The Silent Cartographers

ART 5834: History of Collecting

Drew Walton
 1

Cartography, the study and practice of map making, is undeniably tied with Europes

early modern period. At its core, the map or sea chart acted as a tool for explorers during the Age

of Discovery. This in turn allowed European countries to conquer and colonize much of the

wider world through Mercantilism and Colonialism. This first, real stage of globalization was

effectively enabled by European cartographers who participated in some of the very first steps of

this entire process. They share the successes of this process along with bearing its sins. How did

these cartographers achieve what they did? The most straight forward answer is that they viewed

and studied the works of cartographers from antiquity, who drew the world in widely varying

ways, and sought to outdo them with the new tools they had at their disposal. The problem that

arises from studying the history of cartography from this time period is that the practice of map

collecting is implicitly assumed by the very nature of the subject itself and yet it is rarely

explicitly addressed. Map collections as they exists today are firmly housed within purely

academic institutions, but in the early modern period it was much more nuancedly tied with the

geopolitical and imperialistic aspects that cartography itself represented in this era. This papers

thesis is threefold. Firstly, it intends to explore the closely interweaved connections between

cartography and map collections. Secondly, this paper will act an analysis for the map as a

collectible object, one that transcends the dividing lines between material culture and artwork.

Finally, this paper will argue how map collections evolved from the early modern period through

the following centuries to where it stands currently.

This paper will mainly be driven by historical methodology and as such it will primarily

concern itself with the early modern period as previously alluded to in the opening paragraph and

thesis. Specifically, this paper will examine two particular ages within this time period in

European history; the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, the former beginning roughly in
 2

the fourteenth century and ending in the seventeenth century whilst the latter began in the

fifteenth century and lasted through the eighteenth century. This intersection of these time

periods is crucial as cartography in both these areas is vast and numerous and as such have

extensive historical coverage by a wide range of authors, though they are all historians. In

reviewing the literature that this paper will examine further on, one can divide the historians

covering the history of cartography into two categories: Those relaying the development of

cartography in the early modern period and those writing about the impact cartography had in

their specific regions of study. It is from these two categories from which this paper will

interrogate and draw its ultimate conclusions from.

To review these categories further, the latter will be explored through sources like

Reframing the Renaissance, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, and Black Africans in

Renaissance Europe. These examples, made especially clear with their titles, are much more

critical of the early modern period than other sources in this research paper. More specifically,

they are deconstructive in their views of the Renaissance and the ethnocentrism from which its

maps emulate while also reinterpreting the narrative surrounding this time period. As for the

former category of authors, these are by and large traditional histories of the development of

cartography through both eras this paper focuses on in the early modern period. These include

sources like Maps & Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation to Culture and

Civilization, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World, and Historical Atlases: The

First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870. Once again by the titles alone, one can see that the

authors that will be examined here are focused on the development of cartography rather than

reexamining their areas of study.

 3

Norman Thrower in Maps & Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation to

Culture and Civilization attributes the rise of Cartography in Renaissance Europe to the Fall of

Constantinople. Byzantine refugees carried Ptolemys high caliber work Geographia (see Figure

1) with them as they fled to Italy and by 1410 the Greek was translated into Latin (see Figure 2),

effectively allowing educated Europeans to begin studying Ptolemys cartography.1 This event

largely coincides with the earliest ventures in European exploration and as Thrower ultimately

argues these two events can be considered deeply connected if not one in the same. As Thrower

states, The two subjects are closely interrelated because a place is not really discovered until it

has been mapped so that it can be reached again.2 He goes on to argue that cartography was a

practice partaken in by many of the famous figures of the time period that arent normally

associated with it. Leonardo Da Vinci, Peter Apian, Giovanni Contarini, and Gemma Frisus are

named by Thrower as examples before moving onto Gerhardus Mercator who is attributed to

revolutionizing cartography through his World Map of 1569 (see Figure 3) which is considered

by Thrower to be a hallmark accomplishment in cartography.3

More importantly for the history of map collecting, Mercator used his success to begin

working on a world atlas that was eventually published posthumously by his son in 1594. This

atlas was actually beaten into publication by Mercators rival, Abraham Ortelius through his

Theatrum Orbus Terrarum in 1579 (see Figure 4), which is accredited as the first major bound

collection of maps specifically designed for publication. Ortelius Theatrum was so detailed in

design that it created a new standard in which maps were expected to look like. Jerry Brotton in

1 Norman Thrower, Maps & Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation to

Culture and Civilization, (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall. 1972), 43.

2 Ibid., 48.

3 Ibid., 51.
 4

Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World, provides a commentary of the

commercial value of Ortelius works following its release. As Brotton says, Map-buyers

increasingly demanded that such maps be ever more detailed, reflecting the growing complexity

of the changing political geography of late sixteenth-century Europe.4 Before this breakthrough,

sheet maps were only assembled together in atlas form by men like the French engraver Antonio

Lafreri who featured the mythological Atlas on their title coves holding the world above his

head.5 The prominent success that Mercator and Ortelius had on map collecting between 1570

and 1612 was profound. As Throwers says, This period in cartographic history has been called

the age of atlases because the work of Ortelius and Mercator inspired many others to engage in

this lucrative trade-Hondius, Blaeu, Visscher, and Jansson being among the best known.6

The concept of the historical atlas also came about soon thereafter, Walter Goffart in his

book Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870 describes the historical atlas

as an invention meant for comparative and educational purposes as the multitudes of maps

collected were done so to show an evolving landscape across a long period of time. The first

official historical atlas was Parergon which was an addendum in Ortelius Theatrum. From this

point it developed alongside cartography until the French Jesuit Philippe Briet revolutionized the

historical atlas as tool used in classrooms and universities with his Parallels of Ancient and

Modern Geography and though it is relatively primitive for a historical atlas it did indeed

validate these kinds of collections7. It is from this development that the first major map

collections came into being in Europe. Grand library institutions like the Bibliothque nationale

4 Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World, (Ithaca, N.Y:
Cornell University Press. 1998), 170.

5 Thrower, 55-56.

6 Ibid., 58
 5

seriously began map collecting as a means to provide education to those willing to scour through

their holdings.8 These institutions continue to maintain their map collections to this day; and

though they did not necessarily display their collections as a modern museum does with its

collections, one can see parallel paths with their shared desire to preserve and spread the

knowledge of these maps.

Beyond map collections themselves, the power maps had as collectible objects during the

early modern period cannot be overstated. The saying, knowledge is power applies to maps

and their creators because the cartographers had complete and utter control in what was

acknowledged by the map and what was ignored. Naturally, the state that paid the cartographer

also had immense influence over the creation of maps. Their uses in diplomacy, military action,

and censorship are what J.B. Harley calls intentional silences.9 For Spain and Portugal this

process was also done out of commercial necessity. Harley uses the example of Francis Drakes

voyage around the world, whose sketched charts and drawn maps were immediately confiscated

by the Spanish government upon his return and became state secrets; publication of these maps

7Walter Goffart, "Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Atlases Relevant to History,"

In Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2003),
http://chicago.universitypressscholarship.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/view/10.7208/chica
go/9780226300726.001.0001/upso-9780226300719-chapter-2

8Walter Goffart, "From 1700, New Departures," In Historical Atlases: The First Three
Hundred Years, 1570-1870, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003),
http://chicago.universitypressscholarship.com.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/view/10.7208/chica
go/9780226300726.001.0001/upso-9780226300719-chapter-4

9 J.B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001), 88.
 6

even remained prohibited until 1588. Map collecting in this sense was done to protect Spains

monopolistic plans from espionage from rival European powers.10

Even scientific maps were not free from these intentional silences. Though they were

objectively seen as accurate, Harley argues that omitted details also worked consciously and

unconsciously to dehumanize the landscape and its people it portrayed. For the New World this

rendered the continent without an agency of its own. As Harley elaborates, Thus, with the

process of scientific mapping, space became all too easily a socially commodity, a geometrical

landscape of cold, non-human facts.11 It is interesting to point out that this quote both explains

why the map is seen as collectible object and also why it is so different from a work of art. Why

most other collections of art and culture bring out the sense of the human spirit, maps

compartmentalize humans along with other beings into a simplicity from which only nature,

cartoonish depictions, and the landscape can be observed from a gods eye view. This

dehumanizing factor ironically appeals to the collector, who uses it to effectively seize the world

and place it into their private chambers.

This factor of dehumanization can also be seen in how cartographers mapped out and

portrayed the continent of Africa. Jean Michel Massing in his essay The image of Africa and the

iconography of lip-plated Africans in Pierre Descelierss World Map of 1550 in Black Africans

in Renaissance Europe argues that the cartographer Pierre Desceliers, compensating from the

notorious inability of Europeans to explore the interior of the African continent in the early

modern period, used notes collected from secondhand sources to detail the landscape and its

10 Ibid., 91

11 Ibid., 99.
 7

people on his World Map of 1550 (see Figure 5).12 Just like with Ptolemy these sources mostly

came from antiquity, specifically Pliny the Elders accounts of Ethiopia which are dominated by

the description of lip-plated Africans. It is no surprise then that Desceliers depicts Africans in

Ethiopias stead on his map with enlarged lips, alluding to the known practice in certain African

cultures. Thus, even while Desceliers decision to draw this depiction is not widely inaccurate

per se, it was particularly damaging to the European perception of Africans in general. As

Massing elaborates, For Europeans and this includes cartographers Africans with lip-plates

must have recalled reports of a monstrous race with a lip that protruded so much that it was used

to protect them from the sun.13 Desceliers Map of 1550, in this sense, contributed if not outright

propagated a racial stereotype which dehumanized the agency of the Africans within the African

continent; the results of which can be seen in Europes dark and brutal colonialist history there.

To look at this from another angle, not all map makers were Europeans. Indeed, Dana

Leibsohns chapter, Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New

Spain in Reframing the Renaissance covers the maps created by Native Americans or

Amerindians themselves. As she demonstrates through the chapter, this gave the indigenous

people of New Spain some amount of agency of their own. Maps then were viewed as tools for

these people just as they were viewed in the same light by Europeans. As Leibsohn says,

Because land and its control were seminal to all residents of New Spain, maps were never

neutral images.14 She goes on to stress this point by pointing out that the vast majority of maps

12 Jean Michel Massing, The image of Africa and the iconography of lip-plated
Africans in Pierre Descelierss World Map of 1550, in Black Africans in Renaissance
Europe, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 56

13 64
 8

created in New Spain were those that marked natural resources or territorial lines.15 Following

the conquest of New Spain, indigenous map makers waged a kind of subconscious war against

their colonizers through how they placed designated signs on their maps, these intentional

silences had low key yet wide-ranging effects on how the populace saw their world.

At the same time, indigenous map makers also received unofficial training from the

Spanish in cartography whilst they were trained in other skills. This ultimately meant that

European and indigenous cartography interweaved over the years of Spanish colonization. Map

makers did not just serve European interests too. As Leibsohn explains, Although legal channels

were dominated by Europeans, map patrons included other indigenous people community

leaders or groups seeking a favorable judgement in claims brought against Spaniards, their

slaves, or other native communities.16 Again we see that maps were bought and maintained for

long periods by authority figures in New Spain. So maps of these kinds were collected but only

for values outside its aesthetic appearance. It can be assumed in this case that the maps only

gained aesthetic collectible value only many years after the territorial and natural resource signs

lost practical reference worth to the entities initially commissioning and collecting these maps.

Walter D. Mignolo in his book The Darker Side of the Renaissance explores these

specific elements in greater detail. When the upper higher administration, known as the Council

of the Indies, requested a map (or pintura) from the Amerindians it was mostly done through oral

reports with a minimum being drawn out for the administration network by indigenous map

14 Dana Leibsohn, Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of

New Spain, In Reframing the Renaissance, edited. Claire Farago, (New Gaven and
London: Yale University Press, 1995), 267.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 268.
 9

makers. Explaining the significance of this Mignolo says, Thus, the Inidos viejos who drew

the pinturas of several of several of the relaciones toward 1580 (and who presumably were born

toward 1530-40, ten to fifteen years after the arrival of the twelve Franciscans who began the

spread of Western literacy in Mexico), were already between a tradition in which in which

mapping and writing were both detached from speech and a new learning experience in which

writing reproduced and fixed speech and mapping remained independent of it.17 This divorce

created a fundamental transformation within Amerindian society, encouraging and elevating

those that assimilated into Spanish norms.

Mignolo then comments that the few maps that still exist from Amerindians are on a level

almost wholly different from the traditional western designed map. Using the example of the

Mapa Sigenza (see Figure 6), Mignolo points out that while the map was made in the post-

conquest era of New Spain it still features many of the elements that are unique in an Amerindian

map. The most striking is that the indigenously made map does not correspond to the ideas of

location, latitude, and longitude that Europeans traditionally define as the foundation of the basic

map. Mignolo elaborates stating, This kind of geographical imprecision has been interpreted

in negative (e.g., what the Amerindian did not have) rather than positive (e.g., what the

Amerindians did have) terms.18 This kind of cartographical thinking is explained by the fact that

the Amerindians did not have follow the same kind of conceptions of well-defined territorial

lines and boundaries as Europeans do. Rather, Amerindians used their signs to highlight natural

resources over all other aspects of their region. This kind of logic likely was what made

17 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Pres, 1995), 294

18 Ibid. 299
 10

indigenous map makers so incredibly useful to the Spaniards in translating their intimacy of the

region into more discernable maps for their superiors.

This evolution and development of map collecting alongside cartography reaches its apex

far enough removed from the early modern period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century, when it effectively became what is today in modernity through the works of institutions

like the Cartographic Museum of Geneva, which briefly existed from 1907-1922. Created by

lise Reclus and Charles Perron, two anarchist geographers who spent twenty years editing

Switzerlands encyclopedic atlas Nouvelle Gographie Universelle, it is from this experience

from which they combined the map collections of libraries, government institutions, and private

collectors with the historical atlas into a public museum. With their displays and exhibitions, the

Cartographic Museum became a fundamental force in transforming the practice of cartography

from its dark and oppressive past into popular education. As Ferrettis argues, Moreover,

Perrons presentation of the history of cartography in the museum was quite innovative for his

time, especially when compared to other contemporary museums designed to mythologize the

nation and its historical roots, or to demonstrate European superiority over exotic or

primitive peoples.19

This was done through three drastic measures taken by the museum. The first and most

obvious was that they heavily emphasized world maps in their exhibitions in order to underline a

theme of unification. The exhibitions also stressed non-Europeans maps from the Hebrew and

Arabic worlds along with a handful of maps from antiquity. Finally, Perron and Reclus presented

a vision of the future for geography through the use of three-dimensional representations of the

world which they sought to showcase as surpassing the lesser means in which cartography was
19 Federico Ferretti, Pioneers in the History of Cartography: The Geneva Map
Collection of lise Reclus and Charles Perron, Journal of Historical Geography,
Volume 43, 94. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.10.025
 11

used by Europeans to colonialize the Americas and Africa. As Ferretti elaborates, Such

materials were not included in the exhibition, and it can be assumed that this was an ideological

choice: as we have seen, Reclus and the anarchist geographers were early and radical opponents

of colonialism, racism and European hegemony. The founder of the Cartographic Museum was

aware of the ideological roles which maps could play.20 The Cartographic Museum then can be

seen as a reconciliation of the deeds done through map collecting and cartography with the vast

potential the practices still have mapping out discoveries in our present and our future.

In conclusion, it can be said that the map as a collectible object transcended the values

other materials such as artworks have. It was collected for political purposes, it was collected for

economic purposes, it was collected for militaristic purposes, and it was collected for scientific

purposes. The wonder with which Europeans saw the supposed New World in the early modern

period was undercut by the fact that their marvel inspired them to spread their ethnocentrism

across the near entirety of the world. Only once this was fully accomplished did maps from the

early modern period become quant as it has now. Nonetheless, the level of detail and uniqueness

from which the silent cartographers in the Americas drew their own unique maps was forever

absorbed and forgotten by their colonist rulers. The Europeans made maps in this sense acted as

a decree of their conquest, revealing to the onlooker in the far future that they had once

discovered the rest of the world and controlled it. Whilst today we gaze backward on the works

of the Amerindians with curiosity of their unique ways of thinking, forever truly unknowable to

us because of the nature of early globalization. Map collections however find relevancy today

through their use in education; historical atlases allow for the engagement with the past while

their display as exhibitions allow for an interrogation of the how and why of their use and how

we can do better with cartography in the future.

20 Ibid., 94
 12

List of Figures

Figure 1. Ptolemy/Francesco di Antonio del Chierico/Maximus Planudes

Map of the World
1450-1475 CE
1,500 1,026
Ptolemys Geographia
 13

Figure 2. Ptolemy/ Donnus Nicholas Germanus/Johannes Schnitzer

Map of the World (Woodcut) (Translated into Latin from Greek)
1482 CE
8,073 5,813
Ptolemys Geographia/Decorative Maps by Roderick Barron
14
 15

Figure 3. Gerhardus Mercator Gerhardus Mercator

Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata
1569 CE
1,158 737
 16

Figure 4. Abraham Ortelius Abraham Ortelius

Typvs Orbis Terrarvm
1570 CE
5,816 3,961
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum/Library of Congress
 17

Figure 5. Pierre Desceliers

World Map of 1550
1550 CE
1,536 992
British Library
 18

Figure 6. Unknown Amerindian/Aztec

Mapa Sigenza
1500-1599 CE
54.5 x 77.5
National Institute of Anthropology and History/World Digital Library
 19

Bibliography

Brotton, Jerry. Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell
University Press. 1998.
Ferretti, Federico. Pioneers in the History of Cartography: The Geneva Map Collection of
lise Reclus and Charles Perron. Journal of Historical Geography. Volume 43.
Goffart, Walter. Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 1570-1870. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Harley, J. B., Paul Laxton, and Center for American Places. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in
the History of Cartography. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.
2001.
Leibsohn, Dana. Colony and Cartography: Shifting Signs on Indigenous Maps of New Spain.
In Reframing the Renaissance, ed. Claire Farago. New Gaven and London: Yale
University Press, 1995.
Jean Michel Massing, The image of Africa and the iconography of lip-plated Africans in Pierre
Descelierss World Map of 1550, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan
Pres, 1995.
Thrower, Norman J. W. Maps & Man: An Examination of Cartography in Relation to Culture
and Civilization. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall. 1972.