The Cosmography of Paradise: The Other World from Ancient Mesopotamia to Medieval Europe, edited by Alessandro Scafi

Abstract

From 3 November 2017 to 28 January 2018 the Biblioteca Nacional de España inMadrid hosted one of themost important map exhibitions of recent years. The curators of this exhibition, Professor Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez of the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and Juan Pimentel, a fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), carefully selected and studied more than 200 maps, primarily from the Biblioteca Nacional’s impressive map collection but also from other Spanish institutions such as the National Geographic Institute and the State Meteorological Agency, aswell as Spanish libraries and private collections, to provide an overview of the wealth of cartographic holdings in the Iberian Peninsula. Rather than following a standard monographic or systematic approach, the magnificent exhibition catalogue focuses on the essential function of maps in their relation to the unknown. It includes numerous high-quality images and mirrors the exhibitionʼs structure in six long chapters that span cartographic culture dating back to the early Middle Ages, although with a greater emphasis on maps from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The first chapter looks at the geometric, zoomorphic and human figures that were used to represent the world in these centuries and analyses the solutions adopted to project a spherical surface onto a flat surface. It also addresses the apparently flat images of the Middle Ages and Western Europe’s recovery of Ptolemy’s long forgotten Geography in the fifteenth century, which provided a scientific basis for translating the sphere into a plane representation. The chapter ends with interesting references to the spherical photographic technology known as Little Planet, a stereographic projection characterized by strongly distorted images that allow a panorama to be turned into a planetary photograph, as well as the work titled Terra Forming: Engineering the Sublime, one of the cartographic art projects conceived by Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton of FactumArte. The second chapter provides a fascinating journey through new lands and the associated difficulties of representing unknown territories that seemed immeasurable and inaccessible, as exemplified by Juan de la Cosa’s chart (1500) and other manuscript nautical charts. In fact, on more than one occasion the unknown regions were simply omitted, or were replaced by texts, a device that was employed in Johannes Ruysch’s 1507 mappamundi of the New World. The cartographical medium also made it possible to introduce anthropological and ethnographical elements, a tendency that became increasingly prevalent as European cartographers turned to representing foreign peoples. Foreign peoples is the main topic of the third chapter of the exhibition catalogue, which looks at how human figures and monstrous beings were depicted on, and incorporated into, maps. Whereas on medieval maps they were as important as textual elements, in the modern era they were relegated to the margins. The Age of Discovery spurred the process of cultural amalgamation. Female allegories of the four continents were often represented in the corners of maps or on the frontispieces of Renaissance atlases such as the Theatrum orbis terrarum by Abraham Ortelius (1570). In some instances, cartographers attempted to chart imaginary places, such as Paradise and Hell. Literature also fuelled a ‘cartographic desire’ to locate or illustrate lands of nowhere. Ortelius’s map of Utopia, for example, is based on the description of Thomas More’s ‘no place’ or Utopia (1516). J. R. R. Tolkien’s densely annotated map of Middle Earth, from the Lord of the Rings saga, also fits into this species of mapping fictional worlds. The concept of ‘cartographic silence’, as developed by map historian J. Brian Harley (1932–1991), is the subject of the fifth chapter. The authors zoom in on a few episodes of intentional and unintentional silences caused either by censure or by lack of knowledge or information, which appear on maps as blank spaces that were then used for titles and legends. The last chapter considers other cartographies, such as celestial planispheres and astronomical observations, including, notably a map of Galileo’s observations of the surface of the moon. It also looks at the relationship between cartography and other disciplines such as anatomy, a fusion of different visual languages that led to the creation of magnificent anatomical atlases. The remainder of the chapter touches briefly on other types of maps, such as geological, weather (that is, atmospheric pressure), ethnographic and linguistic maps. Sáenz-López Pérez and Pimentel’s exhibition catalogue weaves a history of maps through multiple episodes and provides the non-expert with the means to approach cartographical documents and reflect on how different devices were used in cartography over the centuries. In addition to supplying new images and iconographies, the authors offer careful and close analyses of the maps and extract a multitude of details from them, allowing readers to understand more fully the multifaceted and ambiguous nature of maps and the various purposes, over time that people have given to cartography.