2nd Year
History&Theory study
Chiao Yang
Abstract Cartography, or mapmaking, has been an integral part of the human history for thousands of years. From cave paintings to ancient maps, through the Age of Exploration, and on into the grand tour, people have created and used maps as essential tools to help them define, explain, and navigate their way through the world. Though numerous maps had been created in all different ways, they might be divided into two categories, one representing the literal topographical information(e.g Turin Papyrus Map) and the other one play a role in constructing symbolic meaning in terms of faith, religion and morality etc ( e.g Babylonian World Map). The former one serves purely as a tool and the later one delivers multiple layer of messages. Tracing the historical pattern of map making, it shows a constant shift of focus between this two categories. With the ancient map from France, Greece, Babylon and Egypt trying hard to depict honestly the geological information, the industry loses its interests in creating representative maps in middle ages, instead using the form to construct mostly speculative images of the world in purpose. However, in renaissance, with the renewed interest in classical works, maps became more like surveys once again, while the discovery of the Americas by Europeans and the subsequent effort to control and divide those lands revived interest in scientific mapping methods. Weirdly, the following Grand Tour in 18 century pushed the old industry one step further in both categories as on one hand tourists require extreme clarity and geological accuracy of maps as they became more reliant on it to navigate themselves, on the other hand they also appreciate the aesthetic value of glamorously giant etching plates disregard of its topographical errors. In this essay, I would focus on analyzing the Iberian cartography between 1400 to 1600 over the age of exploration in comparison with the 100 years mapping progression over the Grand Tour period, trying to spot graphically the underlined difference between them and the reason behind those subtle differentiations.
Part One - The Age of Discovery The Age of Discovery, approximately from the end of the 15th century through the 18th century was an informally defined European historical period in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor in European culture and the beginning of globalization. “European explorers sailed and charted much of the rest of the world” mainly for expanding the surroundings in order to exploit the resources. Two neighbor kingdoms had played the most important role over this period, starting with the Portuguese discoveries of the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores, the coast of Africa, and the discovery of the sea route to India in 1498, their brave fleet under the command of Prince Henry opened up the first page of the new era; and, on behalf of the Crown of Castile, the trans-Atlantic Voyages of Christopher Columbus between 1492 and 1502 triggered a series of expeditions driven by colonialism and mercantilism later on. Many lands previously unknown to Europeans were discovered during this period, which directly caused the exponential demand growth of new maps that depict the up-to-date world. Suddenly, Cartographers found themselves at the best age as the heavy founding of royal family on map making industry provided them with the best paper(or wood panel) and pigment, allowing to produce beautiful giant map-paintings. Though not many of those maps had been preserved properly and became almost unrecognizable now, both the neighbor kingdoms have had one well-known masterpiece being protected well. From the Castile side is The Catalan Atlas produced by the Majorcan cartographic school and from the Portugal side is the Cantino planisphere made by an anonymous cartographer in 1502. Looking at the Castile side again, 'atlas' was the work of a family of Catalonian Jews who worked in Majorca at the end of the 14th century and was commissioned by Charles V of Holy Roman empire (Charles I of Spanish empire). The 'atlas' has subsequently been called "the most complete picture of geographical knowledge as it stood in the later Middle Ages.” About the size of the Catalan Atlas, it is1“originally consisted of six vellum leaves folded down the middle, painted in various colors including gold and silver. The leaves are now cut in half. Each leaf measures approximately 65 × 50 cm, adding to an overall size of 65 × 300 cm.” About the content in the giant map, the first two leaves contain texts in 2“Catalan covering cosmography, astronomy, and astrology.”
These texts are accompanied by illustrations.They also provide information to sailors on tides and how to tell time at night.The four remaining leaves make up the actual map, which shows illustrations of many cities, whose political allegiances are symbolized by a flag. Wavy blue vertical lines are used to symbolize oceans. Place names of important ports are transcribed in red, while others are indicated in black. With half of the 1 Harwood, Jeremy (2006). To the Ends of the Earth: 100 Maps that Changed the World. F+W Publications Inc. 2 Ibid.
text describing Ports, the other 3“explanatory texts catalogue local economic resources, real or supposed.” This map, firstly as an elegant art piece carefully protected in the King’s palace, later set up the solid foundation for Phillip II, the son of Charles V to build up his overseas empire to overcome the financial crisis of the inherited Empire. It is obvious that ‘atlas’ demonstrated a fertile world waiting to be exploited.
Fig. 1 The Catalan Atlas commissioned by King Charles V
Jumping to Portuguese side, as same or more important as Charles V, Prince Harry is the inevitable figure to begin. Though Marco Polo and Jean De Plan Carpin both completed their oversea expenditures in 13 century (1245-1247;1271-1295), this personal behavior driving purely by curiosity or family background didn’t obtain a large influence. It is after 4“Portuguese began systematically exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa from 1418 under the sponsorship of Prince Henry” , that the exploring fashion been ignited and last for two century. Young prince Henry showed interests of exploring the Africa coast because of his awareness of 5“profit possibilities in the Trans-Saharan trade routes”. He wanted to open the trade route of slave and gold with West Africa countries bypassing the traditional route 6“controlled by the Moors of North Africa”. The other two driving forces of his exploration is the willingness to find the mythical Prester John and to find a sea rout to Indie for the lucrative spice trade. Henry the Navigator invested money on voyages and gather the interests of shipowners and stakeholders by guarantee them profit. In his case, its easy to summarize that this travel is always about raw material, trade and money, or in other word, always about exploiting. In a larger scale, the prevailing mercantilism-colonialism theory over that period emphasized the importance of gathering as much raw material as possible, thus the unknown territory (West and south Africa in the Henry’s case) is being treated as and only as the potential storage tank of raw materials waiting to be exploited. With so many new territories, trade routs and possible markets explored day by day under the ruler of Prince Harry, the map Cantino planisphere took the responsibility to record those achievements and later being recognized as “the earliest surviving map showing Portuguese geographic discoveries in the east and west.” The map is particularly notable for7 “portraying a fragmentary record of the Brazilian coast, which the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral explored in 1500, and for depicting the African coast of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a remarkable accuracy and detail.” Also very importantly, the Cantino planisphere is the earliest extant nautical
chart where places are depicted according to their astronomically observed latitudes. However, unlike Catalan Atlas, illustrations in Cantino planisphere are few and way out of scale. Two cities are grandly depicted - Venice and Jerusalem. Other illustrations include a lion-shaped mountain representing the Sierra Leone mountain range, the Alexandria lighthouse, the mythical Mountains of the Moon in central Africa, and either the Table Mountain or Drakensberg range in South Africa. Comparing to Catalan Atlas, it is more technical in terms of the geographical information and coastal line depiction, but more romantic in terms of representing cities.
3 Max von Habsburg, Spain in the Age of Discovery, 1469–1598 Student Book, Cambridge University Press 4 World Regions in Global Context, People, Places, and Environments, P47, CTI Reviews 5 Wikipedia Link, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery 6 Ibid. 7 Evelyn Edson, The World Map, 1300-1505: The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation, P286, John Hopkins University Press
Fig. 2 The Cantino planisphere by autonomous cartographer
It is interesting to mention that the maps in Castile Empire were one of the privileged commodities that only those with certain social status able to buy, for others they were mythical secrets. But in Portugal, the maps were updated to the public through the exploration period and could be bought and used as decorative for a normal family. In this sense, Portuguese not only pioneered the age of discovery but also lead the fashion trend of public use of maps. As long as maps were no longer expensive and mythical, it became the necessities of normal travelers, and the map making industry was then not dependent on the taste of King anymore but tuned to accommodate the demands of increasingly significant tourists group. Part Two - The grand tour 18 century witnessed a very new type of travel, which later developed into the famous tourism industry of today, the grand tour. Generally speaking, it is about social young elites in Great Britain, who had incredible amount of knowledge of the history and cultural context of France and Italy, began to take advantages of the advanced road system and the new peace around their itinerary, self-guided to French and Italian cities such as Paris and Rome which had 8“occupied a very particular but a considerably important place in the British imagination.” Its ironic that Richard Lassels has commented that Grand tour has been 9“ascribed particular value in the construction of elite, masculine identity.” as 10“ the endurance required for early rising, hunger and long hours in the saddle, ensured that the youth was separated from the comfort and ease of home……and developed the fortitude to withstand personal discomfort and danger with courage and without complaint.” However in my opinion, with very
specific destinations and designed itineraries in mind before departing, the Grand tour loses the uncertainty and the randomness of conventional travel. With the help of blooming publications in terms of guidebooks, etching maps and literature, the elite group were well equipped with tons of information and found it comfortable to navigate themselves through the alien territory two thousands miles away from their British home.
Taking Rome as an example, the city which was considered by most of the elite tourists the final destination, it was a urban complex with 11“the city walls’ circumference, regularly measured by visiting British, extended for around fifteen miles.” Not only the daunting scale of the city but also the nameless, intertwined streets and buildings supposed to give the first time tourists a hard time. Also, the difficulty of visiting the city was upgraded by the fact that beyond the inhabited area of the modern city, there were12 “the vast expanses of the 8 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and Grand tour, the British in Italy, c. 1690-1820, Introduction, Cambridge University Press 9 Richard Lassels, the voyage of Italy, preface 10 Ibid. 11 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and Grand tour, the British in Italy, c. 1690-1820, P114, Cambridge University Press 12 Ibid.
disabatio, where gardens, vineyards, grazing and wasteland…littered with ruins” and most of them was “illegible or unrecognisable.” However, their were multiple local groups tried to lend a hand to this situation meanwhile
making some profits.
Fig. 3 prospetto dell’alma citta di roma, Guseppe Vasi, 3′-4″ x 9′-0″, etching on twelve joined sheets of laid paper
Firstly, a new career had been generated by the huge demand on guidance of British tourists, which we later called cicerone. They were group of local people who had intensively developed their own knowledge on surroundings(especially antiquities in this case) in order to squish themselves into the lucrative and new market. They sell themselves not as a tour guide but more in a role of teacher, and they developed course of antiquities, which in the case James Byres or Colin Morison 13“was said to be twenty sequins” . This was not a small number as many tourists only spend that much on decent accommodation for one month. Although the price was daunting, most of the British elite tend to buy such services over the first half of grand tour period as 14“but upon mature consideration realized it was necessary to employ one to see the best things and most efficiently.” Their guidance emphasized discrimination rather than comprehensiveness as only antiquities relating to classic literature or important historical events would be included in their course, and those ancient walls and columns without astonishing background stories were mostly ignored. This implicate that the value of a piece of antiquity is proportional to its historical moments, and if as a pure aesthetic artifact itself they were of no importance in the eyes of grand tour tourists. In other words, the antiquities served as the15 “exemplification of knowledge”.
The authorities of the cicerone group had later been challenged as some of those antiquaries, such as George Ayscough, 16“gorged themeselves at their employers’ table and took them to all sorts of spurious antiquities in order to prolong their employment.” Those unreliable cicerone lost their authority and destroyed the entire career but at the same time lead to the flourishing of a more economical strategy, which “rely on the valet de place to guide one around.” In this way they only need to cost three to four pauls a day for the valet’s hire plus the price of a guidebook. Guidebook now took the “course” responsibility to give meanings and descriptions to the important antiquities. Many cartographers and architects with ability to draw was involved in this new industry and several important figures in the group such as Vasi, Magnan, Venuti and Manazzale, has published guidebooks that 17“divided the city up into giornate of sightseeing, with detailed information on what to view for each subsection.” and gained huge popularity. However the success of such guidebooks were also highly dependent on their aesthetic and collection value. For example, the ‘Rome in 10 books’ by Giuseppe Vasi has over 120 etching plates inside with each one depicting a specific antiquity scattered all over the Rome city. These plates not only help English speaking visitors to understand the antiquity but also can be delicate gifts for someone back England. Richard colt hoard in his book Hints to travelers in Italy mentioned that he
13 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and Grand tour, the British in Italy, c. 1690-1820, P125, Cambridge University Press 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. p126 17 Ibid. p128
18“had
no concept of using a map to find one’s way in a particular place” and in his view, 19“maps were principally a medium for the representation of antiquarian knowledge- rather than a means of articulating modern urban space.” Vasi
himself after having completed his ten books of etchings, wrote a guide for visiting Rome in eight days and published in1765. In 1781 he completed his work with a Map of Rome with over 300 interesting points popping up and could be considered as the very origin of the bird eye grand city view that colonize the top floor of every skyscrapers now.
Despite the aesthetic and collection value of Vasi’s “map”, there were travelers complaining about the utility of those drawings as they fail to give enough details about the directions and locations. Responding to such complaints, Dominique Magnan’s Guide to Rome had been published in 1778 with street plans so that visitors might conveniently see all that interested them in Rome, and also in this volume he radically provided on how to get from one sight to the next implied the complementary use of a map. Following this trend, J.Salmon’s English version of Vasi, an historical description of Ancient and modern Rome, published in 1800, contained the same street plans to accompany each section and as such was the first English language guide to include maps in this way. English guides also began to assume that the reader would be viewing Rome independently, rather than under the guidance of a cicerone, and provided increasing amounts of information on the logistics of sightseeing and in doing so acquired more of the semblance of modern guidebooks. Street names, distances and directions were provided in the later guidebooks, which was as Rosemary Sweet summarized, 20“creating a verbal spatial framework for the city which would have been unnecessary for an earlier generation of travelers who relied upon being shown around a city.”
Over this period of Grand Tour, only Joseph Forsyth, who was in Rome in 1802, questioned those increasingly popular volumes and commended them as21 “superficial and incoherent, suitable only for the visitor with little time to spend.” I would argue that the main reason for him to give this commend is the redundant itineraries and detailed informations provided in those volumes, for example, in Vasi’s Guides for Visitng Rome in Eight Days, each day is regulated and well-planned, thus in a way lack of possible randomness and magical encounter that the earlier generation of British elites might be looking for. Nevertheless, the main stream could not be bothered and despite the designed routs, they also began to offered advice on such matters as fees, tips and opening hours in the thick guidebook. Using a guidebook, following directions and consulting a map altered the way in which the city was understood: it made the spatial relationship between different buildings more explicit and the routes to be travelled more significant and memorable. Tourist’s inclination on later guidebook also implied that they prefer to view Rome 22“as an organic entity, a product of historical changes rather than simply a collection of isolated monuments.”
18 Richard colt hoard, Hints to travelers in Italy, 1793 19 Ibid. 20 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and Grand tour, the British in Italy, c. 1690-1820, P135, Cambridge University Press 21 Ibid. p136 22 Ibid. p136