plan military maneuvers or simply to have charts at hand on which they could follow the course plotted by captains and pilots. Nevertheless, we know that similar charts and atlases belonged to sailors of much humbler rank. “Property of ship’s master Giovanni Battista Montanaro” is the inscription on an anonymous chart (ItVe44), while another anonymous chart appears to have belonged to “Captain Clemente Corsamino d’arbisola” in 1603,46 and a plate in another atlas bears the announcement “And this book belongs to Nicolo Canachi of the Island of San Gioana di Pattino, Ship’s Pilot” (which is then repeated in Greek).47 So these two captains and a pilot all owned charts of the Mediterranean that were not intended for direct practical use as instruments of navigation. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that in their working lives they may

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have used similar charts—which were eventually destroyed through wear and tear—and kept these more elegant copies as souvenirs of their time at sea. Similarly, from the end of the sixteenth century onward, the group of landlubbers who possessed manuscript nautical charts and atlases extended beyond sovereigns, princes, aristocrats, and clergy to include much humbler individuals who made various revealing and informative annotations to their new possessions. For example, in an anonymous seventeenth-century atlas the inscription “1661, property of Giasinto Filippi” is followed by another reading “Obtained from the same out of curiosity” (USCh16), and an atlas attributed to Joan Martines contains a curse on those who do not return the book if it becomes misplaced and a promise of a reward (in wine) for those who do: “Blase Voulondet 1586 — whoever finds this book will give it back to me, Blase Voulondet, and if they will not return it god will punish them, and if they do return it they will have much wine” (V14). Thus it is clear that those owners or purchasers of charts who can be identified with certainty are a very diverse group. This seems to prove that the nautical charts of the Mediterranean had lost their main functions as instruments of navigation 48 and appealed to purchasers for a number of secondary reasons. Indeed, these owners do not seem to have been particularly bothered if their charts and atlases were more than fifty years old—and therefore apparently obsolete. For example, a chart case that Crinò argues was made around the middle of the seventeenth century for a Knight of Santo Stefano contained not only a 1636 chart by Placido Caloiro e Oliva (Placidus Caloiro et Oliva) (ItRo9), but also a 1561 chart by Jaume Olives (ItRo5) and 1561 and 1567 charts by Jacopo Maggiolo (Giacomo Maggiolo) (ItRo4 and ItRo6). It may seem strange that the owner of the case kept three charts that were around seventy years old, but one should emphasize that they are actually more accurate than the fourth, and later, chart.49 The above-mentioned Battista Agnese atlas of around 1552, which had once belonged to Sebastian, 46. ItMi2bis. A further note informs us that the atlas then passed into the possession of Guglielmo Ludovico Porta of Turin, who from 1674 to 1680 traveled the Mediterranean in the service of the Venetian Republic, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Portuguese crown. 47. UKL2, attributed to Joan Martines. 48. Although not confirmed by verifiable evidence, this can be supposed to have been their principal function based on the names by which these products were identified: carte da navigar, cartae pro navigando, cartas de marear, etc. 49. According to Crinò, the client then commissioned a more recent chart—that by Placido Caloiro e Oliva—to make up for the out-of-date toponymic information in the other three. Sebastiano Crinò, “Un astuccio della prima metà del secolo XVII con quattro carte da navigare costruite per la Marina Medicea dell’Ordine di Santo Stefano,” Rivista Marittima 64, no. 2 (1931): 163 –74, esp. 171–72.

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Archbishop of Mainz, was in 1637 presented to the elevenyear-old Christina of Sweden by her tutor, who probably held it a ﬁtting work from which a person of her rank might learn geography. And another Agnese atlas, dating from slightly after 1545, was bought in 1643 by Duke August of Wolfenbüttel for the hefty sum of 200 ducats.50 This interest in precious maps regardless of their age may well explain why Amerigo Vespucci paid 130 (or perhaps 80) gold ducats for a 1439 chart by Gabriel de Valseca.51 It is also clear that, unlike world charts, the charts covering the area of the Mediterranean were not subject to important changes and alterations.52 Hence, a more recent chart of the Mediterranean had no real advantages over one dating from some years earlier; indeed, it was often of poorer quality.

Materials Like their medieval predecessors, the manuscript nautical charts and atlases of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were drawn on parchment, a precious material produced by skilled artisans from the hides of calves, sheep, goats, and maybe even rabbits and pigs, using a long and complex process that had not changed over the centuries.53 The two sides of a parchment were very different: the one that had been the outside of the animal’s hide was yellowish-brown in color and retained traces of the hair follicles, while the one that had been the inner side of the hide was almost perfectly white and smooth. It was this side that cartographers always chose for the tracing of nautical charts. A chart might use an entire hide, which was first trimmed of irregular segments. The resulting surface was roughly rectangular in shape, though it tended to narrow toward one side (forming what was known as the neck, the tongue, or the umbilicus). To the rough side was usually fixed a wooden cylinder, decorated with two end pommels, around which the chart might then be wound, fastened in place by a ribbon passing through two small parallel cuts made at the end of the neck. Very few of the charts that have come down to us are wrapped around their original wooden cylinder, and of those extant charts even fewer are today conserved in that form (they can be preserved much better rolled out on a flat surface).54 To consult the chart, one unrolled it by gripping the narrowed end— or, as Caraci has suggested, one may even have hung the chart on a wall by the neck.55 However, it is much more likely that, even when not consulted at sea, the nautical chart was always spread out on a flat surface for consultation. As in the case of medieval charts (from the 1330 chart by Angelo Dalorto [Angelino Dulceto] onward), the neck of the charts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually occupied the left side (if one takes the upper edge to be north).

It is generally held that this protruding side of the chart got its name from the fact that it actually corresponded to the neck of the animal from whose hide the parchment had been made. This may be true of earlier charts, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this narrow side is not only cut in a curved shape (which recalls the traditional form) but may also be cut as a triangle or a trapezoid. The fact that the neck had become a conventional attribute of parchment charts is even clearer when one looks at those charts made up of two skins joined together along the longest side (for example, the 1561 chart by Jacopo Maggiolo, ItGe9): here the two original necks on the hides have been removed, and the left side of the chart is simply cut into a curved shape. There are even charts in which the neck is actually another bit of parchment stuck onto the main sheet, such as an anonymous seventeenth-century chart (ItVe53). Compared to medieval nautical charts, those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show greater variety in size (ﬁg. 7.4); the smallest is 40 by 20 centimeters 56 and

50. GeW2. A sheet attached to the work bears the following words: “A book of maps and seacharts surveyed by hand on clean parchment, which given to Malta cost . . . 200 ducats.” 51. José María Martínez-Hidalgo, El Museo Marítímo de la Diputación de Barcelona ([Spain]: Silex, 1985), 90, and Julio Rey Pastor and Ernesto García Camarero, La cartografía mallorquina (Madrid: Departamento de Historia y Filosofía de la Ciencia, “Instituto Luis Vives,” Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientíﬁcas, 1960), 73. Compared to this sum, one can only describe as a pittance the 12 ducats Alberto Cantino paid to an unknown Portuguese cartographer for the famous world chart (Cantino wrote: “The said chart made for me in Portugal cost me twelve gold ducats”). 52. In the case of world charts, the demand for updated charts may well have led some dishonest vendors to modify the date. This was the case with the Vesconte Maggiolo world chart, which has disappeared without a trace: its original 1527 date was crudely altered to 1587, undoubtedly to give the impression that it was up to date, showing all the latest geographical discoveries. 53. Claudia Consoni, “La pergamena: Procedimenti esecutivi,” in I supporti nelle arti pittoriche: Storia, tecnica, restauro, 2 vols., ed. Corrado Maltese (Milan: Mursia, 1990), 2:277–95, and Penny Jenkins, “Printing on Parchment or Vellum,” Paper Conservator 16 (1992): 31– 39, esp. 31. 54. Among the few that are still rolled around their original cylinders, one should mention the 1622 chart by Giovanni Francesco Monno (Durazzo-Giustiniani private library in Genoa), the anonymous chart ItBo14, the 1621 chart by Placido Caloiro e Oliva (ItNa5), and another anonymous work in the same library (ItNa15)—all of them rather small in size. 55. Giuseppe Caraci, “La carta nautica del R. Archivio di Stato in Parma,” Aurea Parma 21 (1937): 183 – 89. 56. This chart was made in 1622 by Giovanni Francesco Monno (see note 54). Among other small-sized charts one should mention the anonymous seventeenth-century French chart in ﬁgure 7.4 (ItBo14), the 1656 chart by Giovanni Battista Cavallini measuring 55 by 19.5 centimeters (UKGr21), another undated work by Cavallini measuring 43 by 20 centimeters (ItRo17), the 1597 chart by Vicente Prunes measuring 54 by 17 centimeters (USNY17), and the 1621 chart by Placido Caloiro e Oliva measuring 50 by 20.5 centimeters (ItNa5).

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fig. 7.4. SMALL NAUTICAL CHART. Anonymous seventeenth-century nautical chart of the Mediterranean.

Size of the original: 17.7 54 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna (Rot. 81).

the largest 222 by 132 centimeters.57 Particular mention should be made of the 1644 chart by Alberto de Stefano: measuring 160 by 80 centimeters, this is formed of six individual parchments stuck together on a canvas backing, so it seems to have been originally intended to hang on a wall (UKGr20). This wide variety in size reveals that charts were now losing their original function—given that outsized or undersized charts were obviously of no use to actual navigators. Rolled-up charts were probably kept in canvas covers or in special containers. Perhaps the only surviving example of a container is that shown in ﬁgure 7.5. The interior of this wooden cylinder, faced with elaboratelyworked leather, is in fact divided into four smaller cylinders of different lengths and diameters, each designed to hold one nautical chart. Under the lid (another

cylinder with a rounded end) there are four different holes, so that each chart can be slid into its respective cylinder.58 The container must date from around the period of the latest chart, that by Placido e Caloiro e Oliva made in 1636 (ItRo9), and gives us an idea of how such documents were kept and, perhaps, how they were prepared for use on board ship. However, there were different ways of storing nautical charts. For example, the 1535 chart by Vesconte Maggiolo (ItTo2) is cut into two pieces and glued onto four tablets that are fastened together in accordionlike folds (ﬁg. 7.6); however, we have no way of knowing if this was the way they were originally mounted. There seems little doubt that the odd mounting of the 1630 chart by Giovanni Battista Cavallini was original. Once in the collection of the Counts Guidi of Volterra, this was, according to the description given by Magnaghi, glued onto three wooden tablets that folded on top of one another.59 However, given that the back of the right tablet bore a chart of the Aegean, this work should more properly be considered an atlas.60 Parchment was not always sold by the hide, but was sometimes sold in rectangular-cut sheets. Folded together two or more times, these then formed folios, character-

fig. 7.5. CASE FOR NAUTICAL CHARTS. A container, in wood and finely worked leather, intended to hold four nautical charts. Size of the original: length 84 cm; diameter 12.5 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome (Sez. Cartograﬁa, Varia 5).

57. FrP59. It is a 1654 chart signed by Roussin (formed by four joined sheets of parchment) that shows the area of the Mediterranean. Measurements of more than 200 by 100 centimeters are also found in those rare nautical world charts produced in Italy—such as that now called the Pesaro world chart (ItPs2) or the Nicolò de Caverio world chart (FRP2), both dating from the early years of the sixteenth century. 58. Crinò, “Un astuccio,” 163 –74. 59. Alberto Magnaghi, “Carte nautiche esistenti a Volterra,” Rivista Geograﬁca Italiana 4 (1897): 34 – 40. 60. Two 1627 nautical charts by Joan Oliva covering the same area are also mounted in the same way to form a single object. (They are now in private ownership in Portugal.)

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The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

fig. 7.6. NAUTICAL CHART OF THE MEDITERRANEAN GLUED ONTO FOUR PANELS. Vesconte Maggiolo, Genoa, 1535.

Size of the original: 2 sheets of 45.9 43 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Archivio di Stato, Turin (Corte, Biblioteca Antica, Jb. III 18).

ized by the regular alternation of double white and double yellowish-brown sheets. However, as in the case of nautical charts, folio atlases were always drawn on the white face of the parchment. The sheets could be bound together at the margin (usually on the left side), but it was more usual for them to be folded vertically down the middle, with the yellowish-brown recto of one double sheet glued to the yellowish-brown verso of the next. In this way, all the undesired discolored pages were hidden, and the volume—normally consisting of a limited number of charts—was made more robust and solid. There are also examples of charts ﬁxed onto backing so that they unfolded in the manner of an accordion: this is the case with the 1555 (UKGr7) and 1556 (ItMa2) atlases by Angelo Freducci (ﬁg. 7.7) and a work in a private collection in Canada, which may be anonymous but is probably the work of Giorgio Sideri and hence datable to around the second half of the sixteenth century. I should also mention a feature that is particularly noticeable in later works: though bound together along one side, the sheets are not always of the same size (even if they are clearly all the work of the same cartographer). This is the case, for example, with an anonymous French

atlas, whose larger sheets are folded over so that they do not stick out of the volume (USCh17). Naturally enough, the book binding and format were often changed, either to satisfy the tastes of the various owners of the charts or simply for reasons of conservation. Sometimes, however, one can be certain that the extant work is in its original form: this is clear, for example, with a number of atlases by Battista Agnese that have typical sixteenth-century bindings of two hard covers in nut- or red-colored morocco leather decorated with fillet work, arabesques, and six-lobed rosettes in gold—a combination that is, in effect, the trademark of one of the most prolific cartographic workshops of the sixteenth century.61 The leather binding of the previously mentioned 1594 atlas by Joan Oliva is also very probably original, given that it bears the coat of arms of the Order of the Knights of Malta (to which we know the first owner belonged) 61. Often a small compass was included inside the back board of the binding. Wagner, however, cautions against using the binding to determine the attribution of an anonymous work. Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 6.

The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean

fig. 7.7. NAUTICAL ATLAS WITH ACCORDION-LIKE BINDING. Angelo Freducci, Ancona, 1556. Size of the original: 35 230 cm opened. Photograph courtesy of the Biblioteca Comunale, Mantua (MS. 646).

(USCh9). And the same conclusion can be drawn concerning all those atlases produced in Leghorn that still bear the arms of the Order of the Knights of Santo Stefano on their front cover. Finally, I should mention the splendid mosaic Florence-work in the leather bindings of the three atlases that are attributed to Francesco Ghisolﬁ and known to have belonged to members of the Medici family and the remarkable turquoise-encrusted binding of the previously mentioned atlas by Battista Agnese.62

Manufacture In both the charts and atlases, part of the drawing might well be in lead pencil. This was the case, for example, with the large circle enclosing the central wind rose and bearing the sixteen peripheral wind roses—as can be seen in the ﬁrst sheet of the 1512 atlas by Vesconte Maggiolo (where some of the pencil drawing of the circle is still clearly visible) (ItPr2). This procedure is conﬁrmed by the explanation Martín Cortés gives of the drawing-up of a nautical chart: after the drawing of two straight lines that bisect each other at ninety degrees, “over the point where they bisect one must put the center and draw a circle nearly as wide as the whole chart, which is often drawn with lead because it is easy to erase.”63 In the Braidense Atlas by Joan Martines, four sheets still bear clearly visible marks of the tracing of this large circle (perhaps by a metallic point)—though here the pe-

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ripheral wind roses the circle was intended to bear are missing. And all the sheets of a Battista Agnese atlas (ItBo11) bear inscribed traces of a large double circle, with the inner circle bearing the wind roses (obviously omitted in the land maps). Therefore, it seems that all the sheets were prepared in the same way, irrespective of their final purpose. However, the order in which chartmakers carried out all the procedures involved in drawing up a chart is still a matter of debate among scholars. Many claim that coastlines came first, followed by the indications of wind directions, while others claim the exact opposite. The fact that in the 1548 atlas by Vesconte Maggiolo (ItFi20) there are two sheets bearing only wind directions—varying according to the schema used in drawing up the charts— suggests that the wind rhumbs were drawn first. However, these are not unfinished charts but explanatory drawings and therefore do not tell us anything about the actual order in which cartographers worked. In his chapter “De la composición de la carta de marear,” Martín Cortés suggests that first all the wind rhumbs, both main and secondary, be traced in, and then transparent paper and “carbon paper” be used to copy the coastlines from a padrón (master copy); he also mentions that one can divide the original into a number of little squares if one needs to enlarge or reduce the image.64 Bartolomeo Crescenzio mentioned two other methods for copying from an original: the first would have involved stretching both parchments on a frame that was then held against a light source to make tracing possible; the second, known as “pouncing,” involved the perforation of the coastline with “thin needles,” leaving a trace of pinpricks on the new parchment that could be dusted with soot in order to give a clear black outline to be reworked in pen.65 The scholar criticizes these two methods as the sources of imprecision and error. Electron microscope tests of four medieval nautical charts in the BL collection have revealed that in three cases the lines marking wind direction are beneath the others indicating coastlines and place-names—and were therefore obviously drawn first—while in the fourth case it was not possible to identify the lowest level with certainty. However, as Campbell has pointed out, the network of wind lines could not have been used as a framework for the copying—and possible reduction or

62. Corradino Astengo, “La produzione cartografica di Francesco Ghisolfi,” Annali di Ricerche e Studi di Geografia 49 (1993): 1–15, esp. 6 –7, and Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 62. 63. Martín Cortés, Breve compendio de la esfera y del arte de navegar (Madrid: Editorial Naval, Museo Naval, 1990), 215. 64. Cortés, Breve compendio, 214 –27. 65. Bartolomeo Crescenzio (Crescentio), Navtica Mediterranea (Rome: Bartolomeo Bonfadino, 1602 and 1607).

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fig. 7.8. NAUTICAL CHART OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN WITH GRID. Sheet from a nautical atlas by François Ollive, Marseilles, 1658. Size of the original: 52 34 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Museu Marítim, Barcelona (inv. 10257).

enlargement— of the image, because their position with regard to the coastlines varies from chart to chart.66 As to the use of the method of quadratura (squaring) suggested by Martín Cortés, the only traces of it are to be found in a few, very late, charts: a half-sheet chart of a 1658 atlas produced by François Ollive (Francesco Oliva) in Marseilles (fig. 7.8) (SpBa8) and two sheets in an anonymous atlas that may be attributed to the same chartmaker (FrMa4). These certainly unfinished works—they show only color-highlighted coastlines, without any placenames or wind directions—are covered by a fine grid of small squares that have nothing to do with geographical meridians or parallels (apparently drawn in lead pencil, they seem to have been intended to be temporary and erasable). The 1658 atlas that Jean François Roussin drew up in Toulon (ItMo4) also contains a chart of the Mediterranean with a fine grid of squares instead of a network of wind rhumbs: however, this chart does have place-names and scrolls bearing the names of the continents (all that is missing is an indication of scale and the usual decorative

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

features). In this case, therefore, it would seem that the grid of small squares was not intended for erasure. Given that these charts cover areas already depicted—at the same scale—by other sheets in the same atlases, their function within the volume as a whole is not clear.67 Naturally enough, unfinished charts give us some help in understanding the order in which they were drawn up—though even here, they tell us only about the procedure followed by a particular chartmaker and nothing about generally established rules. As a first example, one might mention an anonymous nautical chart that has been rescued from use as material for book binding (fig. 7.9) (ItSa2). This shows only the eight main winds (in black) without the half- and quarter-winds, together with a traced coastline (also in black), but without any islands (except Euboea) or place-names; there are also circles or series of concentric circles designed to contain the ornamentation for the thirteen compass roses. The chartmaker seems to have worked in the following order: first he drew the lines for the eight winds, then the outlines of land masses, and finally the circles for the ornamental roses (arranged so that they do not overlap the coastline). Afterward he would have gone on to add the other wind lines and the lines of the half-winds, place-names (both black and red), and finally the ornamental figures that this undoubtedly seventeenth-century work would have contained. A few unfinished nautical charts are bound in one of the three volumes of manuscript charts prepared by Robert Dudley for his Arcano del mare and therefore probably belonged to the compiler (GeM3, GeM4, GeM5).68 One is complete with ornamentation (but uncolored), while another lacks only the red ink placenames. A third chart is very difficult to interpret given that it has a very unusual wind system. It lacks a central wind rose and has four wind roses placed on the hidden circle at the four edges, from which originate only a few wind lines. The Mediterranean area is divided into four separate sections, each differently oriented. Rotating the chart ninety degrees at a time, each section in turn becomes aligned with north; there are no place-names or ornamental features, but the coastline is highlighted in color. Because of its quite odd nature, this chart must be considered some sort of an experiment and cannot be taken 66. Campbell, “Portolan Charts,” 390 –91. 67. The purpose of the odd chart drawn on the back of the first sheet of Vincenzo Volcio’s 1592 atlas (SpM4) is even harder to make out. A “negative” image of the Black Sea has been drawn on this brownish side of the parchment, which normally was not used. The complete wind lines are given (in black, red, and green), the coastline is traced in black, and only the black ink place-names are given (in mirror writing). Black ink is also used to outline a wind rose and for two drawings of sovereigns. 68. Munich, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. icon. 138, 139, and 140.

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fig. 7.9. UNFINISHED NAUTICAL CHART ONCE USED FOR BOOK BINDING. Anonymous seventeenth-century nautical chart of the Mediterranean.

Size of the original: 38 59 cm. Photograph courtesy of the Archivio Vescovile, Savona.

as offering any clue to the normal procedures used by chartmakers. Another anonymous nautical chart is totally without place-names (ItVe19). As usual, the wind lines are marked in black, green, and red, while the coastline (limited to the east central section of the Mediterranean) is traced in black ink (with greenish-brown underlining). There are also pen outlines for four small compass roses, plus a ﬁfth larger and much more elaborate rose—all of them certainly intended for later decoration in vivid colors. There is another anonymous chart of the same area, totally without ornamentation and with brown used to emphasize the coastline alone (ItVe15). Only the black ink place-names have been inscribed, while all the red ink names are missing (though the cartographer has left space to add them later).69 Another particularly interesting anonymous chart perhaps dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century (ItVe44). Richly decorated with compass roses and miniatures of cities and various animals, the work, however, is

totally without place-names. This may well mean that the coastal place-names in red and black were the last things added to a chart—though this one example is hardly enough to establish that this was the general rule. There is also the possibility that this chart— entirely ﬁnished in all other respects—had left the cartographer’s workshop for the studio of some expert or scholar who was responsible for inscribing the place-names, perhaps in Greek (some69. Two other anonymous charts without red ink place-names have come on the market: Lot 51 in the Sotheby’s auction of 21 April 1983 and Lot 54 in the Christie’s auction of 7 December 1988. The description of the latter points out that, though unﬁnished, the chart seems to have been used on board a ship. Things are further complicated by an anonymous sixteenth-century Venetian chart (ItVe30), which contains only a few place-names in red ink— except in the areas of the Adriatic, the Peloponnesus, and part of the Archipelago (where the usual black ink place-names are also found). This proves that the cartographer was following his own particular method; however, because the chart belonged to the distinguished Venetian Dandolo family, it could have been a deliberate choice to give detailed information only on those areas where Venice had interests.

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thing that was far from uncommon).70 However, one would seem to be justified in claiming that the coloring of decoration and ornamentation was the last operation carried out before the addition of the cartographer’s signature, together with the place and date of completion— though of course not all finished works are signed.71 As for atlases, it is more probable that each sheet was completed before being bound in a volume— even if this general rule seems to be contradicted by an anonymous atlas that Wagner, with many reservations, attributes to Battista Agnese.72 Not only is the traditional scroll intended for the owner’s coat of arms incomplete (with the pencil outline only partially inked in); there are also a number of incompletely colored sheets and numerous gridded white sheets that have been left entirely blank.73 Similarly, doubts are raised by the previously mentioned 1512 atlas by Vesconte Maggiolo (ItPr2), given that the blue used to color the Canary Islands on the fourth sheet has left a clear outline on the opposite page, suggesting that the book was shut before the paint was dry. However, these are only isolated cases from which one cannot generalize. What does seem clear is that the individual charts in the volumes must have been drawn on rectangles of parchment that had already been cut to size. Atlas charts were therefore very different from those that were divided into sections—such as the previously mentioned Munich chart (GeM5) or an anonymous chart auctioned at Christie’s on 21 June 1989, which shows the Mediterranean divided up into six panels (there is absolutely no indication that these were then to be cut up and bound as a volume).74 As already mentioned, the last phase, for either individual charts or atlas sheets, was in all probability that of coloring and decorating. The brushes used to paint decorative figures, the backgrounds of the smaller islands, and the highlighting of coastlines were made with hairs of vair (squirrel fur) bound together, cut to various shapes, and held in a handle made from a feather (often a vulture feather). In both charts and atlas sheets, the cartographer used black ink to trace the lines indicating the eight main winds, the coastlines, the outline of ornamental figures, and coastal place-names. This ink was made using ferrous sulfide and finely ground oak nuts dissolved in rain water, vinegar, or wine, with gum Arabic used to thicken the resulting mixture. Red ink was used for the sixteen quarter-winds and the names of the most important coastal locations. It was made using shavings of brazil wood infused in vinegar with gum Arabic, but it might also have been produced using cinnabar or red lead. Green ink, which the cartographer used to mark in the eight halfwinds, is not mentioned in medieval or Renaissance treatises; one may assume it was made by diluting verdigris in vinegar and then adding gum Arabic.

The History of Renaissance Cartography: Interpretive Essays

The pigments and binding agents used to make the materials that cartographers used to color decoration, create background relief for smaller islands, and highlight coastlines cannot have changed much from the medieval to the Renaissance period. Information on these technical aspects can be gleaned not only from well-known medieval treatises on the matter,75 but also from two Renaissance works: Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte della pittura (published in Milan in 1584)—a work that “takes up and completes recipes and mixtures from Cennini, Alberti and Leonardo, complementing them with new mixtures”—and Cristoforo Sorte’s Osservazioni sulla pittura (published in Venice in 1580)—in which, among other things, the author “deals with chorography.” 76 The range of paints available was very wide, but it would take an analysis of a great number of charts to establish which paints were actually used by the various cartographic workshops. One study has focused on Martin Behaim’s famous globe, which, as it is drawn on parchment, allows one to suppose that the cartographer— Georg Holzschuher—used the same paints as those used for nautical charts. Analysis shows that the green was produced using verdigris, the red using cinnabar, the white using white lead, the blue using azurite, and the yellow using ochre, with liquid gold and silver plus various organic colorants also used. Hence, no use was made of the more expensive pigments, such as malachite or lapis lazuli, or of coloring agents formed by the mixture of different ingredients.77 70. There are three known charts and two atlases that give all placenames in Greek: FrP36, ItL2, USNY1, GrA2, and the Nicolaus Vourdopolos chart that was once in the Archives of the Guidi family in Volterra (Alberto Magnaghi, “L’Atlante manoscritto di Battista Agnese della Biblioteca Reale di Torino,” Rivista Geografica Italiana 15 [1908]: 65 –77 and 135 – 48). 71. That the inscription was added at the conclusion of the work is shown by the fact that it often includes a date that can refer only to the day on which the chart or atlas was completed. What is more, the long inscription in Jacopo Russo’s 1528 chart (UKBi1) is clearly squeezed in between two figures of saints, so it must have been written after they were finished. See Roberto Almagià, “I lavori cartografici di Pietro e Jacopo Russo,” Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: Rendiconti Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, 8th ser., 12 (1957): 301–19, esp. pl. X. 72. USCh2. Wagner, “Manuscript Atlases,” 102. 73. The anonymous atlas ItBe1 also seems to be unfinished. Gaetano Ferro, “L’Atlante manoscritto della scuola di Battista Agnese conservato a Bergamo,” Rivista Geografica Italiana 91 (1984): 501–20. 74. Indeed, the drawing in one panel runs over into the next panel. The chart could date from the end of the fifteenth century. 75. See David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in HC 1: 286 –370, esp. 324. 76. Silvia Bordini, Materia e immagine: Fonti sulle tecniche della pittura (Rome: Leonardo–De Luca Editori, 1991), 59 – 60. 77. Bernd Hering, “Zur Herstellungstechnik des Behaim-Globus,” in Focus Behaim Globus, 2 vols. (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseums, 1992), 1:289 –300, esp. 298 –99.

The Renaissance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean

So, even though we cannot be certain, it seems likely that charts and atlas sheets also made use of low-cost pigments. However, detailed analysis might well bring out regional variations in the use of different pigments and also reveal the use of new substances made available thanks to geographical discoveries and contemporary developments in decorative techniques.78 The production of manuscript nautical charts and atlases must have required a great deal of time: for example, the inscription “a Kal Xbris ad Kal Maias 1646” reveals that Friar Nicolò Guidalotti took ﬁve months to complete his atlas (ItVe7). However, that is the work of an amateur who probably copied similar works by Placido Caloiro e Oliva,79 so it does not tell us anything about the output rate of a highly professional cartographic workshop such as that of Battista Agnese (which in the year 1542, we k

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