Renaissance Cartography Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

- by Alessandro Ricci and +1
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- Cartography, Reformation Studies, History of Cartography, Renaissance Cartography

Sources, contexts and circumstances of the writing of An Ode on the Capture of Polatsk by Jan Kochanowski

In this article it will be shown that the so-called Berlin Sketchbook, associated with the workshop of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (ca. 1460 - 1533), can be firmly attributed to his grandson, printmaker and cartographer Cornelis Anthonisz (1500/05 - 1558). For Anthonisz., this little booklet served as a didactic and creative drawing book in which he
recorded motifs with seeming nonchalance; his sketchbook appears to have been an archive of images and visual test bed in one.

In this paper we propose a series of hypothesis on Martin Waldseemüller’s enigmatic cartographic representations of 1507, highlighting the connections between his cosmography and Copernican cosmology. The beginning of the conceptualization process regarding a “fourth part” of the world, which Waldseemüller called “America”, implied a thorough review of the philosophical speculations on the tradition related to the characteristics of the Earth. By covering 360° degrees, Waldseemüller world map doubled the Ptolemaic representation and encouraged the re-examination of the measurements of both the Earth and the universe. In turn, this strengthened the widespread idea of earth movement; two key issues in the development of Modern science. Furthermore, exploring the intersections between the work of Waldseemüller and Copernicus, will allow us to consider the typical achievements and contradictions of Renaissance science, to argue their peculiar way of understanding the discovery of new lands, and to determine the consequences of how information was processed.

Speech held at the Medieval Congress in Leeds 2010

This is a the presentation delivered at the four-day meeting of members of the Brussels Map Circle with its Italian sister organization called Associazione Roberto Almagià in 2016. From 4 to 7 May map specialists from Belgium, Italy and Great Britain met at the Academia Belgica in Rome to exchange ideas on the so-called IATO atlases, otherwise known
as Lafreri atlases.
This contribution focused the importance of the "Priviliegio" asket to Venetian Senate and Roman Papal Court to protect the conceptual ideas and the formal aspect of maps in Rome and Venice during the early Renaissance.
A sample of the way of draw local maps from larger geographical context is provided with the Map of America by Paolo Forlani.

- by Vladimiro Valerio
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- Cartography, Renaissance Studies, Renaissance Art, History of Cartography
- by Marisa Bass
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- Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, Renaissance Art, Early Modern Europe

The world map Kun Yu Wan Guo Quan Tu, a map completely labeled in Chinese and previously thought to be the works of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci in 1602, is incompatible with the authorship of Matteo Ricci or European cartographers. The map portraying an outdated Europe without the Papal States, Tuscany and Florence is inconsistent with Ricci's status as an Italian Jesuit living in the Renaissance era. On the other hand, the geography of America on this map is not discovered by Europeans until 200 years after Ricci's death. For these reasons, the world map is nicknamed " Impossible Black Tulip ". According to a statement and the historical background of place names on the map, it is constructed between 1428 and 1430, more than 60 years before Christopher Columbus' first voyage. Martino Martini's Novus Atlas Sinensis also supports the capability of Chinese cartography in Ming dynasty. The loss of original Chinese documents, translational errors, and Ming politics have kept this secret for the past 600 years, until the details of this map are publicly available. The entire history of cartography and Age of Exploration should be revised to include the pioneering voyages (1405-1433) and cartographical development led by Zheng He, the Chinese Admiral.

- by Siu-Leung Lee
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- History, American History, World History, History of Cartography

The main contention of this article is that from the very beginning of the genre to its very end, the Venetian isolarii viewed the Levant as a network of islands fractured by the Ottomans’ conquest. Cartographical narratives of a historical trauma, the Venetian isolarii adopted different strategies for tackling a highly sensitive topic. As the Ottomans were steadily advancing along the Eastern Mediterranean archipelagos, the Venetian cartographers, such as Bartolomeo dalli Sonetti and Benedetto Bordone, were carefully editing the content of their isolarii, expecting from their readers to mentally map the invisible confrontation between the Sultan’s army and the Serenissima. The Lepanto victory brought a radical change of tone, and the mapmakers, such as Tomasso Porcacchi, Giovanni Camocio or Simon Pinargenti, manifestly joined the choir of those who were looking forward to the Venetian resurgence in the Levant. The fracture of the Eastern Mediterranean space was no longer suggested, but visibly exposed. However, it was only a change of tone, as the mapmakers continued to convey the same fundamental ideas. Thus, the Venetian isolarii display a remarkable continuity through time, from its beginnings to the post-Lepanto era and illustrate both the enduring format of this cartographic genre and its adaptability.

A detailed examination of the depictions and toponyms of the extant states of the Johannes Ruysch world map of 1508 reveals that the first depiction of the New World engraved onto the left-hand copperplate was based upon or derived from a map of the "King"-type design. Subsequent re-engravings of the different states of the map show incorporation of depictions and place-names from a map of the "Lusitano-Germanic" design-type. This is a complete reversal of the conclusion made by Henry Harrisse in 1892. A similarly close examination of the place-names cut into the wood blocks of the Martin Waldseemüller world map of 1507 [extant copy, 2nd state, c. 1515] and his "Carta Marina" of 1516 show that, after the initial woodcutting was completed, both maps were re-cut to incorporate place-names from another map, which was probably the Ruysch map.

- by Gregory McIntosh
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- Philology, Print Culture, Early Modern History, History of Cartography

The Selden Map presents an image of the highly dynamic nature of the East Asian Archipelago in the early seventeenth century. It also indicates through its innovative way of depicting a system of routes that Chinese merchants were experimenting with new technical approaches to respond to these changes. By the early seventeenth century, the efforts of merchant trading families and organizations related to Fujian started to generate understandings of East Asian trade as a system rather than tributary relationships. Instead of the imperial state leading this process, the Selden Map indicates that merchants took up the task of defining boundaries and frontiers. This was especially true in relation to the island chains of the western Pacific, which appear as both an economic and an ecological frontier on the Selden Map. The Selden Map reveals shifting geopolitical relationships in Japan, the Philippines and the region around Makassar. The process of envisioning this trading system could be disruptive, as European merchants and states tried to put forward their own competing visions of East Asia. But the Selden Map also reveals how this consolidation of knowledge by some Chinese merchants was part of the process of larger-scale gathering of foodstuffs, notably non-grain cash crops, necessary to feed the populations of the growing cities of the coastal Ming Empire as well as ports across East Asia.

- by Robert Batchelor
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- Cartography, Southeast Asian Studies, Southeast Asia, History of Cartography

The article deals with the representations of „Muscovy“ and „Alba Russia“ on the 16th century maps and developments of these Renaissance choronyms in the 17 - 18th centuries, and „Muscovite“ toponymy on the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish Crown. The Muscovy and populating her Muscovites emerged on the maps ca. 1500-1540s as cartographic symbols on the understudied lands, which were not considered as political unit until the mid-16th century, and later were also limited in their domineering status in these lands by special cartographic means.

- by Marian Coman
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- Renaissance Cartography, Ottoman Balkans, Moldavia, Genoa

No other symbol associated with the Ottoman Empire has been so widespread in the early modern culture and had such an impact on the European imaginary as the crescent moon. This symbol proved to be so influential that the Ottomans themselves ended up by assuming the crescent moon as a state emblem during Selim III’s reign. This article aims to investigate the use of the crescent symbol in the European cartography from the mid-fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth. By scrutinizing both the most celebrated cartographic representations of the Ottoman Empire, as well as some of the lesser known ones, I argue that the European map-makers faced a double dilemma. In order to cope with the two paradoxical features of the Ottoman Empire – a huge, threatening, Empire that cannot be ignored, but neither can be easily acknowledged and legitimized cartographically; and a state governed by Muslim elite, but nonetheless inhabited by numerous Christians – the European cartographers designed an impressive array of ingenious maps. In most of these maps, the crescent moon symbol played a crucial part in getting across a complex and subtle message. The article is divided into three sections, entitled (1) From the Islamic to the Ottoman Crescent Moon, (2) The Ottoman Crescent and the Later Crusades and (3) The Crescent and the Cartographic Territorialisation of the Ottoman Empire. The core argument of this article is that the cartographic symbol of the crescent was continuously enriched with new meanings throughout this period. Initially, the crescent was just an emblem ascribed to the Islamic world. Once it became associated with the Ottomans, in mid-fifteenth century, the cartographers emphatically drew on the opposing pair of the two symbols: the crescent and the cross. However, from the end of the sixteenth century, a new meaning emerged, as the map-makers increasingly used the crescent as a heraldic badge of the Ottoman Empire. Finally, one century later, the crescent acquired a new symbolic value, as an “orientalising” decorative detail.

- by Marian Coman
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- History of Cartography, Renaissance Cartography, Ottoman Balkans, Later Crusades

This article analyses the Mercator-Hondius Atlas maps in the context of constructing knowledge of the world. In what follows, we analyse the elements of continental geographies and ocean spaces on the maps presented in the atlas. We take as our starting point the tension between empirical and theoretical knowledge and examine the changes occurring in the ways of representing land and sea on atlas maps which are evident in the Mercator-Hondius Atlas. Consequently, we investigate how the world was represented through information in pictorial and textual form. We argue that the maps in the Mercator-Hondius Atlas make explicit not only the multiple cartographical traditions and the layered nature of atlases as artefacts. They also exemplify the various coexisting functions of the atlas.

- by Johanna Skurnik and +1
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- Cartography, History of the Book, Renaissance Studies, Maritime History

The essay examines the cartographic images and decorations present in the Italian public buildings during the 15th and the 16th century, highlighting the context of the topographic representations of the Venetian dominions proposed by Cristoforo Sorte to the Republic. With the same aim, the essay takes into account the professional story of Egnazio Danti, author of the maps which decorate the “Guardaroba” of Cosimo I in Florence and the Gallery of geographical maps in the Vatican.

"Diktaian" Zeus in eastern Crete, broadening the perspective on ancient myths, modern findings - and how they might improve tourism on the Lasithi plateau. Including the respective interpretation of some Renaissance maps of Crete.
Paper presented at the >>International Symposium “Greek Mythology and Modern Regeneration”<< 31 July-2 August 2015, Psychro, Crete. To be published in Greek as "Αναγέννηση του Δικταίου Δία - μία νέα ματιά στους μύθους του Οροπεδίου Λασιθίου" (Crete University Press)

Among the most dynamic and influential literary texts of the European sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) emerged from a world whose horizons were rapidly changing, and the poem presents itself as a prism through which to examine various links in the chain of interactions that characterized the Mediterranean region from late antiquity, through the medieval period, into early modernity, and beyond. The idea for this volume—and of the project from which it originated—takes its point of departure in Jorge Luis Borges’s celebrated short poem “Ariosto y los Arabes” (1960), which sees the Furioso as the hinge of a past and future literary culture that circulates between Europe and the Middle East. Protagonist of both historical conflict and cultural exchange, the Muslim “Saracen” represents the essential “Other” in Ariosto’s work, but the Orlando furioso also engages with the wider network of linguistic, political, and faith communities that defined the Mediterranean basin of its time. The sixteen contributions assembled here, produced by a diverse group of scholars who work on Europe, Africa, and Asia, consequently encompass several intertwined areas of analysis—philology, religious and social history, cartography, material and figurative arts, and performance—in order to shed new light on the relational systems generated by and illustrative of Ariosto’s great poem.

The paper analyses old geographic maps, created from the 1480s until the mid-18th century, which show the fortress or settlement of Érsomlyó in present-day south Banat. For a long time after it fell under Ottoman rule (1552) and having permanently changed its name into Vršac in the second half of the 16th century, Érsomlyó was still persistently shown in numerous cartographic publications created in Western Europe in this period. Due to erroneous copying of data from old maps and the lack of knowledge about the contemporary geography of European Turkey, including Banat, in the analysed maps Érsomlyó is most often located much more eastward, sometimes on the very border of Banat towards Transylvania and Wallachia. From the second half of the 17th century, particularly at the time of the Great Turkish War, Vršac also began to appear in European geographic maps. However, data from older maps were mechanically transferred to some maps from this period, and Érsomlyó was inscribed in parallel with Vršac.

- by David Salomoni and +1
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- Geography, History of Science, History of Cartography, Spanish History

A study of nautical charts, portolan charts, documentation from Italian archives, and Cosmographia Ptolomei to define the use of the term "Spain" and the evolution of its meaning, as well as the names of kingdoms and regions of the Iberian Peninsula. Detailed analysis, toponymy and characteristics of geographical features, ports and anchorages of the coast of the Kingdom of Granada during the late Middle Ages

- by Raúl González Arévalo
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- Cartography, Medieval History, Medieval Studies, Maritime History
- by Andréa Doré
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- Cartography, Renaissance Cartography, Potosi, Portuguese cartography

(http://www.isem.cnr.it/COLLANA/22/VOLUME%20-%20Raba%20SAMPLE.pdf ) Lo spazio culturale e di pensiero mediterraneo – somma di ‘mondi’ differenti, passati e presenti, in pace o in guerra tra loro, di differenti percezioni della realtà, dei sogni e delle convinzioni profonde di donne e uomini in viaggio, e di idee che rimbalzano da una costa all’altra, da una città all’altra – è al centro di questa opera corale, che testimonia la pregnante attualità della parabola umana e intellettuale di Miguel de Cervantes, restituendo la natura complessa e variegata del contesto storico che ne ispirò e influenzò le azioni, il pensiero e la produzione letteraria. A quattrocento anni dalla morte del padre del Quijote, uomo del suo tempo e scrittore per ogni tempo, la sua esperienza di soldato, di schiavo, di scrittore costituisce una preziosa lente di ingrandimento su molteplici temi e problemi, un movente alla ricerca multidisciplinare capace di rispondere agli interrogativi del presente attraverso lo studio del passato.

- by Michele Maria Rabà
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- Military History, Cartography, Spanish Literature, Gender Studies
- by Eva Oledzka
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- Cultural History, Cultural Studies, Cartography, Renaissance History

The star catalogue contained in the Almagest has been the standard star catalogue for European astronomers and astrologers from the Roman Empire until the end of XVI cen. when the Landgrave of Hessen and Tycho Brahe made new observations of star positions and created new star catalogues. I will analyze the transmission of the Ancient star catalogue and the other star catalogues derived from it between the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Based on these star catalogues, "scientific" celestial maps were created, the first dating from the end of XIV century. I will examine some of these maps preserved in manuscripts, in engravings and on one astronomical instrument.

- by Giancarlo Truffa
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- Iconography, History of Astronomy, Renaissance Cartography, Star Catalogues
- by Gregory McIntosh
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- Philology, Textual Criticism, Manuscript Studies, History of Cartography
- by DIEGO BARATONO
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- Geography, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Historical Geography

This volume taps into the heretofore scarcely leveraged potential offered by a codicological and paleographic approach to reconstruct the history of Ptolemy’s 'Geography'. The author presents many of the work’s manuscripts for the first time, and also provides a number of illuminating insights about the history of the reception of Ptolemy’s 'Geography'.

- by Renate Burri
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- Geography, Historical Geography, Cartography, Classics

This article argues that the computer automation of perspective and rendering in Google Earth has far-reaching consequences for the relationships between representations of the earth, its ecology and cultural responses to climate change. Theorists Erwin Panofsky (1991) and William Ivins (1975) to Lev Manovich (1993) and Don Ihde (2009) have argued that the emergence of Renaissance perspective structured a new relationship between the image and the object: contributing to the initiation of industrialisation and science. Whilst Manovich describes the impacts of Renaissance perspective in terms of its effect upon scientific and industrial structures, Jean Louis Comolli has argued that its advent was both a cause and a consequence of a shift to a humanist social regime. This article argues that Google Earth and its corollaries now complicate the visual and discursive constitution of the cultural and ecological environment. The contemporary computer-generated ‘visual nominalism’ of Google Earth results in a photomapped representation of the earth that can elevate environmental awareness through visualised data sets at the same time as it reduces the earth to a product design–engineered object. As Comolli’s Machines of the Visible becomes Machinima of the Visible, this article asks whether public and scientific calls for a turn towards geoengineering can be viewed through a product design–engineered interface that reconstitutes the social machine as an engineer of the earth object itself.

- by Leon Gurevitch
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- Sociology, Environmental Sociology, Cartography, Game Theory
- by Peter Borschberg
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- History, Geography, Historical Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics

(coord. Zoltán Biedermann, avec des contributions de Patrick Gautier Dalché & Elio Brancaforte), [Université de Téhéran, Centre de recherche et de documentation d’Iran, École pratique des hautes études, Paris], Turnhout : Brepols, 2006,... more

- by DEJANIRAH COUTO
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- Iranian Studies, Renaissance Cartography

A bibliography of 22 articles, books, and reviews from 1916 to 1952 by George E. Nunn. From 1924 until 1952, Nunn published a series of articles, books, and book reviews that established him as one of the leading authorities in English on the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Columbus's influence upon the cartography of the early sixteenth century. The influence of Nunn's contributions in the history of cartography and geographical explorations has continued into the 21st century.

Sources, contexts and circumstances of the writing of An Ode on the Capture of Polatsk by Jan Kochanowski

- by Jakub Niedzwiedz
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- Art, History of Cartography, Renaissance Cartography, Polish Literature

Truly transcultural conference on the history of maps. Delighted to be part of this translation venture. :)

- by 席东 and +1
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- Cartography, Middle East Studies, Middle East History, History of Cartography