Excerpt from an enhanced version of Bartolomeu Velho’s portolan chart of the east coast of North America, ca. 1560. Compare with the original. Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress reports on how its Preservation Research and Testing Division used multispectral imaging to bring out previously illegible place names on a 16th-century portolan chart of the east coast of North America. Initially the PRTD was brought in to confirm that the chart was legit before the Library purchased it (which it did last fall), but the faded iron gall ink in some areas of the map suggested obscured details that further analysis could draw out and place names that could be made legible again. According to the article, this represents the first time the Library has posted an enhanced image of one of their holdings.
This exhibition presents many of the most historically significant manuscript maps from the late medieval and early modern period from the Beinecke Library’s vast collection of maps. It is focused on portolan charts—large, colorful charts that showed the shoreline of the Mediterranean, and were used by sailors to navigate from port to port. These maps were crucial to the expansion of European trade in the fiftieth and sixteenth century. Yale University Library has one of the most significant map collections of this period and owns some unique items not found in any other collection. […]
This exhibition presents maps from several different historical groups and demonstrates how maps functioned to place people within a larger world context. While primarily focusing on European maps, it also includes Middle Eastern and Asian world maps to illustrate common elements and also highlight significant differences. In addition, the exhibition presents some map forgeries and how they were determined to be fakes using scientific and historic analysis.
On that last point, yes, the Vinland Map will be a highlight of the exhibition, as will the Aguiar and Beccari portolan charts, the Martellus world map, and the Abenzara map.
The exhibition runs until 8 January 2023. Lectures will be taking place in the fall.
A 16th-century globe bought for £150 at a Welsh antiques fair has sold at auction for £116,000. It had been expected to fetch £20-30,000. The globe, which dates to the 1550s or 1560s and believed to be by, or derived from work by, François Demongenet, includes sea monsters but not Australia (not yet discovered by Europeans) and is made of paper gores, which makes it both rare and fragile. More from the auction house here. Auction listing. BBC News coverage. (Image: Hansons Auctioneers.)
“Maps depicting Renaissance Tuscany are back on display at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence after being hidden from public view for more than 20 years,” the Guardian reports. “The wall paintings were commissioned in the late 1500s by Ferdinando I de’ Medici after the republic of Florence’s conquering of its rival Siena led to the creation the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and depict the newly unified territory.” It cost €600,000 to restore the three maps drafted by Stefano Bonsignori and painted by Ludovico Buti; the maps are on display in the Uffizi’s maps terrace, also newly renovated and limited to 20 visitors at a time. [MAPS-L]
The Piri Reis map is back on display at the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. Like the Tabula Peutingeriana, it’s only taken out for display at intervals to protect it from the elements. Discovered when the palace was being converted into a museum in the 1920s, the map is the western third of a portolan chart drawn on gazelle skin parchment in 1513 by Ottoman admiral Ahmet Muhiddin Piri (“Reis”—admiral—was his title). It was an expansive compilation of ancient and contemporary sources much like the Waldseemüller map, and is fascinating in its own right; in recent years, though, it became one of the “proofs” of a nutty theory involving ancient civilizations and polar shifting. [Tony Campbell]
Map rom Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, Legatio Babylonica, 1511. JCB Map Collection, John Carter Brown Library.
When an exhibition held in Burgos, Spain celebrating Magellan’s voyage wanted to use the Burgos Cathedral’s copy of Pietro Martire d’Angiera’s 16th-century Legatio Babylonica, which contains the first-ever map of the Caribbean, they discovered that the map had been replaced by a fake. El País reports (in Spanish) that prosecutors have closed the case for lack of information—they don’t even know when it was stolen, much less who stole it.
Out tomorrow from Johns Hopkins University Press, Alida C. Metcalf’s Mapping an Atlantic World, circa 1500 explores how sixteenth-century European maps conceptualized a new, Atlantic-centred world. From the publisher: “Metcalf explains why Renaissance cosmographers first incorporated sailing charts into their maps and began to reject classical models for mapping the world. Combined with the new placement of the Atlantic, the visual imagery on Atlantic maps—which featured decorative compass roses, animals, landscapes, and native peoples—communicated the accessibility of distant places with valuable commodities. Even though individual maps became outdated quickly, Metcalf reveals, new mapmakers copied their imagery, which then repeated on map after map. Individual maps might fall out of date, be lost, discarded, or forgotten, but their geographic and visual design promoted a new way of seeing the world, with an interconnected Atlantic World at its center.” [WMS]
The National Maritime Museum is closed right now, obviously, but in the meantime they’ve given us a virtual version of one of their treasures: a 1541 table globe by Gerardus Mercator.
Teozacualco Map, ca. 1580. 177 × 142 cm. Benson Library, University of Texas at Austin.
Mapping Memory, the exhibition of 16th-century indigenous maps at the University of Texas at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art that I told you about last month, wraps up this weekend. If you need more information to help you decide whether to visit, here are writeups from Atlas Obscura and Hyperallergic.
The Blanton Museum has also released a short video about the exhibition.
For a closer look at the Teozacualco Map (above), see this site.
In case the Talking Maps exhibition (previously) was insufficient cause for you to visit the Bodleian Library in Oxford this year, here’s another. The Sheldon Tapestry Map of Oxfordshire, one of four tapestry maps of English counties commissioned in the late 16th century by Ralph Sheldon, is on display at the Bodleian’s Weston Library. The tapestry is partially complete—intact it would have measured 3.5 × 5.5 metres—and on display for the first time in a century, having gone through a “painstaking” restoration. BBC News, Londonist.
The Oxfordshire tapestry map replaces a display of the Worcestershire tapestry map that had been running for the past four years: both were donated to the Bodleian by Richard Gough in 1809. The Bodleian acquired a sizeable section of the Gloucestershire map in 2007 (it went on display the following year); other parts are in private hands. The fourth tapestry map, of Worcestershire, is the only one that is completely intact and not missing any pieces: it’s owned by the Warwickshire Museum, where it’s on display at the Market Hall Museum.
Unknown artist, Map of Teozacoalco (detail), ca. 1580, tempera on paper, 176×138 cm, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin Libraries.
Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th-century Mexico, a new exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, presents “a selection of maps, known as Mapas de las Relaciones Geográficas, created by Indigenous artists around 1580. These unique documents show some of the visual strategies used by native communities for the endurance and perseverance of their cultures throughout the so-called colonial period and well beyond.” Opened 29 June; runs until 25 August.
Temascaltepec, ca. 1579-1580. Archivo General de Indias. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Gobierno de España.
Texcaltitlán, ca. 1579-1580. Archivo General de Indias. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Gobierno de España.
Tuzantla, ca. 1579-1580. Archivo General de Indias. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Gobierno de España.
Seven maps from late 16th-century Mexico are the focus of a 2018 study by University of Seville researcher Manuel Morato-Moreno (Cartographica article, press release). Part of a series of maps sent back to Spain by local administrators, the maps are hand-drawn, but imitate the style of printed maps: the hatching deliberately evokes woodcuts, while the animals are reminiscent of cartouches, sea monsters and other illustrative elements. But the maps also incorporate Indigenous design elements.
Although all the maps were done in the European style, they also show some characteristics that suggest the influence of indigenous cartography, like footprints on the routes and eddies in the rivers, in which fish can also be seen on the surface of the water. Having these indigenous conventions in coexistence with European cartographic characteristics suggests an effort to adapt the two cartographic styles to each other. “The authors of these maps might have unconsciously mixed European and native conventions,” the researcher adds.
In addition, the experts have identified the influence of another renaissance practice which originated in the portolan charts: drawings of figurative scenes of indigenous people and animals of the region, like deer, rabbits, vultures and armadillos. “Possibly the disproportionate representation of these animals is a way of emphasising the animal species that were characteristic of the region, or, as in the case of the armadillo, highlighting those exotic species that were unknown in Spain.”
Writing for BBC Travel, Madhvi Ramani looks at where Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world, famous for being the first map to name “America,” came to be: the church of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. The collaboration there by Waldseemüller and Martin Ringmann is covered in detail by Toby Lester’s Fourth Part of the World, which Ramani refers to (and I review here), but this take is, well, shorter. [ICA]
Publishing pieces on the Waldseemüller map, often called “America’s birth certificate,” seems to be a thing that happens in early July: Voice of America did it in 2016. Can’t imagine why that might be.
