The Pond Seeker

Jefferson taken out of context

2010-11-26T11:44:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I was watching the Ken Burns documentary on Thomas Jefferson. Later in the presentation there was a bit on Jefferson's postwar politics, including his support for other revolutions. The French Revolution made many Americans nervous, but he seemed to love it. Then I heard a very familiar quote in a context so unexpected that it left me gobsmacked.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots...

I've seen this quote many times, and always for one purpose: to evoke praise for U.S. soldiers fighting in foreign wars. I didn't know who said it, or why. I nearly jumped out of my chair when I found out that it referred to Shays' Rebellion. Thomas Jefferson wrote those words to support a domestic tax riot! If there's a better example of a radical populist notion being used exclusively by conservative hawks, I'm not aware of it.

Page 241 of Thomas Jefferson: an intimate history by Fawn McKay Brodie (which, hopefully, you can see below) gives the entire quote along with some details on Jefferson's reaction to the French Revolution. It's quite an eye-opener.

The Milkmaid at the Met

2009-10-10T19:19:00.032-04:00

When I visited the Rijksmuseum in 2006, Vermeer's "The Milkmaid" entranced me: I kept walking in close to see the intriguing pointillist bits, backing up again, standing close again, and backing up once more to admire the way those points resolved themselves into a unique and vivid texture. Then I wandered off with my mind pleasantly blown, only to come back a few minutes later for another iteration. I never expected to see it again without visiting Amsterdam.

When I got the e-mail from the Met about a month ago I was so excited that I was almost jumping out of my chair. I was going to get to see her again - in New York! Then I realized that Grace's parents, who would be visiting on Columbus Day weekend, would probably love to see it with me. I was right. We went to see the exhibit today, and my head is fit to bursting. As always, I don't presume to know that my assertions about what I see reflect reality. The following are just my strong reactions.

In 2006 I spent a long time pondering "The Milkmaid" but gave very little thought to its symbolism, context or implications. Marveling at the technique was more than enough for me. I was taken with Vermeer's little dots that, once I stepped away, composed a texture that nearly leaped off the canvas. That construction of texture reminded me of nothing so much as a field of ragged robin. Every once in a while during the summer I'll be riding around and I'll glance out my window and say "that's ragged robin". Each flower is too far away for me to see, and its color and overall appearance at that distance is indistinguishable from many other flowers. Yet my eye can distinguish the overall texture created by the aggregation of blooms of that particular configuration.

After taking a look at the Wikipedia entry for "The Milkmaid" and its image page, make sure you click on the full-sized version and pan around. Look at the bread especially, and then zoom back out. You'll see what I mean about the pointillist technique.

Today, just seconds after getting another look at "The Milkmaid", I was brimming over with gratitude and joy at the privilege of standing in front of that canvas again. The contrast between the subtle gradations of curve and shading on her dress, and the way the rough texture of the bread pops out of the canvas, is endlessly captivating. As it turned out, I'd barely begun to appreciate this piece. But before my big revelation, I had one or two others to get to.

I had seen "Woman With a Water Jug" back in January of last year at the "Age of Rembrandt" exhibit at the Met. Again, at the time I thought of little but the technique. But today I saw something new: she is a conduit.

Take a look at the Wikipedia page, its image page and the full-sized image. Look at how she grasps the window with one hand, and the pitcher with the other. Look at the way the light flows through her, pools in the bowl, and spills over into the Turkish rug. The chivalric imagery is almost staggering: the atmosphere is guazy and ethereal, and with her head covering she is untouchable. In this vision, Dutchmen could brave every ocean and return with the world's riches, but only the Dutchwoman could imbue them with meaning. Her society needed her there.

The next thing that caught my interest was the map in "Woman With a Lute". Check out the Wikipedia page, the image page, and the full-sized image. Note that the map on the wall in "Woman With a Water Jug" was a relatively innocuous map of Zeeland. The map behind the smiling woman with her lute, however, is one of Europe, and it's swarming with ships. Vermeer finished this painting four years before the Dutch raid on the Medway, during a time when English paranoia over Dutch activity was something like American anti-Soviet paranoia of the 1950s. Pepys conveyed this vividly in his conclusion to his diary entry from August 27, 1664.

All the newes this day is, that the Dutch are, with twenty-two sayle of ships of warr, crewsing up and down about Ostend; at which we are alarmed. My Lord Sandwich is come back into the Downes with only eight sayle, which is or may be a prey to the Dutch, if they knew our weakness and inability to set out any more speedily.

I think the woman is composing a love song to a man out there on one of those ships - ships of which anyone in Vermeer's town of Delft would have been acutely aware.

I gravitated back to "The Milkmaid"; I had a lot more admiring to do. As I made several more cycles from the back of the crowd to the front, I thought more and more about the blue jug. The material beneath the cobalt blue glaze didn't look white, which made me suspect that it was a very poor, locally produced imitation of true China. As I'd just learned by reading Vermeer's Hat, by 1657 anyone who was anyone in Delft would have had imported blue and white China. Then I noticed a display case I'd walked by a number of times without noticing. It turned out to be the key that opened up the painting for me.

There behind the glass were contemporary examples of the objects in the painting. They could very well have been fired in the same kilns, and perhaps in the same batches, as the ones Vermeer painted. Seeing the grey stoneware jug with its thick glaze of imported cobalt forming a literal veneer of culture, I knew I was right: every object in the painting is of the cheapest possible variety. Suddenly a fact that had eluded me snapped into place: "The Milkmaid" portrays a household that is among the poorest of the poor.

I returned to the painting and saw its subject in a new light; now the roughness and ruddiness of her face made more sense. She has a lot of strength, this woman - too much strength to be defeated by her circumstances. She's not worn out. But I was able to see more clearly that she is careworn. Then, as my eye went back over the picture with this new information, it settled on a detail that had been nagging at me, and it all fell into place.

Look at the blotch on the section of bare wall to the right of her head. It's not just a blotch. It's a nail hole.

They had to sell their map.

Did the family of the house fall on hard times because of an unwise business venture? Was the husband an aspiring merchant whose ships were lost to Cromwell's aggressive attempts to control the Channel trade? It's fun to speculate, but all I can say for a fact is that there was something hanging there, and now it's gone.

Think of the maps on the walls in the other Vermeer paintings. They represented the power of the Dutch trading empire and evoked images of the places from which the Dutch middle class got its upward mobility. Light comes in through the window, and shows us a map which itself is a window to the outside world. The woman may be permanently installed in her domestic function, but she is an integral part of that world-wide network of trade, and well should her dreams fly along the rhumb lines of the map on her wall. But the milkmaid... her map is gone.

Like the woman with the water jug, the milkmaid takes radiant energy and redirects it, imbuing mundane objects with significance and life. Unlike that other woman, though, there is nothing ethereal about the milkmaid. She is achingly real, and only the real surrounds her. The map that once gave her a window to the greater world is gone. Look at that wall, with its solitary nail and the inconspicuous nail holes that you only notice after Vermeer has drawn your eye to the big one. Now step back and look at the painting again. Isn't that the saddest wall you've ever seen?

After seeing the real examples of the objects in the painting, and then noticing the nail hole, I'm seeing "The Milkmaid" with new eyes. As in "Woman With a Water Jug", the chivalric meaning assigned to the domestic female is weighty enough to make my knees hurt. And at the same time Vermeer is taking the viewer on an artistic slumming tour. He's brought a romanticized vision of the lower class to life and beyond: the viewer gets to be a condescending voyeur in the milkmaid's quaint and hyper-saturated reality. The occupants of the house may have had to sell their map, and they may suffer the indignity of serving from the poorest implements, but they have everything they need: nourishment, as from the bread and milk on the table; comfort, as from the foot-warmer on the floor; homely culture, as portrayed on the ceramic tile on the baseboard; love, as personified by the Cupid on one of those tiles; and sex, which our sturdy subject seems to promise. The painting invited the viewer to gaze with benevolence upon this prototypical noble savage.

And standing behind it all is a blank wall that shrieks with its silence. In other Vermeer paintings, maps speak volumes: they testify to the Dutch skill in making the maps; they tell stories about the people teeming onto wharves on the other side of the world to load their carefully-packed products into Dutch ships; and they speak romantically of the female subject's vital place in that web. The wall behind the milkmaid, not just empty but emptied, transforms the scene into a tragedy of Shakespearean grandeur. The greater world into which she once was tied has been taken away. She still fills her world with nobility, but that world now stops at the nail holes on the wall.

After I posted this entry I mentioned it to my friend "J" in Amsterdam. Our conversation is worth recounting here.

Nice thinking Hugh.

And indeed the milkmaid is not upper or even middle class, like the idle, lute playing woman is. But you should note that both the lute player and the woman with the water jug are in the parlour, the family's living & receiving room. The milkmaid however is in a kitchen in the basement (look at the light falling down through the window!), with a tiled floor. The rather pricey Delft blue tiles along the foot of the wall are there to protect it when the floor is (daily!) scrubbed with water, naval style.

Maps hung in parlours, hallways, offices and such, not in kitchens. They were popular wall decorations, cheaper then paintings, but more expensive then most prints aka etchings.

Maybe the milkmaid is in her own kitchen, but probably in that of a middle class family. Even rich Dutchmen would not provide expensive tools for use in their kitchens, which explains the basic quality of the jugs and such. A poor family's kitchen would be darker, damper, lower and without even such tools and without the decorated tiles along the wall's bottom.

So the general assumption is that she is a servant, preparing breakfast: the milk will be cooked to make porridge I guess.

However looking at her dress and head gear the girl with the water jug IMHO also is a servant. The water pitcher is silver and stands in a large silver bowl. After their dinner which still was eaten with a knife but without a fork, guests at the table would wash their greasy hands under water poured by a servant using just such jugs and bowls, the bowl for catching the water. So the silver water jug undoubtedly is in a wealthy household, the milkmaid me be the only servant in a lower middle class family like shopkeeper or of some ship's officer.

Thanks for the detailed response.

Even while I was having my thoughts about "The Milkmaid", that flaw in my logic nagged at me: that she was a servant in a back room, and therefore might be expected to use the cheapest of cookware. Ah well. Ideas are like money, yes? Easy come, easy go.

And yet I can't help but think that I shouldn't throw out my whole thesis. I should not expect to see a map behind the milkmaid. But now that I have noticed those nail holes, they seem conspicuous. It seems clear that Vermeer wanted to draw the viewer's attention to them. To put it another way: now that I've seen them, I can't unsee them. From a purely compositional standpoint, they seem like a hidden focus of the painting.

Where there is a map on a wall in a Vermeer, that map is significant. Is not the conspicuous absence of the map in "The Milkmaid" also significant? Perhaps Vermeer is simply pointing out that the milkmaid is disconnected from the broader world?

The main thing that makes me wonder about this is that the nail holes seem to form a rectangle. There was something hanging there at one point, although of course it could have been anything.

You are right re the 'hidden focus'. There is nothing accidental in Vermeer's compositions and specialists have mathematically analysed his dimensions and perspectives: everything always is in place.
However the nail may have been used to hang her apron.

Another thing is that it was typical for many painters in our Golden Age to depict common people as such: a milkmaid, a peasant, a market woman, a butcher or baker. Before this was done nowhere, the commoners were at best seen in the background, a crowd watching something more important like a crucifixion or a nobleman doing something and such. In The Netherlands art for a first became 'democratic', also because the market for art did no longer consist of princes, nobles and the church but of urban citizens, wealthy and just doing well: a kind of proto-middle class came up and bought paintings. It has been estimated that between 1600-1700 some 5 or 6 million paintings were made in this country and about 1,000,000 of those survive, one at my wall!

I'm anxious to hear more thoughts on the subject.

Hijacking Ecclesiastes

2008-12-21T17:08:00.009-05:00

This is a continuation of my investigation of Carissimi's "Vanitas vanitatum II". You may want to read the previous two entries first.

Here's the translation of the verses near the end of the piece that seemed incongruous.

Scepters, crowns, power,
pomp, triumphs, victories,
honors, ornament, glories,
toys, delights,
ostentation, riches;
all is vanity and shadow.

Where are the famous rulers
that gave laws to the world?
Where the leaders of the people,
the founders of cities?
They are dust and ashes.

Where are the seven wise men,
and the followers of science,
where the arguing rhetoricians,
where are the expert artificers?
They are dust and ashes.

Where are the strong giants,
the preeminent ones,
where are the victorious warriors
who defeated the barbarians?
They are dust and ashes.

Where are the generations of heroes,
where the vast masses of cities,
where is Athens, where Carthage,
and the face of ancient Thebes?
Only their names remain.

Where are the glories of dictators,
where the victories of magistrates,
where the triumphant laurels,
where the immortal dignity
of Roman honors?
Only their names remain.

Scratching my head about why a text written sometime around the height of the Roman Empire would include rhetoric about the futility of long-vanished Roman honors, I went to Wikipedia for more information about Ecclesiastes. According to the article, historians tend to date Ecclesiastes from about 250 BC, give or take a century. It's also a book of the Hebrew Bible, which might have explained the disdain for Roman honors. However, it didn't explain the sense of looking back on a long-dead empire, like the narrator of "Ozymandias".

I decided it was high time I up and read the bloody thing, so I followed the link to the text of Ecclesiastes. Coincidentally, at about this time Karl e-mailed everyone in Continuo Collective his translation of the Vanitas Vanitatum II text from the Book of Ecclesiastes. Both sources told me the same thing: Ecclesiastes doesn't mention Roman honors!

As I read Ecclesiastes I became more and more fascinated at the differences between it and Vanitas Vanitatum II. Beyond Carissimi's inclusion of a theme that wasn't in the biblical text, there's a conspicuous difference in tone. Ecclesiastes is a highly personal, deeply introspective piece; it's the story of a man who's spent his life's vigor striving for earthly reward, only to find that, for all the good it did him, he might never have lifted a finger. Carissimi's additions, on the other hand, are bombastic screeds against a mode of behavior embodied by iconic men of power. Reading Vanitas Vanitatum II alongside its source material makes it look like the work of some eccentric botanist: a flowering cactus grafed onto an apple tree.

Once I noticed Carissimi's jarring shift in both content and tone I got much more curious about his intent. Clearly he was taking the engine of Ecclesiastes and using it to power an anti-classicism machine. It seemed reasonable to think that his employer was sick of hearing about ancient Rome, which made me think of the "Virtual Tourist" exhibit that I wrote about on March 9th and 12th.

The "Virtual Tourist" exhibit illustrated a European fascination with classical Rome during the late sixteenth century. Carissimi wrote his music sometime during the third quarter of the seventeenth century, a period I know little about except for the diary of Samuel Pepys. If, after reading about Carissimi's life and the music of the period, I find that there was another popular resurgence of classicism during Carissimi's lifetime, then I'll have some evidence to back up my hypothesis about his motivations.

Stay tuned.

Vanity gives way to fun and curiosity

2008-10-24T19:22:00.011-04:00

Bear with me here. I'm setting the scene for my investigation into the context of Carissimi's "Vanitas Vanitatum II".

At the beginning of the third rehearsal Pat spoke about the text of the vanitas pieces. It seemed to him that Carissimi had used the absolute worst aspects of Ecclesiastes to scare money out of people and into the collection plates. He was very curious to know the circumstances surrounding the writing of the music but, since Carissimi's details are lost to history, he wasn't sure if we could ever find the information. Of course I jumped on the opportunity to do some digging and, with the help of JSTOR, found this article from the April, 1981 issue of Music and Letters. It indicates that not only can't we reliably date Carissimi's music, but we don't even know whether he or one of his students wrote the vanitas pieces!

Speaking of not knowing things... boy, was I in for it. On the weekend before the fourth rehearsal I found out I had to sing a solo in Carissimi's "Vanitas Vanitatum II". I was apprehensive and excited at my first vocal solo in... gosh, I hate it when I do the math and my brain spits out "a decade". Anyway. During the next few days I used every spare moment to practice, using keyboards to help me find the notes. I heard the intervals and progressions; I thought I had the part down. Then I got up there on Tuesday night and most egregiously befouled the proverbial bed. I couldn't hear my part at all - I was feeling around for my notes like a ninth grade choral student sight-reading a part. I felt utterly humiliated, and I knew I had only myself to blame: I'd walked in there looking forward to impressing everyone on my very first attempt at a solo. Pride goeth before a fall, and I knew that my fall was obscenely apropos of the music we were singing: "Vanity! All is vanity!"

During the next week I despaired and sweated. I didn't want to go back to a keyboard because that's part of what messed me up in the first place: the early music we're singing is a half tone off from the modern tones, so I'd practiced the wrong notes. I had no opportunity to run through it with Grace so I resolved myself to muddling through as best I could during the next practice, hopefully figuring out my part a little better by listening to the instruments. Then I thought back to my choral experiences back in the early nineties and realized I'd been coming at Continuo Collective all wrong. When I think back to the Oneida Area Civic Chorale I don't think of how I wowed anyone with my solo from "Oklahoma". I think of how tingly it made me feel to come to know Mendelssohn's "Elijah" intimately, from the inside - of hearing my voice interact with all the other voices in order to build a piece of music. Feeling myself as a cog meshing with other cogs, and hearing us forming something bigger than ourselves, was one of the most sublime experiences I've ever had. Once I remembered this, everything changed. I walked into Continuo Collective last Tuesday night wanting not to wow anyone, but to understand the music and hopefully improve my contribution to it.

I had a few minutes before practice to go through my parts with three of the continuo players. That, along with my changed attitude, made all the difference. I began hearing what my part was doing in relation to the music, and my performance improved. More importantly to the historical discussion, though, I discovered of a pair of mistakes I'd been making at the end of my solo where I demand to know "Where the immortal dignity of Roman honors?" In addition to my tendency to go up a step instead of staying put on the last note, Grant pointed out that I wasn't holding some of the notes long enough. I had been singing the end of the line as though it ended like similar lines earlier in the piece: with an ascending, triumphant exclamation point. But instead my solo called for me to extend the second syllable of the word "honorium" and then descend one step for the last two syllables. This changed the character of the solo entirely for me. Before I'd seen it as a scornfully triumphant excoriation of Roman-style honors. Now it felt wistful as though the singer, acknowledging the perceived glory of ancient Rome, should hold out his hand longingly to an apparition fading into the mist. Wow! That's really neat!

Uh...

Hold on.

It's all well and good to think of someone from the seventeenth century longing for ancient Rome, but the text of this music is from Ecclesiastes. When Ecclesiastes was written, no one was longing for ancient Rome because Rome was just hitting its stride! So what was going on here?

Stay tuned.

Vanitas

2008-10-22T22:29:00.009-04:00

Grace and I are singing in Continuo Collective this semester. Grace has spent a number of seasons in the group but it's my first time. Thankfully some of the singing I did years ago was in Latin, otherwise I'd feel utterly overwhelmed. As it is, between the Italian enunciation and the complex chords I feel like I've thrown myself into the deep end of the pool. I'm glad I joined, though, and particularly excited to be a part of the Vanitas Project.

During our first rehearsal we looked at some good examples of vanitas paintings. One of them was Holbein's "Ambassadors", which I wrote about in a February entry. I was excited that we were working on something I actually knew a bit about; between my visit to Paris and Amsterdam, my readings on sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch history, and my visit to the "Age of Rembrandt" exhibit at the Met, I felt like I had a decent handle on the concept.

Tony made the point that, though vanitas art denounces worldly pursuits, the people who commissioned that art were most likely quite attached to those pursuits. I couldn't agree more; for me, Dutch still life painting is all about the paradox - not to say hypocrisy. Remember, those artists were hired by rich, powerful Dutch merchants to depict a panoply of shapes, transparencies and textures; this showcased not only the artists' talent but also the sundry goods that the patron imported from the far reaches of the world. The Dutch had become the preeminent merchants on the planet, and speaking of the planet... why, they just so happened to have a freshly printed set of atlases by Blaeu. Expensive, but worth it! They were bloody satisfied with themselves, and it showed in those paintings that gave great lip service to the renunciation of worldly pursuits.

If I'm overstating the hypocrisy angle it's because I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror and when I think of the hypocrisy of chivalry - a psychological construct that allowed for the ruination of the very people that it purported to protect - it reminds me of the suspiciously pornographic contradictions at the core of vanitas painting. This all goes to explain why, as I worked on my solo in Carissimi's "Vanitas Vanitatum II", I got to thinking - and researching - more and more about his purpose in composing it.

Stay tuned.

The Postmodern Prometheus

2008-06-25T11:01:00.000-04:00

In the recent movie Iron Man Jeff Bridges' character, industrialist Obadiah Stane, has to deal with an epiphany. He's particularly unhappy because it's a big shiny epiphany that fills the room, and it's not his. Before long Stane will also get big and shiny, and demolish the room. But we don't know that yet.

Tony Stark has just returned from Afghanistan like a walking Joseph Campbell lecture. He's watched American soldiers killed by his own weapons. With Stark Industries shrapnel in his chest, he's almost died by his own design. Under the noses of his captors he's built more machines: a miraculous power source, a device to stabilize the shrapnel, and finally a suit of powered combat armor that he uses to break free. Stark has watched his creativity refracted, seen all the colors: death, salvation and everything in between. He's been burned, and doesn't want to bring humanity any more fire. At his word, Stark Enterprises has stopped producing weapons.

Tony's old pal Obadiah is not pleased - and Jeff Bridges does a superlative job here playing a slimy smooth operator. He pretends to have Tony's best interests in mind while trying to bring him back around to his old devil-may-care weaponsmith self. Throughout this performance Stane masks his distress almost perfectly, only losing his cool once. In the midst of his words sliding off Stark's newfound moral exterior, Stane exclaims "We're ironmongers, Tony!"

This caught my attention. I'd always assumed that "Iron Monger", Stane's name for his version of the Iron Man armor, was a made-up word. In the eighties, when Stane appeared in the comic book, it seemed natural to me that a comic book writer would take the Shakespearian word "fishmonger" and tweak it to create a corrupt-sounding version of "Iron Man". But here in the movie Stane was using the word before he even knew about Stark's armor. It seemed to imply that "ironmonger" was not a new construction, so I looked it up. Sure enough, it's been a common enough word for at least six centuries. The word appears eight times in the diary of Samuel Pepys.

October 23, 1660
...She also took me to her
lodging at an Ironmonger's in King Street, which was but very poor...

November 25, 1662
...Up and to the office all the morning, and at noon with the rest, by Mr. Holy, the ironmonger's invitation, to the Dolphin, to a venison pasty, very good, and rare at this time of the year...

November 28, 1662
...Up and to Ironmongers' Hall by ten o'clock to the funeral of Sir Richard Stayner. Here we were, all the officers of the Navy, and my Lord Sandwich, who did discourse with us about the fishery...

September 7, 1663
...The play being done, I stole from him and hied home, buying several things at the ironmonger's--dogs, tongs, and shovels--for my wife's closett and the rest of my house, and so home, and thence to my office awhile, and so home to supper and to bed.

October 27, 1664
Up and to the office, where all the morning busy. At noon, Sir G. Carteret, Sir J. Minnes, Sir W. Batten, Sir W. Pen, and myself, were treated at the Dolphin by Mr. Foly, the ironmonger, where a good plain dinner...

May 21, 1667
...Mr. Harper at Deptford did himself tell her that my Lord hath had of Foly, the ironmonger, L50 worth in locks and keys for his house...

July 20, 1668
...and so home, and took occasion to buy a rest for my espinette at the ironmonger's by Holborn Conduit...

February 6, 1669
...Thence home, and just at Holborn Conduit the bolt broke, that holds the fore-wheels to the perch, and so the horses went away with them, and left the coachman and us; but being near our coachmaker's, and we staying in a little ironmonger's shop, we were presently supplied with another, and so home, and there to my letters at the office, and so to supper and to bed.

When I think of Pepys's ironmongers I get an impression of skilled craftsman; their cleverness doesn't earn them any particular standing in society, but neither does it bear any moral attachments. I thought this was very interesting, because the word perfectly embodies Stane's side of the moral gulf between him and Stark. If Pepys had beaten his wife with the espinette rest, would the ironmonger at Holborn Conduit be responsible? The notion is laughable. Stane feels the same way about his weapons: he just makes tools that his clients find useful - he's not responsible for what people do with them after they leave the warehouse. Stark used to feel similarly, but not any more.

Thoughts of moral accountability reminded me of Plato's Republic, which I've been listening to lately. In it the character of Glaucon recounts the legend of Gyges, who discovered a ring that gave him the power to become invisible. Glaucon claims that no man could resist the temptation to abuse such a power, and goes on to assert that all attempts to live a just life are merely part of a selfish social contract - if people could get away with injustice with no fear of punishment, they would. The more I thought of this, the more it seemed like an inversion of Tony Stark's epiphany. Gyges stumbles upon an opportunity for power without accountability, and he lacks the strength to resist. Contrast that with Stark's transfiguration, which gives him both the impetus for his creative act and the strength not to abuse his creation.

I was thinking about moral accountability for one's creations, so I suppose it was inevitable that I'd come around to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This line of thought got more interesting when I thought of the full title: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. There's been a lot written over the centuries about how Shelley's book was the first science fiction story, and about its core theme of the moral ambiguity of technology - which is ultimately beyond the control of the creator. In that sense, Iron Man could not be a more direct descendent of Shelly's novel. Stark is a Prometheus forever straining toward two opposing asymptotes: improving the human condition through technology, and maintaining control over technology.

This fascinating article about Luddite influence in Frankenstein puts Shelley's novel in a historical context. With its emphasis on the concept that Luddites were not against technology, but rather against implementing it in ways that made life worse for people, it also brings me back around to Tony Stark. Another man might have seen the ends for which his weapons were used and sworn off technology. Not Stark. He reacts to his epiphany not only with a surge of fresh creativity, but by imposing moral boundaries on his creations. He is a consummate control freak. That's where his alcoholism comes from, and it's what makes him a hero for an age in which we keep discovering how little we can control. Like Frankenstein, Stark keeps creating. Like Frankenstein, he eventually comes to be defined by his endless chase after his unbound creations.

Along with thoughts of Shelley, my musings brought me back to an association I had when I first listened to The Republic. Anyone who's read Tolkien will understand the reaction I had to hearing about the ring of Gyges. I had been drifting a bit, listening to the narrative as I walked. But when Glaucon started talking about a gold ring whose power to make the wearer invisible would tempt even the most virtuous man, little exclamation points appeared over my head as I thought of the One Ring.

I always feel embarrassed when I discover that an idea I heard from a modern author is actually thousands of years old. I respond to that embarrassment by examining how the idea flowed from the distant source to the twentieth century spigot. I wondered if Tolkien got his idea from Plato, and then a more interesting question came to mind: Do the differences between Plato's story and Tolkien's reflect an evolution of human morality?

At first I thought of how the ring of Gyges was utterly irresistible, and of how The Lord of the Rings gets a lot of its dramatic tension from the One Ring being not quite irresistible. A very few mortals could be a Ring-bearer, and I thought this crucial difference represented a conceptual shift over the millennia. Perhaps people, at least in their imaginings of themselves, had gotten better.

Now listen up, because this is a perfect example of how a short attention span like mine can get you into trouble. I have not yet finished The Republic. I had to take a break around chapter six because I'd had it up to here with the narrator's plummy tones that so perfectly reflected my growing certainty that Plato was a self-satisfied wankspout. Because I had not yet come to Socrates' conclusions about justice, it was easy for me to forget that the story of the ring of Gyges was Glaucon's story, not Socrates'. Once I remembered this, I searched the text and found the following in chapter X.

Let a man do what is just, whether he have the ring of Gyges or not, and even if in addition to the ring of Gyges he put on the helmet of Hades.

Plato - through Socrates' dialogue - refutes Glaucon's notions, making a case for personal accountability and individual morality. And again, I hear millenia-old echoes in Frodo Baggins and Tony Stark, two variations on an old theme. In one story the object of power is a ring forged by the Dark Lord Sauron, and Frodo is the only one who can destroy it. In the other story, the object of power changes mercurially: first it's a missile, later a suit of armor. That's because the real prize is knowledge, and no one can destroy that. Stark is like a snake that constantly eats its own tail while shedding its own skin. He forges one weapon, it burns him, and the pain propels him on his hero's journey. He comes back changed, with a new weapon, trusting only in himself to use it. But others find a way to steal his new fire, and he must chase it. His Mount Doom is a phoenix. His hero's journey never ends.

Part of me wishes I had something pithy to say about all these connections. I recognize, though, that I'll need a few more years of reading under my belt before I can extract any pith without injuring myself. In the meantime, I'm just going to enjoy hearing the echoes and feeling the pleasant surprise as I recognize themes that have been handed off for so long from mouth to mind. I'll leave you with a quote from Henry V that would have echoed loudly in Tony Stark's mind.

Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained: and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive that day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.

The Warrior Queen's New Clothes are GORGEOUS!

2008-05-04T21:00:00.001-04:00

At forty-seven seconds the date 1585 appeared on the screen. Then I saw that Spain is the most powerful empire in the world. OK so far. Next the movie informed me that Philip of Spain, a devout Catholic, has plunged Europe into a holy war. "Well that's a bit one-sided, isn't it?" I said to myself. I started dredging my memory to see if that sweeping statement was even remotely fair to Philip - of whom admittedly I'm no fan - but my time had run out. At one minute and nineteen seconds the third sentence hit.

Only England stands against him.

Wow. Now that's impressive! It took the movie only three sentences spanning thirty two seconds to climb to a height of inaccuracy from which it could proclaim the nonexistence of the Protestant Netherlands. Not to mention the... the... aw, heck, what was the name of that other group of people who stood against Philip II? It's easy to overlook, because it was such a tiny thing - barely a political entity at all, really. It's on the tip of my... oh yeah! THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE!!!

Somewhat crestfallen to have been cast into a universe in which the Dutch Republic and the Ottoman Empire did not exist, I took solace in the costumes - like a child who, despondent after hearing that there's no Santa Clause, finds consolation in knowing he'll still get presents. Honestly, though, my crest never fell that far. The historical fictionalizing was so brazen, so dazzling, that I bypassed annoyance and outrage, moving - like ice sublimating directly to water vapor - to a quiet, almost reverent place. I felt a faint need to applaud this vivid description of the emperor's new clothes.

Beautiful scenery and sumptuous costumes filled the screen. At times the camera showed Elizabeth's intrigues from the unusual point of view of the vaults. I was enjoying myself well enough. Then, like a raspberry seed expertly thrust between my teeth, one of the characters made a passing reference to Parma's men gathering "on the coast of France". Ah. So it wasn't just the Dutch Republic that didn't exist, but the whole of the Netherlands!

Strangely enough, Lord Howard also seems not to exist in this universe - maybe he was in the Netherlands when it ceased to exist - and Drake gets only the briefest of mentions. Sir Walter Raleigh seems to hold the entire fleet together with his rugged, bold, yet sensitive manliness and his unflinching gaze. Then the vastly outnumbered English ships meet the Armada almost yardarm-to-yardarm, and the English start losing ships very quickly. Never mind that in reality the English hardly ever got within seven hundred yards of the Armada. I think the most painful thing here is that the depiction of the ship design is, as far as I can see, very accurate: the Spanish ships have the traditional high castles, whereas the English ships are race-built. I say it's painful because they bothered to get the designs right but, without the corresponding story elements, it's a wasted effort. The design of those ships is what made it possible for the English to literally run circles around the Armada, and the reason why the battle didn't play out yardarm to yardarm!

I have to admit here that I can't suggest an alternative to the battle scenes. Sure, I would enjoy seeing a historically accurate story where we cut back and forth between the Spanish soldiers cursing at the cowardly English dogs for not closing and grappling, and the English soldiers cursing at how unexpectedly ineffectual their newfangled gunnery was proving against the Spanish hulls. But I have no illusions that the peculiar impasse at which the fleets found themselves in the Channel would make an exciting movie.

I was rather pleased that, despite the nonexistence of the Netherlands, at least the movie portrayed the Armada's main problem: the winds that threatened to drive it onto the shoals and precipitated the decision to anchor. Unfortunately it then goes right back to inaccuracy, with the Armada burning in view of Dover. Here's where I think the reality could've made an exciting movie: the cutting of the cables during the fireship attack; the white-knuckle helpless sweep along the coast of the Netherlands; the last-minute change in wind direction that allowed them to escape into the North Sea; the sinking of the first ships and the execution of a captain who allowed his ship to separate from the rest of the Armada; the horrible deaths of so many mariners in the sea and on the land all along the west coast of Scotland and Ireland; and the final, pathetic limping of the surviving ships back to the Bay of Biscay. We did at least get one tragic, beautiful, haunting image from that part of the journey, spliced into the fireship scene: the horse jumping off the ship and swimming in the ocean. This was almost certainly a reference to the records from an Armada ship that, passing to the west of Ireland, sailed through a cluster of hapless, swimming animals from another ship that had foundered.

Words of the Day: Algarve and Triglyph

2008-04-02T21:15:00.015-04:00

Before I could wrap up my investigation into the van den Keere world map of 1611, there was one more nagging question I had to answer: "What the heck does 'ALGAR' mean?" That was the caption for one of the forty vignettes of peoples and cities of the world that formed the map's border. I'd found an Algar in Wikipedia right away, but I knew it was too far inland, and too small, to have made van den Keere's top forty list. So I threw it on the pile of mysteries from that map that I had to solve.

After a lot of Googling, a trip to Room 117 of the New York Public Library, and some help from the Director of the NYPL Map Division, I figured out all the vignettes but that one. Then, today, I found this nifty gallery that shows some old maps with "Algarbia", "d'Algarve" and "Algarve". It turns out that the Algarve is the southwestern tip of Portugal - a region that includes Cape St. Vincent, where Nelson had his famous battle. But the icing on the investigative cake was the etymology: Algarve comes from the Arabic al-gharb, meaning "the West". Neat! The Reconquista drove out the Muslims, but not all of their words.

Next up was my other nagging brainworm: "Where does the word 'triglyph' come from, and why does the word for a squarish architectural feature have the prefix 'tri-'?" Why was I wondering this, you ask? Well, last week I was studying up on Palladian architecture in preparation for my visit to the exhibit at the Peabody Library in Baltimore. My head was swimming with lots of shiny new bauble words, and "triglyph" bobbed right near the top. Grace asked me about the tri- prefix during the drive down to Baltimore on Friday night, thus doubling my curiosity. Then it doubled again at the exhibit on Saturday when I saw the word in a surprising place.

Among the books on Vitruvian architecture was a copy of Giacondo's Vitruvius iterum et Frontinus from 1513. It was opened to the grand engraving that filled the first page of "QVARTUS", or chapter four. But what caught my eye was a small bit of print on the last page of chapter three. Below the text, on the right side of the page, was the word "Triglyphis". Since it was in a position I associate with a signature, I said to myself "Hey! Maybe Triglyphis was a classical architect - a contemporary of Vitruvius - and that's what the triglyph was named after!"

Points for creativity, but accuracy? Not so much. Today I looked up the etymology of the word and found the following on Encyclopedia.com.

triglyph (archit.) in the Doric order, block with three vertical grooves. XVI. — L. triglyphus — Gr. trígluphos, f. TRI- + gluphé carving.

Clearly this wasn't named after a man. Just as clearly, the "tri-" comes from the three vertically-split segments. Oh well. Goodbye, imaginary classical architect Triglyphis; hello, new etymological friend. Not a bad exchange.

On Writing Well

2008-03-27T20:57:00.011-04:00

I haven't made many blog entries lately, partly because of a book I ran across at The Strand two weeks ago: William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I picked it up and read the blurbs, and it seemed to call out to me. I bought a copy, and by the time I'd read a few pages its voice had risen to a nearly deafening - yet curiously benign - scream. I recognized that I desperately needed to hear what Zinsser was saying: cut out useless words; cut out pretentious words; use a short word if it does the job of a longer one; simplify, simplify, simplify.

One of Zinsser's best suggestions - to read what I write out loud - was so obvious and simple that it hadn't occurred to me. Trying it, I felt like a longtime whittler who'd just seen his first lathe. I found pretentious and tangled constructions that I'd never use in conversation, and when I gutted and reworked the sentences the result not only sounded better - it sounded more like me. It was all exactly as Zinsser said. Until I read his book I didn't understand what it means to "find my voice". It's not about finding a single voice, but about whatever voice I speak with being authentic to me.

I said I haven't made many blog entries lately. Notice I didn't say I hadn't been blogging. If you look at my entry on Ptolemy and Peutinger, you'll see that I've been putting the book's ideas into practice. At least I hope you'll see that, because I spent a lot of time rewriting that entry again and again. I'm keen to know if it helped. If you could tell me if I'm clearly conveying my ideas, and whether my writing is changing for the better, I'd take it as a kindness.

A Wealth of Online Viewers

2008-03-19T16:26:00.009-04:00

Since I started my "Maps: Finding Our Place in the World" entry I've spent probably a week or two researching the Chicago Festival of Maps exhibits. The compulsion that drove me along so many branching investigative paths was unsettling, but both the process and the product of all that digging gave me joy. It also made me aware of the staggering amount of work that's been done to bring old maps and manuscripts to the internet. Check out the new "Viewers" list at the top of my links on the right edge of the screen. I'm delighted with the content of each, and in awe of the amount of work and creativity that went into most.

My favorite viewer is the University of Oregon's tribute to Nolli's Grand Plan of Rome. I especially like exploring the map icons layer, but overall I appreciate how the map engine can overlay political regions, natural features, human-made artifacts and satellite images in a visually digestible way.

Coming in a close second is the British Library's Online Library. Check out the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Golf Book and tell me you didn't gasp. Then, if the multiple layers in the Nolli map weren't enough for you, take a look at the Gough Map. Zoom in to see the woodcut imprints on the Rom Weg Map and the multifarious threats to mariners portrayed in the 1562 Map of the Americas. Lose yourself in the detail that three generations of Cassinis put into their Carte de France. And don't forget that nifty new viewer for the 1659 Blaeu Atlas!

Venice and the Fourth Crusade - What to Believe?

2008-03-18T14:58:00.020-04:00

I almost began this entry by typing something along the lines of "Historiography seems to interest me even more than history." See how the zero-sum game mentality tries to creep in? History and historiography don't compete for my attention; it's their intimate dance that draws my attention! If people didn't do such bloody fascinating and ambiguous things, we wouldn't come up with such fascinating and ambiguous stories about them.

In two lecture series about the Byzantine Empire I heard a lot of intriguing stories: riots started over chariot races, an empire nearly torn apart over religious icons, and even a Crusade that stopped in Asia Minor because its leader decided to go swimming in his armor and got himself drowned. What intrigues me more than these events, though, is the fact that two historians can tell wildly different stories about any one of them.

First I made my way through Lars Brownworth's 12 Byzantine Rulers podcasts, and then I listened to Professor Kenneth W. Harl's lecture series World of Byzantium. Toward the end, I came across a striking difference between the ways in which the two lecturers portray Venice, and particularly the Doge Enrico Dandolo. This entry summarizes Mr. Brownworth's opinion that the Doge was basically a calculating villain who had his eye on Constantinople's riches from the very start. He spun a story about invading Egypt and then pulled a monumental bait-and-switch, knowing that the Crusaders wouldn't be able to come up with the money they promised. Once the Crusaders were indentured to Venice, Dandolo sicced them on the Dalmatian coast of Hungary, ignoring the Pope's outrage. In Zara Dandolo met Alexios IV Angelos, who had headed west to drum up support for a coup. In exchange for help, Alexios promised to end the Schism and reunite the Orthodox and Catholic churches, but Dandolo really had his eye on Constantinople. While the Byzantines struggled to maintain power over the city, Dandolo kept encouraging the Crusaders to invade, which of course they eventually did.

Professor Harl tells a very different story, although he admits from the start that his is only one of several versions. He says that the Venetians had to suspend shipping for a year in order to construct the Crusader fleet, and that when the Crusaders couldn't come up with the money, supplies, and people they had promised, Venice was facing bankruptcy. Therefore "...Dandolo had little choice but to go on crusade himself and work out some kind of installment plan to pay off the debt." Harl emphasizes the fact the the Venetians had already established plenty of trade routes in the east; the concessions they got from the Crusader states dwarfed those from Constantinople, so they had no reason to divert the Crusade there.

I'm not sure that I understand Professor Harl's argument. He seems to be saying that, since the Venetians had a lot of trade in the east, then of course they wouldn't want Constantinople. But since when does having some money make people not want more? Also, I think that "...Dandolo had little choice..." makes a poor excuse for sacking Constantinople. It all seems conspicuously apologist. However, Brownworth's version might be even more suspect. Unlike Harl, he doesn't even note that there are wildly different versions of the story. Also, his version of Dandolo sounds a bit too much like a moustache-twirling villain to be real.

Clearly I'll need to read more before I can lean any further toward either Harl's end of the interpretive spectrum or Brownworth's. This list may serve me well for that. In the meantime, I welcome discussion.

Virtual Tourist 2: Ptolemy and Peutinger

2008-03-12T23:11:00.060-04:00

The four-hundred-year-old book behind the exhibit glass didn't engage me right away. I felt a connection only later, after two accidents of timing. Since last night I've tried to figure out how to describe that connection, and I've spent most of that time wishing I could come up with metaphors that don't sound hackneyed. Occasionally my wishes come true. Then there are times like this. That book was like an ancient insect suspended in amber: I was able to connect not only with the tiny artifact, but with the history that flowed around it.

The placard said that the book contained a fold-out image from the Peutinger tablet. "What's that?" I said to myself, and then took out the iPhone I'd bought just days before and Googled it. Between the placard and the internet I learned that the Peutinger tablet is a medieval painted copy on parchment of an ancient pictorial itinerary used by Roman armies and provincial governors. In 1508 the copy made its way into the hands of Konrad Peutinger, an eminent German antiquarian, and was first published in the 1590s.

Less than two days before I read all this, I had been fascinated to learn that Ptolemy's knowledge was unknown in Europe for the thousand years before the Renaissance. Noting that the source for the Peutinger tablet was made near the beginning of that era, I wrote the following in my notes.

!!!Was the Peutinger tablet a transmission vector for Ptolemy??

No, probably not, because it was from the fourth or early fifth century. By then Ptolemy was unknown [in the West], yeah? And this is a perfect example of what Whitfield was saying: the Peutinger tablet was anti-theoretical! It was for keeping control in the empire, rather than figuring out the outer world within an objective framework!

I looked at the book. I looked at the partial image of the Peutinger map on the tiny computer in my hand. The map was clearly schematic: It showed the roads but not the true shape of Italy. I thought of how Ptolemy, who strove to define those true shapes within an objective framework, was all but lost to the West for a millennium, and how the fourth century original of the Peutinger map was made at the dawn of that millennium. When I looked back at the book, I felt like I was touching the flow of history.

Yesterday I saw images of the entire tablet online, and that feeling surged back: the book wasn't just a book. It was a window into the era of cartographic divergence that Peter Whitfield described in The Image of the World.

By the first century A.D. Greek-Roman geography formed one intellectual tradition. All the major scientists were Greek, but writing within Roman institutions; owing much to roman civil and military culture, but representing the development of Greek thought over six centuries. The Greek genius was peculiarly analytical and theoretical, and to this tradition the Romans contributed little if anything. The typical Roman scientist-philosopher was Pliny, the hunter-gatherer of flora, fauna, facts, artefacts, lore and legend, but utterly lacking the analytical impulse. The theoretical spirit reached its culmination in the work of Ptolemy of Alexandria (c.A.D.90-168), who consciously summed up the methods and materials of his predecessors. Ptolemy stood at the end of a line of precocious achievement in classical science. The process by which his work fell into neglect had two main aspects. First, the Roman distaste for theoretical geography; second, the radical discontinuity in learning and literature from the fourth century onwards...

The Peutinger map, with its focus on roads and the distances along them between cities and towns, was clearly designed to be a highly functional tool, but it's not a map in the strictest sense. It's a schematic. Like a modern subway map, it contorts geographical relationships to array all points of interest within the workspace; geography is subsumed under human utility. This is the antithesis of Ptolemy. In his intellectual landscape the mundane world fits into a framework of graticules that seems almost like a Platonic ideal; here too the earth is subsumed but there's a critical difference: it's subsumed under a concept. The people who had the Peutinger map made had no time for such rarefied ideas: they were busy trying to hold together an empire. Controlling the economic and military forces flowing through that empire was like holding onto a gigantic bloodhound: powerful muscles tensed, bones shifted, skin slid freely and the grip was lost. And all this time, Islamic scholars were looking at Ptolemy's notions and saying to themselves "This is interesting. This is worth copying." While one empire fell, a seed of future empires was wending its way through quills far off in the east. I touched a small piece of the detritus from that sweep of history, and I feel honored. I think this is the way museums are supposed to work. I'm just getting that.

What can I say but "WOO HOO!!!"?

2008-03-12T05:56:00.005-04:00

This morning on the MapHist list, Dr. Paul van den Brink of the Explokart Research Team at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands announced a new digitized atlas of Blaeu, the "Toonneel des Aerdrycks, ofte Nieuwe Atlas" of 1659. The viewer shows six volumes, including the texts, and was ordered for by the city of Leiden.

The website is in Dutch. I have looked upon the viewer and found it totally sweet.

Virtual Tourist 1: Introduction, Hard Fill Wanted

2008-03-09T22:04:00.023-04:00

My four-day visit to the Chicago Festival of Maps was a sort of birthday present to myself. On the morning of my birthday I set out for the Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome exhibit. Flush with excitement over the previous day at the Field Museum, and from the cold walk across Hyde Park, I got to the University of Chicago Library soon after it opened at nine o'clock. That I stayed until the library closed at one o'clock, yet still saw only a small fraction of the exhibit, most eloquently conveys its thought-provoking richness.

The exhibit frontispiece tells the story of how the library obtained the treasure trove on display. In 1891 William Rainey Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, bought the stock of a Berlin book dealer with, among other things, a "unique set of Lafreri's Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae consisting of 1100 plates of which no public library has a set of over 120 plates." The plates are engravings of monuments and antiquities of Rome, most published in the late sixteenth century, the age of Michelangelo and the Counter-Reformation.

I dredged my memory for details from the conversations I had with Grace about the music and art of the sixteenth century, and how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation manifested through them. I thought of the sensuality and palpability of Michaelangelo's human figures, and asked myself "Wasn't Michaelangelo's work more a reflection of the Reformation than the Counter-Reformation?" I hadn't even made it past the frontispiece and it was clear that I needed to do lots more studying. Sitting here writing this entry it's even more clear: I just turned to Grace and said "Didn't Michaelangelo do the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?" Of course the answer was "Yes". Sigh. Throw Michaelangelo on that big pile of stuff I need to study in the context of the confessional brouhaha of the sixteenth century.

The first item in the exhibit was Francesco Albertini's "Little work on the marvels of the new and old city of Rome. The placard said that this was the type of manuscript guidebook to Rome produced in the Middle Ages, and that the simplicity of the frontispiece is typical for early sixteenth century books inspired by classical antiquity. When I read of the "New and Old Rome" motif that runs through so many of the items in this exhibit I thought back to Nolli's "Grand Plan of Rome", which I'd seen at the Field Museum the previous day. Nolli's map showed, among two thousand points of interest, such classical structures as the Circus Maximus.

The placard said that Albertini's "little work" was published between 1493 and 1510. I tried to place this in context, and the first thing I thought of was the Reconquista. The Spanish completed their reoccupation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, but of course they continued to be extremely busy with the Muslim presence on the Barbary Coast. Continuing to rummage in my head, I thought of how, in 1571, Philip II was very invested in keeping Italy under his control, yet making sure it didn't get overrun by Ottoman forces. Suddenly the History of European Art lectures popped into my head: specifically, the bit about the pilgrimage routes through France and into northwest Spain. I looked in my notes and found it: Santiago de Compostela, supposedly the most important pilgrimage site in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

I thought back to Etzlaub's map of the pilgrimage routes to Rome from 1500, and Paris's map of the pilgrimage routes to Apulia from 1252. This led me to my big question: What happened between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries to shift the focus eastward, from northwest Spain to Rome? Also, how did Spain view these Renaissance "advertisements" for Italy? Was this material part of Italy's striving for independence from spain? How much did the fall of Constantinople play into this?

These are big, intimidating questions, and although there are centuries-wide gaps in my knowledge, at least I feel confident enough now to ask them. I know a few things:

In 800, the Pope Leo III was weak enough to need help against the Lombards, but strong enough for Charlemagne to want him as an ally. The crowning of Charlemagne represented a break with Constantinople and a bond with Western Europe.
In the years following Henry VIII's initial request for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon in 1525, the Pope became very weak indeed. Spain and France were fighting over Italy, and the degree to which Rome capitulated to Henry's desires was directly proportional to the French army's incursions. When plague struck the army at Rome's doorstep, the Pope regained some influence, but by this time the Papal ambassador had already given Henry the go-ahead.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the city-states of Italy became extremely powerful, mostly because they supplied, and eventually usurped, the Crusades. I know that, during the Fourth Crusade, Venetian forces attacked first Zara and then Constantinople against the wishes of the Pope, but I have no idea how much the power of the merchant city-states elevated that of Rome.
Between the beginning of the Crusades in the late 1090's and the fall of Constantinople in 1204, Italy was not only a source of ships for the Crusades, but a waystation on the route to the Holy Lands.
After the fall of Constaninople, Rome would have been even more of a waystation as pilgrims sought alternate routes to the east. When the Crusader states fell, Rome would suddenly have become the easternmost focus of Christian pilgrimage.

Having thought through all this, I wondered if the eastern shift in pilgrimage destinations indicated a refocusing of Europe's collective eye: during the Reconquista, northern Spain would have represented a foothold on which Christian soldiers dug in their heels to push the Muslims south; however, the more the Iberian Peninsula was retaken, the more Europeans must have felt secure in casting their eyes eastward to the newly-minted crisis in the Holy Land. On the other hand, the eastward shift may have had less to do with conceptual geography than with the rising power of the Papacy and the declining power of Constantinople. I think I need to understand Papal history before I can hope to answer my questions, so I've decided that when I finish World of Byzantium I'll be starting in on Popes and the Papacy: A History. Wish me luck. And check back in to see if I've answered those big questions.

Here is a high-resolution zoomable image of Lafreri's title page for his Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae.

Philip II and Victor von Doom

2008-02-29T10:49:00.012-05:00

In issues 551 through 553 of The Fantastic Four, the FF get a surprise visit from a future version of their oldest nemesis: Victor von Doom, aka Doctor Doom. Doom has traveled back in time on a purportedly benevolent mission: to warn the team that Reed Richards will go mad with power, and that this will have disastrous consequences for the entire planet. Under normal circumstances the FF wouldn't believe Doom for a second, but they've recently been shaken to their foundations by the events of the Marvel Universe's Civil War, in which Reed made some choices that caused most of the world to lose faith in him. They listen to what Doom has to say, more or less, and then a time portal opens and their future selves - the FF from the future Doom's timeline - show up. They want to take Doom back with them, but the present-day Reed, allowing for the possibility that what Doom says is true, decides to protect Doom. Arguments - and eventually fighting - ensue between "our" FF and their future selves: not simply because the future FF want Doom, but because they remember a version of history where they fought their future selves, and this is all part of preserving the time stream! Eventually the fighting subsides as the present-day FF learn the truth. Here's the conversation between Ben Grimm, the future Doom, Sue Richards, and the future Reed Richards.

Ben:

You guys are tryin' to keep things the way they were, but Doomsie... is trying ta change history.

Doom:

As I said. To prevent Reed's madness from destroying the future.

Sue:

Destroying it how, Victor? You say you're a man of honor... tell us the truth. What's the world like where you come from?

Doom:

...
Paradise.
It's paradise.
His dual-layer Dyson swarm provides nearly free and inexhaustible energy. Advances in medicine have greatly extended both the duration and quality of life. There hasn't been a war in over 40 years, hunger and crime are all but unknown, education is universal. Art thrives.

Reed:

There's still a lot of work to do, but --

Doom:

But humanity is safe, happy, prosperous and striving for true greatness.
And it's all Richards's fault.

Ben:

Fault? Are you out of yer blamed mind?

Doom:

That honor belongs to me! I should be the savior of humanity, not Richards. Doom!

Reed:

Now you know the truth. Doom came back to the past, intending to correct history so that the future would be the product of his hand.

Fun story, huh? Well, I sure enjoyed it. But it's not just a story.

In 1571 a Christian naval coalition defeated a large Ottoman force at the Battle of Lepanto. The unprecedented cooperation between Western Christian states shows how dire the Ottoman threat had become. Had the battle gone slightly differently, the Christian forces would have been enveloped by the larger Ottoman force and crushed, leaving the eastern Mediterranean and much of eastern Europe open to further encroachment. One would think that any Christian would have felt unalloyed joy at news of the victory, let alone the king of one of the main countries involved. In my experience, though, you can always count on Philip II to behave enigmatically. First, let's put Philip's Catholic faith into perspective. The following is from page 27 of David Howarth's The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story.

But it was not only a political empire; it was also a religious entity, and that was what made it so complex. King Philip was His Most Catholic Majesty. He believed he was appointed by god to defend the truth against infidels and heretics. The pope was Vicar of Christ: Philip, in his own eyes, was Champion of god, the equal of the pope in God's designs. In this sense, his boundaries were vague. There were people all over Europe, caught in the ebb and flow of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, whose loyalties were divided between their country and their church. In almost all of Philip's Catholic domains, Protestants had been exterminated, or pushed far under ground, by the Inquisition. The only exception was the Netherlands. All through his reign they had been in revolt, partly against the shame of foreign rule and partly to protect their Protestant creed: he had to keep an immensely expensive army there, and it had never succeeded in putting the rebels down. But he was not only concerned with his own domains. It was his personal duty, divinely imposed as he believed, to punish Protestants everywhere and rescue Catholics who lived under Protestant rule.

Now, on to Philip's reaction to Lepanto in 1571. The following is from page 294 of Victory of the West by Niccolo Capponi.

Despite his apparent elation over the Christian victory, the king was not totally happy about the league's success. Don Juan had put the Habsburg galleys and soldiers at considerable risk by deciding to join battle - a rash decision to say the least, especially for el rey prudente, and according to a number of Philip's councillors the prince could only thank God if he had come out of it alive. Significantly, the king commissioned only one work of art to commemorate the victory - Titian's Philip II, after the victory of Lepanto, offers the prince Don Fernando to victory, now in the Prado - and to celebrate more the continuity of the Habsburg line than the Ottoman defeat. The six large canvases of the battle by Luca Cambiaso, now in the Escorial, were probably gifts of Giovanni Andrea Doria to the royal secretary Antonio Pérez, acquired by the king at a later date. One has the distinct impression that for Philip the league victory represented a potential source of political trouble, possibly because by weakening the Porte's navy it had altered the balance of power in the Mediterranean and loosened Spain's grip on Italy.

This utterly amazed me when I first read it, and it still makes my jaw slacken a bit. Philip II was the model of a Catholic King of the sixteenth century: as relentless as he was devout. Yet upon hearing of the greatest Catholic victory of his age, his reaction was lukewarm. It didn't matter to him that Christian forces won, as long as he wasn't in control. Even if everything happened that he wanted to happen, it didn't matter as long as it wasn't by his hand. Sound familiar?

The best stories aren't just stories. They're history.

Thanks to Grace for giving me the idea for this entry. It still amazes me that I didn't think of it, seeing as how I was the one who told her about this aspect of Philip's personality.

Well isn't that Special?

2008-02-29T10:19:00.013-05:00

So the other morning, on my way to the shower, I was thinking about the Duke of Medina Sidonia and George Washington. OK, that sounded a tad slashy, didn't it? Don't worry, though: I strive to make history exciting, but not that exciting.

...

Psst! You're supposed to say "So, uh... why were you thinking about Medina Sidonia, the commander of the Spanish Armada of 1588, and George Washington, the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783 and first President of the United States?"

I'm glad you asked that question! And in such a fine, expository manner, too! Why, I think of the two men often because, odd as this may sound, I'm struck by their similarities: as a nobleman experienced in administering large estates, each was one of the very few men of his time qualified to command large-scale logistical operations; each had the ability to draw upon the resources of his homeland, a vast region whose participation in the coming conflict was absolutely crucial; and each was reduced at several times to writing desperate letters to other commanders who were supposed to be giving him support, but who instead decided not to associate themselves with one who looks to be the loser. There are more similarities, but this is all a story for a future entry.

As I was heading into the shower (again with the inspirations coming to me in the bathroom!) I was thinking of all this, and of how I should blog about it soon, and how I should also do entries about the similarities between Philip II and Henry VIII, and so on. Then a memory surfaced...

As Hugh steps into the shower, we zoom with a reverse dolly so that the background retreats. Insert reverse aging SFX so that Hugh is now 22 years younger. When we dolly in and zoom out, Hugh is standing in a hallway in his high school, looking on as Bob signs Hugh's yearbook.

In 1986, my sophomore year, Bob Cole was the salutatorian of his graduating class. He also played first trumpet in stage band. I played third trumpet, so I knew him about as well as a tremendously geeky sophomore could know an exceedingly together senior. He was a nice young man, and I'll bet he went on to become an outstanding member of his community. At the time of his graduation, though, he mostly just annoyed me. See, my friend Tony and I were totally into our own geeky little world, constantly quoting from whatever science fiction or advanced calculus or crude comedy routine we were into at the moment. Once or twice Bob expressed his irritation at this, saying that I should be bettering myself by reading biographies instead of wasting my time with these fictional worlds. He alluded to this in what he wrote in my yearbook. Now, to be fair, he wrote a lot and most of it was quite nice. The closing sentences were what annoyed me.

Fiction is interesting, but fact is where it's at. Remember also that you'll sleep one third of your life away. So don't waste time! Take care.

Bob Cole

Dick. That's what I thought at the time, and I stand by it. Now, don't get me wrong; we were high-schoolers, and all high-schoolers are dicks in some way or another, so it's absolutely no insult to Bob. Also, Bob was right: I should have been reading biographies. I wish I had been reading biographies. The ignorance I felt two decades later that motivated me to start learning history was a direct result of disregarding Bob's words. But Bob was wrong, too, and here's why: You don't get anywhere with people by preaching. Right or wrong, if you point out a person's deficiencies and tell them what they should be doing, it just ain't gonna work out well. And anyway, it's usually more about the ego of the one giving the advice than about the well-being of the one getting it. Regardless of all that, though, people simply don't take kindly to being told what to do. I want to go back to that moment and whisper in Bob's ear: Bob, don't tell him what to do. Not only is that not gonna work, it's gonna piss him off. If you want him to read history... tell him a story. Tell him a story about a king kneeling in a tiny room - a king who had the power to assemble the greatest Armada the world had ever seen, and hurl it across the ocean at his most bothersome foe, but who never stepped outside that room to meet his commanders, or to observe his vast armies, or to lay his hand on the prow of one of his mighty ships.

When I thought of all this - of how Bob was 100% correct in what he said but 100% wrong in his approach - something crystallized in my head, and I came up with another Law of The Pond Seeker. Now I have three of them, in descending order of priority, like with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

Learn.
Share my enthusiasm.
Don't preach. Do tell stories.

So I ain't gonna preach to ya. I'm gonna tell ya stories. If I do my job right, the rest will come on its own.

Next time: The story of that king.

So... Why Maps?

2008-02-27T21:56:00.022-05:00

You wouldn't think that eighth century Byzantine economics could inspire a guy. The thing about the Muse, though, is that she has no regard for what you or I think. That's exactly as it should be; I believe in waiting humbly for the Muse, and being nothing but grateful if she deigns to swing by. And I believe that the most profound expression of my gratitude is to grab her mane and ride her for all she's worth. I don't ask questions about her destination, and she doesn't ask questions about my mixed metaphors.

A few weeks ago during a morning commute I was listening to Professor Kenneth W. Harl lecture about the ways in which Constantine V stimulated the Byzantine economy. Constantine forcibly imported artisans from around the empire to engage in large building projects in Constantinople. This greatly stimulated the economy by increasing taxes and the exchange of coined money. Constantinople was also the home of state monopolies such as the silk trade. Ho hum. Then Professor Harl got to a good bit about how, back in the days of Justinian, some Nestorian monks had smuggled silk worms out of India in their bamboo rods, and from those stolen worms arose the silk industry that spanned southern Greece, the area now known as the Peloponnese. In Constantine's time, though, it was known as Moria.

Wait. Pause. Rewind. What? Moria?? As in the Mines of Moria from The Lord of the Rings? Well, OK, Wikipedia says it's actually Morea, with an E. Still, it made me wonder about the possible associations as I digested Professor Harl's news that Morea means "mulberry", the tree on which the silkworm does its thing. Constantinople sold silk to Western Europe at a huge profit, so it stands to reason that this region, from which so much Byzantine wealth arose, was named after the plant that made it all possible. The Wikipedia article, though, indicates that the origin of the name is not quite as cut and dried as all that:

There is some uncertainty over the origin of the name "Morea", which is first recorded in the 10th century in Byzantine chronicles. As with many other things in the Balkans, part of the uncertainty stems from the political implications behind each suggested origin of the name.

Popular belief in Greece today is that the name originates from the word moria, meaning mulberry, a common plant in the region. In Greece it is also believed that it is of Frankish origin.

In 1830, the Austrian historian Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861) published the first of his volumes Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters ("History of the Morea Peninsula during the Middle Ages"). Based on his analysis of the spread of Slavic place names in mainland Greece, Fallmerayer proposed that the 19th century Greeks had almost no linear cultural connection to the ancients but a large one to the Slavic tribes who had invaded during the 6th and 7th centuries. To support his thesis, Fallmerayer proposed that the word comes from the Slavic word more, meaning sea. Fallmerayer did not find any conclusive evidence as there was no evidence other than several scattered village names to suggest this. The spelling of the name with the omega "Ω" however indicates that the word is likely of Greek origin with the omega being a prolonged "o" sound.

Now that's interesting, and a much more likely origin of the purportedly magnificent abode of Tolkien's Dwarfs; after all, I can certainly see Gimli as a Slavic warrior.

I ruminated on the Tolkien connection as I walked to work. As I went into the bathroom - and isn't it weird how often inspiration hits in the bathroom? - a thought struck me, apropos of nothing but the fact that I happened to be thinking of maps and Tolkien: He put maps in his books, but no other illustrations! That means something! Maps are so important that Tolkien chose them above all other images to include in his printed work.

Turns out I was totally full of crap. It just so happens that I've only read the relatively cheap editions of his books that have no illustrations except maps. There are other editions with Tolkien's drawings of characters and landscapes. In order to acquaint myself with what Tolkien actually drew, as opposed to what I had fancied he drew, I got three books out of my library : The Annotated Hobbit; J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator; and Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien. They show that Tolkien was quite engaged in drawing his characters and their villages and houses, not to mention many colorful patterns that are reminiscent of Medieval manuscript illuminations. So I was wrong. But then again, perhaps I wasn't entirely wrong. Because even though Tolkien did draw things aside from maps, his drawings of maps seem different than the rest. Unlike the ethereal feeling I get from the other material, the maps seem very solid and real. And then there's the simple fact that there are editions with only maps. Someone thought that it was important to leave the maps in even when all else was stripped out.

But that's not the story.

The story is that I wanted to believe that Tolkien thought maps were special. The only basis I had for this assertion was the single edition I'd read, yet I got excited enough about this "discovery" to become rather crestfallen when I found out otherwise. Once I recognized this desire, it became clear that I think maps are magical, and that I was searching for a way to articulate and justify the fascination that had taken hold of me so abruptly and so thoroughly. The more I thought of it, the more sense it made, because maps are magical. Maps do something that the human brain - especially my brain - can't do, or at least can't do well. Maps show complex spatial relationships, and we're so used to them that we forget how difficult such relationships are to visualize without them. Look at Matthew Paris's map of the pilgrimage route from London to Apulia. Essentially a one-dimensional construct, the map shows simply that the path from this abbey leads to that abbey, and that path from that abbey leads to this mountain, and so on. There are virtually no two-dimensional relationships. This map reveals that visualizing two-dimensional - let alone three-dimensional! - relationships is something that the human brain just doesn't do out of the box. It has to be trained to do it! Maps represent not only a way to help with that training, but a shortcut around it!

Military historians talk a lot about castles and fortresses as examples of force multipliers. The notion is fairly straightforward: there are ways of multiplying the effective force of a few people so that they seem like a lot of people. This usually involves paying a premium to gravity so that you can reap huge dividends later. You get together a bunch of people who, over a long period of time, lift stones from low places and build a particular kind of very high place out of them. Once they're done assembling that high place, they bring themselves, and lots of food and weapons, into it. Now, anyone who wants to get to the people, or the food, or the high place itself, have to fight their way to it from the bottom of the enormous potential well created by all that work. And the people up there who did the work? They have the option to release most of that energy they stored up over the months and years, very quickly: all they have to do is drop things. I said the notion is straightforward. The sheer (ha ha) effectiveness of the force multiplier, though, beggars the imagination if you're hearing the actual numbers for the first time. I know I was absolutely stunned last year when I read the bit in Niccolo Capponi's Victory of the West about the Siege of Malta in 1565. The Ottomans landed on Malta in May with about thiry five thousand men and nearly sixty guns, some of them huge masonry destroyers. Thirty five thousand men! That's more than the Armada carried twenty-three years later! What was even more surprising to me, though, was that Malta - with less than six hundred members of the Knights Hospitaller, four hundred Spanish troops, around four or five thousand Maltese, and fifty artillery pieces - held out against this force until Sicily came to the rescue in September!

Here's what I'm coming to realize: Maps are intellectual force multipliers. When you make a map, you take huge amounts of work done over vast periods of time and you bundle it together. Just consider the amount of work that al-Idrisi did in making his world map. That piece of paper with the continents isn't just a piece of paper: it's a highly-concentrated chunk of negentropy, or order. The waste heat discharged from all that gradual work done over all those centuries to bring together the knowledge distilled into the map hanging on my wall could incinerate the world's armies. And with that energy people can take their brains - which may be ill-suited to the task of visualizing what the map shows, and anyway probably don't have the time, resources or inclination to go across the ocean to find out for themselves what's there - and they can make decisions that change the world. That concentration of power in an unassuming form is, I think, what makes maps so fascinating to me.

The Sixteenth Century: Now with 30% more Confessionalism!

2008-02-26T10:34:00.041-05:00

The recent In Our Time episode about Rudolf II got me to thinkin'. I made some connections that pretty near blew my mind - yeah, I know, it doesn't take much - and now I feel like I understand the sixteenth century a little better. You be the judge. Here's a transcript of the relevant bits; I gave up on sorting out the voices, so all three of the guests are just listed as "Guest". Their names are listed on the site.

Bragg: There was a university in Prague... there were universities all across Europe, yet Rudolf was attracting these people. What was he offering - his course - that the universities weren't providing?

Guest: Well, Charles University in Prague is a special case because in the aftermath of the Hussite Revolt Prague had been sort of sealed off from the rest of Europe and not fully integrated, so it was in a bad state. But the more general point is that universities were set up effectively to teach the received heritage of the west and to pass it on to the next generation. They were not remotely regarded as research institutes; they weren't set up, they weren't founded, they weren't funded for that kind of thing, and if you wanted funding - salary in the first instance, equipment and assistance in the second, to pursue natural philosophical inquiry, and to move back the frontiers of knowledge to change the accepted order of things, and you were not very independently wealthy as of course Tycho Brahe was, you needed to find a wealthy patron to sustain at least some part of that inquiry. And the obvious concentrations of wealth and prestige were in the courts of Europe - central Europe of course was divided into many individual territorial principalities, so it was very rich with this particular resource. Rudolph was at the summit of that system: notionally for the whole of Europe, and certainly for central Europe. And the other part of the equation is of course that it began to dawn on rulers in the Renaissance period that there was considerable prestige to be attached from being associated with these collections, with the kind of concentrations of knowledge and expertise, and also conceivably with the discoveries, whether mathematical, astrological, or whatever. So there was an incentive for them to patronize scientists - what we would call today scientists on the one hand, alongside artists on the other.

Bragg: He spent some of his youth at the court in Spain...

Guest: Yes, that's right, and that was the main thing he brought back with him. I mean, what he didn't bring back - and this is crucially important for understanding the natural philosphical as well as other aspects of his reign, is the ethos of the Counter-Reformation. Because there was simply no way of translating that from the Spanish half of the Habsburg family to the Austria half, because the political conditions were utterly different. He didn't have a consolidated state like Castile to make the center of his empire, he didn't have the ethos of the Reconquista, five hundred years of expelling first the Moors and then the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, and of course he didn't have the boatloads of gold and silver coming in from the New World, either, to finance a military campaign, nor did he have the army. So he needed to find a way out of this trap which was building all around him, of his empire dissolving into equally antagonistic confessional factions. And part of the reason he then ends up patronizing this remarkable work in the arts - broadly conceived - including the arts of alchemy and astronomy, shifting into an interest in the natural world, is because here we have a field of cultural significance and creativity outside this fractious confessional demesne. So he's actually responding very creatively to the confessional pressures of the era by shifting the center of gravity of his court in a rather different (one or two of the other guests say "Yeah" in agreement) Now that doesn't tell you his personality, but given that he has a reputation, particularly in his latter years, of actually going mad, of actually sort of losing his grip, this suggests to me a very visionary and a very creative response to an almost impossible situation, one which had been prepared by previous Habsburg emperors, particularly his father Maximilian II, which Rudolf epitomizes and pushes to a new level because it is the only way of escaping from this dilemma that he finds himself in.

Bragg: Anything to add about his character before we wrap on him?

Guest: Yeah, I mean maybe I'm being slightly facile here, but Rudolph's father had a reputation for being extremely liberal, hence you've got this development of the Ultraquists - the believers who tolerate both confessions, Protestant and Catholic. Maybe Rudolph is more that he can't stand either confession particularly, so he doesn't favor either, which gets him into a lot of trouble of course with the church.

Bragg: Well he is, as we said at the beginning of the program, he is trying to get God out of the equation, isn't he?

Guest: He's trying to get the Catholic interpretation of God, perhaps, out of the equation, but there's no doubt that he's attracting people that are extremely devout, extremely spiritual, but they're performing practices that orthodoxy will automatically condemn as being diabolic.

I found the notion of Rudolf actively seeking to balance out the Counter-Reformation with a liberal alternative to be immensely intriguing, and a little suspicious: it had that whiff of twentieth-century thinking about it, so I wondered if there was actual historical evidence that Rudolf thought this way, or if the contributors were stroking a pet notion to the point of distortion, as historians sometimes do. I was thinking of posing this question to the Gunroom and, always keen to put in a Patrick O'Brian connection, I began thinking of Stephen Maturin. Of all the characters in 'the canon', Stephen is the only one who comes across to me as surprisingly modern. The following comes from a conversation in Master and Commander between Stephen and James Dillon, referring to their involvement in the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

'...Even then I no longer cared for any cause or any theory of government on earth; I would not have lifted a finger for any nation's independence, fancied or real; and yet I had to reason with as much ardour as though I were filled with the same enthusiasm as in the first days of the Revolution, when we were all overflowing with virtue and love.'

'Why? Why did you have to speak so?'

'Because I had to convince him that his plans were disastrously foolish, that they were known to the Castle and that he was surrounded by traitors and informers. I reasoned as closely and cogently as ever I could - better than ever I thought I could - and he did not follow me at all. His attention wandered. "Look," says he, "there's a redbreast in that yew by the path." All he knew was that I was opposed to him, so he closed his mind; if, indeed, he was capable of following me, which perhaps he was not. Poor Edward! Straight as a rush; and so many of them around him were as crooked as men can well be - Reynolds, Corrigan, Davis... Oh, it was pitiful.'

'And would you indeed not lift a finger, even for the moderate aims?'

'I would not. With the revolution in France gone to pure loss I was already chilled beyond expression. And now, with what I saw in '98, on both sides, the wicked folly and the wicked brute cruelty, I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind - it is my own truth alone - but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have - for what they are - are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.'

'Patriotism will not do?'

'My dear creature, I have done with all debate. But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.'

I always thought this sounded a lot like twentieth century nihilism. Yet the Gunroom folks, who know a thousand times more about Patrick O'Brian than I ever will, swear by his ability to "inhabit" the period; it's supposedly almost impossible to catch him in an anachronism. So I had to concede that if my reaction to Stephen was wrong, then my reaction to Rudolf might well be wrong too: perhaps what I perceived as a twentieth-century motivation is actually a universal human motivation. Amid all this angst over the appropriateness of bringing modern interpretations to bear on non-modern characters, I thought of the similar, stronger reaction I had when I read the placard for the Cimerlini cordiform heart map at the Field Museum. It said that "At a time when the world was divided by religious conflicts, some mapmakers thought that it was important to portray a world unified by love and tolerance." At the time, I took umbrage at what seemed to me like a wrong-headed interpretation, only to find out later that the writer of that placard was easily one of the world's experts on Cimerlini and his contemporaries, and on their motivations. I couldn't have been more wrong if I'd tried. While I was thinking of all this, something went click and a big piece of the puzzle that is the sixteenth century fell into my lap: It's all about confessionalism.

In 1517 a man walked up to a wooden door and nailed a piece of paper to it. That it happened to be a church door, and that it's seen as the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation, has led people to think of this act as one of rebellion. It wasn't. It was the equivalent of you or I going down to our local city hall and filing a complaint. It was only after the Catholic Church and Luther had gone through a few rounds of "Shut up!" "No, you shut up!" that Luther truly became a revolutionary. In other words, times were overripe for religious discord. During the next few decades, confessionalism reached awe-inspiring proportions as Protestants split with Catholics, and then Protestantism itself became so splintered that one has to laugh or cry at the seemingly endless ramification.

In 1566, in the midst of this divisiveness, a man made a heart-shaped map of the world as a way of saying "We are all one."

Toward the end of the sixteenth century, a man looked at all the splintering - of credos and of skulls - going on around him; in an attempt to change the subject, he gathered wizards from all over the land to show the world shiny new things.

Now let's go back to 1588, to a man in a small room, clutching his well-worn rosary beads and trying to ignore the pain in his knees. I've often wondered about that man. Philip II had power the likes of which is quite simply inconceivable. He ruled an empire that reached from the Philippines in the east to South America in the west. He set in motion the greatest armada the world had ever seen. Few dared tell him that his plan for that armada was logistically impossible. Medina Sidonia tried to do so several times, at no small risk to himself, but Philip's councilors of state refused even to pass the last letter along.

Why? What makes humans think it's a Good Idea to give their power to kings? I still feel like I'm light years away from being able to answer that question, but at least now I feel like I understand Philip II in the context of his times a little better. The tendency toward confessionalism was extremely high: people were desperate to define themselves as Catholic or Protestant or Calvinist or Followers of the Great Green Arkleseizure, and then to set themselves against the Other. In this atmosphere, of course people gave their power to a man who could not bear the thought of a single Protestant in all of his vast kingdoms - a man willing to drain the Spanish treasury trying to expunge every last one. Just as today, though, there were people like Cimerlini and Rudolf who reacted to that oppressive divisiveness by trying to bring people together. Philip's power flowed from religion, and the engine of religion ran on a confessionalist gradient. Rudolf was marketing a new kind of engine.

People tend to look upon the sixteenth century as a conflict between confessional factions. Now I see those wars of religion as a subset of a larger conflict between divisiveness and unification. I'm pleased to have reached this new perspective by honing an old tool: Ever since I listened to Professor Brad S. Gregory emphasize the importance of viewing historical characters from within their own context, I've striven never to see history through modern lenses. That mindset has come in uncommon useful when reading about people from Elizabeth I to George Washington. Moments like this, however, make it clear that I've gone overboard. Certainly it's not useful to clutch stubbornly at those modern lenses when there's an old, dusty pair with a more appropriate focal length available; but neither is it useful to reject out of hand anything that sounds modern. After all, I believe firmly that people are people, and that in the most general sense human motivations don't change. I'm dead certain that I would have much more to talk about over a beer with Samuel Pepys than I would with the vast majority of my own peers.

The picture on the top right is of Gustav Mahler. I used it as a stand-in for the fictional Stephen Maturin because Mahler is, to me, the very image of Stephen. Look through some pictures of Mahler and you'll see how hunched he looks, how uncomfortable he seems in his own skin. That's Stephen for you.

Tangent... or boomerang?

2008-02-24T19:27:00.015-05:00

Yesterday I had another one of those lovely moments when a search looped back on itself. They seem to be happening more often; hopefully this means that I'm developing that framework for understanding that I wrote about the other day.

I figured I'd had enough of a breather after my marathon writeup of the Field Museum exhibit, so I tackled my notes from the "Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome" exhibit at the University of Chicago Library Special Collections Research Center. I began transcribing them, but soon I ran up against another tangent I just knew I'd end up chasing: the fascinating symbols in the frontispiece of Bartolomeo Marliano's guide to ancient Rome, Topographia antiquae Romae, published in Lyon by Sebastien Gryphius in 1534. The gryphon, the rectangular block, the chain and the winged sphere fascinated me so that I took the time to draw it in my notes. Thankfully you don't have to make do with my sketch. The top left section of the picture above shows you exactly what I saw. Click it to see a larger version.

My fascination with these symbols started a conflict in my brain. "Why do you care about this?" I asked myself. "It's just a symbol that some publisher hoped would impress folk. Keep pushing ahead! Don't get lost in minutiae like you always do!" But I knew it was useless; I had my teeth in those symbols, and I wasn't about to let go.

I did some unsuccessful Googling, and then hit the jackpot. Holbein's Ambassadors, a book by Mary S.F. Hervey that's fully downloadable from Google Books, has an image almost exactly like the one above, and the following explanation.

The sixteenth century repeated its favourite symbols over and over again. Alciati had made famous that form of emblem in which words and picture combine to form a single device. But in so doing he had merely given classical shape to a general taste. the better-known symbols were so familiar that they were readily understood without the explanatory text. Such was that adopted by the bishop of Auxerre in the window of the Maison de l'Aumonier.

The sphere with the wings of Hermes is an emblem appropriated by Fortune. Sometimes a youth, sometimes a maiden, with winged feet lightly poised on an ever-rolling globe, or wheel, the figure of the deity was well known and popular in the sixteenth century. Derived from the antique, it had quickly leaped into favour on the revival of learning. there were many variations of the familiar allegory. Machiavelli had devoted a sonnet to it; Alciati had placed it among his emblems; it had been painted and carved, and all were acquainted with the symbols that gave it pictorial expression. When, therefore, the winged globe was abstracted from the whole subject and used as a separate emblem it was readily interpreted. But to guard against all possibility of misunderstanding, the printer Gryphius has added to the symbol the motto, Virtute Duce, Comite Fortuna [Virtue as guide, Fortune as companion]. The meaning is identical with that of the Dinteville motto and conclusively proves the point.

The wings of Hermes! OK, so the image was appropriated as the new symbol of Fortune. Fortuna ain't quite a god, but heck, she's close enough as makes no odds; I sure don't want to mess with her! The point is that those early publishers really did think of themselves as the new gods! Immediately this connected back to the van den Keere world map of 1611. Take a look at the largest of the three images above. Of all the allegorical tableau from that map, that's the one which fascinated me the most. See how Death is wrestling with a man for control of an hourglass? That's not just any man. See the apparatus near his feet that's labeled "DE WITTE PAES"? That's a printing press, and the label means "The White Press", the printing shop in the center of Amsterdam where the map was made. That man is a printer, and as far as I can see, he's on a roughly equal footing with Death! The way I read this, the printer sees his craft as giving mankind the godlike power to impede Death; able to store and disseminate information in ways that were impossible mere decades earlier, man can effectively slow the deleterious effects of time by passing his essence to posterity! Gryphius thinks of himself as a modern day Hermes, and van den Keere is ready to rassle with Death!

Intriguingly, that wasn't the only connection to the van den Keere map. Hervey's book is about a specific painting: The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein. YIKES! I think this is what the young kids nowadays are calling "freaky-deaky". Until I read the article I had no idea that anamorphic perspective was an invention of the Early Renaissance - or even what anamorphic perspective was. That is an amazing painting, one that I'll be spending some time analyzing. For now, though, it's enough for me to ponder what these images say about their makers. These symbols speak of people deeply invested in establishing a cosmology, yet unable to find their own place in it: "Look at our new tools! We've mapped the world, and our knowledge flies to its four corners! Surely we are the new gods! Aren't we? Aren't we? ... By the way, tell that skinny guy with the hood and the scythe to stop staring at me."

When I read history I get scared easily. It ain't a matter of taking the road less traveled by, because the road in the yellow wood branches off not into two, but into a seeming infinitude of paths. I cringe at all I'll never have time to learn. I think that's why I have a tendency to focus so obsessively on minutiae like this; if I bring my entire sensorium to bear on a square millimeter of the surface of history, it blocks out the vertiginous view of all I don't know. It's very easy to fill my mind's eye with one man and his printing press - to wonder why he thought it was a Good Idea to take a wooden block with those particular symbols, put some ink on it, and press it to paper. It's a lot easier than attempting to get my head around the vast sweep of history going on around that man. The disadvantages are obvious: after all, the whole point of me studying history is to understand that vast sweep, and here I am wasting precious time on trivialities. This time, though, it worked out well. Gryphius's frontispiece led me down unexpected paths, and now I'm thinking back to my lectures about Erasmus and wondering just how much his humanist teachings affected that printer in Lyon. Sometimes those minutiae I chase because they're comfortable turn into windows, and I find myself looking out at an expanse I'd been scared to face before. And you know what? The sun feels kinda good on my face.

With apologies to Samuel Pepys

2008-02-24T08:37:00.004-05:00

23rd. Up betimes and to the woods, where walked up and down a short while with much content. Thence home a while to look after my blog; and to Whole Foods, where the doors were not then open; but presently they did open; and I in, and bought a bagel for 79¢ and went home again, where I ate it with some eggs to my breakfast. But Lord! To think of the many thousands of eggs I have eat since I was a boy, and yet upon the eating of every new egg I find it to be the pleasantest in all respects that ever I had in my life! I by train under the river to Penn Station (all the way reading in Wikipedia of the Hussite revolt), where great crowding of people that had a desire to get up stairs. But then it shews them fools, that they would not walk to the farther stairs, which they might all have gone up faster. Thence to the New York Public Library to look upon a book about van den Keere (a Dutchman, that made a great map of the world in the year 1611), wherein I saw most incomparable pictures. So away, and did happen upon the most perfect pair of stockings for my Lady Watson, they being of a pattern very pretty and mirthful, with little black dogs on a field of green. I did buy them, and the other stockings together with them, for seven dollars, and was well pleased with them and the price. Taking up my wife, went homewards, and so to Sakura, there to meet my Lady Watson and Sir M. Castle, where we were very merry, and a mighty pretty dinner of sushi rolls we had, and much discourse. I did give my Lady Watson the stockings, which pleased her, and she did give to my wife a fine picture of her cat put within a frame, that pleased her mightily. And so we home, and I gave my Lady Watson some books for her to read of the life of Henry VIII. And so they left us, and I to my blog and my wife to her studying. And so to bed, where we lay a while, I rubbing my wife's feet, and we very merry.

A new release of Mattingly's Armada!

2008-02-23T19:25:00.011-05:00

Tell everyone! Prepare the hearth! Slaughter the fatted calf! Let all the church bells ring! O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful! and after that, out of all whooping!

I sense that you do not share my excitement. Can it be you are unaware of Garrett Mattingly's masterpiece? Have you not surrendered yourself to the warp and weft of his narrative, not wondered at how one man could be both meticulous historian and storyteller born?

Well... dude!... whaddaya waitin' for??

Last night, while writing the previous entry, I noticed that a new hardcover edition of The Armada is scheduled for release just a few days from now. Cool!!! The previous edition of 2005 was a paperback. Aside from this fancy edition of 2002, it seems that there hasn't been a hardcover edition in quite a while. And at only ten bucks, this new one is a steal. So buy one!* Buy ten! You buy me one, I'll buy you one, and we'll both give 'em away to some lucky, lucky reader. And if you've already read your Mattingly, then why not work your way down the following reading list? Believe me, it won't get boring: the more I've read about Philip II, the more fascinatingly inscrutable he becomes.**

The Spanish Armada by Martin and Parker: Among other things, their modern research on the Armada gunnery and their character analysis of Philip II are welcome additions to the literature.
The Great Enterprise, ed. Stephen Usherwood: An excellent collection of period documents that shed a great deal of light on the Armada.
The Voyage of the Armada - the Spanish Story by David Howarth: A very valuable and criminally overlooked addition to the literature. Howarth will give you more insight into the nautical mechanics of the Armada than you ever knew you needed.
The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: I was only 64 pages into this one when, on December 26, I got bitten by the cartography bug. I'd read enough, though, to say with certainty that it adds a new and entirely necessary dimension to the Armada story: the experience of the common soldiery and populace on both the Spanish and English sides. It starts out with Miguel Cervantes doing his duty as an Andalusian procurement official for King Philip during the intensive Armada preparations - and getting excommunicated for his troubles!
The Appointment of the Duke of Medina Sidonia to the Command of the Spanish Armada, an article by I.A.A. Thomson of the University of Keele in The Historical Journal, XII, 2 (1969), pp. 197-216: This brilliant article deconstructs the usual straw man approach to Medina Sidonia, showing why he was not only the right man, but perhaps the only man, for the job. If you don't have access to JSTOR then beg, borrow, or steal it. NOW!
The Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto by Niccolo Capponi: a densely detailed yet surprisingly engaging account of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, and the preposterously convoluted politics leading up to it.

*I highly recommend the 1959 hardcover version, regularly available from Amazon resellers for a buck or less plus shipping. If you can't afford one, I will send you one. I am serious. I buy copies specifically to give them away.

**I remain hopeful that someday I'll scrut him.

It ain't quite the light on the road to Damascus, but it'll do.

2008-02-22T19:56:00.006-05:00

In December I had two watershed moments in quick succession, and I think they represented my first steps beyond a sort of event horizon. Today I realized that I'd only recounted one of them. This is the other. To set it up, I need to go back a ways.

A few years ago I took a hard look at my own ignorance and resolved to make myself less so by reading only history. This was very difficult, since I'd never liked history and never had a head for it; my attention span wasn't the greatest and my retention was abysmal. At first, my progress felt like slogging uphill through molasses. Then I read The Armada by Garrett Mattingly, and the scales fell from my eyes. It was the first time I had ever enjoyed reading a history book - the first time I even realized that it was possible for history to be exciting. In the midst of this wonder and exhilaration I was also frustrated: that I hadn't found this out twenty years earlier, and that despite my excitement I was still moving through the book at a snail's pace. Ah, but the reason for that snail's pace gave me still more cause for exhilaration: I was stopping every few sentences, and sometimes several times per sentence, to look up all the things I didn't know; and for the first time in my life, I was enjoying it so much that I didn't mind! Mattingly's book is a model of meticulous history, yet it's also the most captivating story I've ever heard. He gave me a precious gift: the knowledge that there are ways of looking at history that make it exciting.

I finished The Armada in May of 2006, and during the next eighteen months I discovered more ways to make history exciting. David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing was a high point; it taught me a few things about historiography that I'll be talking about in future entries. I read several more books about the early days of the American Revolution, and several more about the Spanish Armada, growing more fascinated by the world of Philip II with each one. During my hikes and my commute I listened to many Teaching Company lectures on my mp3 player. I started to feel like I actually knew a thing or two. Yet I also felt like I could never make up for lost time, or for my lousy attention span and retention: what I didn't know was so vast that whenever I learned something new, I had nothing to connect it to. Soon it would fall out of sight, swallowed up by the deep shadows in my miles-wide chasm of ignorance.

Then in December I felt something new happen in my head. I had been going back and forth through the 12 Byzantine Rulers podcasts. They're good, but since they're so detailed, and since I had so little knowledge of the period, I had literally listened to some episodes around six times in order to take everything in. Again, I was frustrated, feeling like I hadn't even achieved a mental framework on which to hang anything, let alone a robust structure! But then one morning I felt a framework being built. I was listening to the episode on Irene, an empress who presided over a particularly disastrous era for the Byzantine Empire in the eighth century. The iconoclastic controversy distracted the empire from the Muslim threat that was whittling away its periphery. In the midst of this, Pope Leo got so fed up with receiving absolutely no support from Constantinople for Italy's fight against the Lombards that he finally went to France for help! That's why Charlemagne got in bed with the Papacy, it's how the Papal States got created, and it's what directly preceded the unprecedented crowning of Charlemagne by Leo in 800! Well, anyway, here I am swimming in the wide-open space and struggling to remember all this stuff, and all of a sudden my ears perk up. "Hey, Charlemagne! I had been struggling to remember what I knew of him..." and I felt the two whisper-thin filaments of understanding connect, and there was a TZZZZT as they were arc-welded together, and there was a framework. It's slender, but it's there; my attempted understanding of the eastern empire came together with what I'd forgotten about the west, and now I feel like I have something that's actually overarching and that can support other things.

Again, it may not sound like much. But it's real, and it's mine.

Waghenaer Redux

2008-02-21T20:15:00.017-05:00

See, here's what y'gotta know about me: sometimes I'm full of crap.

Now some folks who love me will take objection to the above statement because they don't like me beating myself up. I must point out, however, that I say such things with an eye toward recognizing the fallibility of perception. This is a valuable exercise. Some folks don't give it a thought. Others fancy themselves enlightened thinkers because they recognize that different people remember the same event differently; then they fall into the trap of thinking that recognizing human fallibility makes them immune to it. Big mistake. I figure this logical fallacy has seduced most of us at one time or another. With that in mind, I report that my account of the Waghenaer maps in the Armada was rather mangled.

First of all, I used the words "eastern Dutch coast". Jaap pointed out that there is no eastern Dutch coast, and that the Netherlands do have an eastern border - with Germany. It pains me to admit this, but it took me several days and a consultation with Grace to understand this comment. I was picturing the low countries from the perspective of the Armada sweeping along past Calais, Gravelines, Dunkerque, Nieuwport, Oostende, Blankenberge, and the Schelde. Admittedly I had forgotten just how abruptly the coast curves to the north, but the point remains that, in my head, it still seemed perfectly reasonable to refer to the part of the coast that lay furthest to the east as "the eastern Dutch coast". Jaap - and apparently everyone else who doesn't have my brain - thinks that an eastern coast means a coast to the east of the land, and since there ain't no such thing in the Netherlands, then "the eastern Dutch coast" is a misnomer. This goes to show just how easily people can miscommunicate; often I wonder, with a shiver of apprehension, just how many times I've talked at cross-purposes with people and never realized it.

So. On to my error about the Waghenaer editions. After I went back to Howarth's The Voyage of the Armada I found that the Armada did have a complete edition. Here are the relevant bits.

August 7, 1588: The armada is sitting, waiting for Parma to come out, or at least to send local pilots.

In fact, there was a harbour in Parma's control not far away, which could have sheltered the armada, even for the winter: the river Schelde, leading up to Antwerp. The southern side of it and the city of Antwerp were in Parma's hands. The northern side, and the port of Flushing near the mouth, were held by the Dutch. The armada was strong enough to fight its way in past Flushing, and to have a good chance of defending itself off Antwerp; but without the pilots it had not a hope of finding the entrance channel, which is called the Wielingen and extends between immense sandbanks, shallow but invisible, almost twenty miles out to sea.

August 9: After the Battle of Gravelines, the Armada ships have no anchors and are drifting helplessly along the Flanders coast. Everyone aboard the ships is preparing to die.

Some time early that morning the whole of the fleet must have crossed the Wielingen, the entrance to the River Schelde, where there was a clear run downwind to comparative safety. Waghenaer described the way in, but his directions were excessively complicated and they depended (like the entry to Spithead) on seeing landmarks and having the local knowledge to recognize them: 'When Wotkerke is one with Blankenberge and St Catalina shuts into Ostend, you are then before the mouth of the Wielingen: but when the steeple of Ostend is one with St Catherines then you run upon the shallow called Trix, which always turneth about in manner of a whirlpool by reason of the violent meeting of sundry currents and tides...' Nobody in the armada seems to have thought of trying it, except perhaps the remaining Flemish pilot, and he was not in the van where he might conceivably have led the fleet, but was bringing up the rear.

Here's the bit about the gap in the waggoners. The Latin version, which the armada would have carried, was published in 1586. It was the English version that was incomplete in 1588.

Just before the armada sailed, however, there was a great innovation in northern pilotage. This was the first atlas of sea-charts of western and northern Europe. It was published in Holland by Lucas Janszoon Wagenhaer of Enchuysen - for the Dutch at that time were leaders in cartography. The first volume, from Cadiz to the Zuider Zee, appeared in 1584, and the second, of the North Sea and the Baltic, in 1585. A Latin edition of both parts was published in 1586. An English edition, entitled The Mariners Mirrour, was commissioned by Lord Howard in 1586 but was not published until the armada had come and gone, in October of 1588. Wagenhaer's work was an immense success - so much so that all sea charts were called Waggoners by English seamen for at least a century afterwards. In 1588 it was much the best thing of its kind in existence, and there is no doubt the armada pilots had it, either in Dutch or Latin, or perhaps with the relevant parts put into Spanish. The English, on the other hand, did not. But of course they hardly needed it. Most of the time, they were in their own home waters, and they knew the Channel coast by heart.

So. The waggoners were important, but not as important as I remembered. The combination of the ships' helplessness after having cut cables at Gravelines, and the lack of expert navigators for the coast near the Schelde, was much more important.

Here is the lovely image of the 1583 Waghenaer map that I used for the header.

WOO HOO! A Waghenaer from 1590!!!

2008-02-17T22:10:00.009-05:00

See my correction of this entry here.

The 1590 Waghenaer map in the Maps: Finding Our Place in the World exhibit so excited me that I had to give it a separate entry. Click on the image above to see the larger one that I got from the Wikipedia article on Waghenaer. The image is supposedly from 1584, but I believe the same plate was used for the 1590 edition I saw in the exhibit. This has to be one of the first editions published after the Spanish Armada ended in failure late in 1588, which means that it's also one of the first to include what Medina Sidonia had so desperately needed in August of that year: information about the eastern Dutch coast.

In The Voyage of the Armada, David Howarth stresses the importance of the rutters, or coastal navigation instructions. Waghenaer was the first to publish comprehensive collections of these instructions; that these collections came to be known as "waggoners" illustrates what a boon Waghenaer's work represented to mariners. A waggoner was published soon before the Armada sailed; since copies were readily available, the Armada commanders almost certainly carried them. However, the edition that included the eastern Dutch coast was not published until later in the year, by which time the Armada ships were variously sunk along the coast of Flanders and the North Sea, shipwrecked along the coast of Ireland, and scattered along the Biscayan ports of Spain after having limped home. Howarth makes a fair case for the missing piece of the 1588 edition being at least partially responsible for this failure: if, as the Spaniards were sweeping helplessly along the Dutch coast with the west wind after having been forced to cut their cables, they had known that they could have anchored at Antwerp, they might have gained succor - might even have spent the winter there. As it was, they simply tried their best not to get beached or shipwrecked, and made for the North Sea the moment the wind allowed.

The Armada story was my gateway into the love of history, and it has continued to fascinate me more with every new book or article I read. Imagine my excitement upon seeing a Waghenaer sitting right there behind the glass! Granted, this is more of a display edition - something a wealthy merchant would have admired and shown off, rather than something a mariner would take aboard ship. The Armada commanders would almost certainly have carried a standard, less lavishly illustrated rutter with very extensive printed instructions like the following. Thanks to Jaap for sending me the photostats with his translation.

If the tower of Oostende comes over the western gate, or over the wind mill of Oostende, then go that direction until you are free of the banks, then you go between the land and a bank called the Geire which runs toward Oostende: and when you get along Oostende, so you may move seaward in order to come to the Wielingen.

It took a navigator who was thoroughly experienced with that section of coastline to even use the rutter, which paired the printed text with illustrations of coastline profiles as seen from the water. See those peaks marching along the top of the map? Those aren't distant mountains; they're profiles of the coast matched up against the same section of coast, as seen in typical map style from above, shown directly below them.

Chasing a Tangent: The van den Keere World Map of 1611

2008-02-16T19:12:00.014-05:00

Text in red italics indicate questions for which I'm seeking answers. In other words, please help!

Here I go again. This is the third time that I've sat down and tried to plow through my entry on the Field Museum maps exhibit and spent most of the day investigating a single item. Click the image above, and you may get a sense of why I wanted to plumb this map's elaborate symbolism, especially the skeletal spectre of Death apparently wrestling with a male figure over control of an hourglass. The allegories are fascinating: Ticho(Tycho) Brahe and a warrior angel* confer over a globe about the size of the ones I just saw; Abram Ortelios(Abraham Ortelius) sits reading a book while Proclus peers over his shoulder; Archimedes likewise observes Ptolemeus(Ptolemy) working on a globe; and Euclides(Euclides) and Mercator confer over another tome while a very sinister-looking "Alphonsus Rex Hispanes" - presumably a representation of the king of Spain, but I don't know who Alphonsus is - leers over their shoulders.

Almost as interesting as the allegorical figures is the thick border, comprising forty tableau of figures, cities, and scenes from around the world. Here are the captions. Some of them are self-explanatory, some not so much.

HISPANI
ROMA
ITALI
FRANCFURT AM MAIN
GERMANI
IMPERATOR ROMANORUM
HOLLANDI
BRITTANI
LONDON
GALLI
REX GALLIA ET MATER REG.
PARIS
CHINESI
REX CHINARUM
GUINENSES - Inhabitants of Guinea-Bissau
MINA - Cripes! Look at all the things to which Mina might refer. One of the meanings listed is "Arabic sea port", which would seem to fit the bill.
ABISSINI - Abyssinians, or inhabitants of historic Ethiopia
HAMBURGUM
REX ET REGINA DANIAE ET NORW.
DANI - Check out the dude on the left. Is that not the coolest outfit you've ever seen?
BANTAM - When this map was made, the Dutch and the English were vying for control over this strategically important trading city in Java.
IAVANI - I think this is Java.
GOA
MALABARI - People of Malabar
REX MAGORUM - King of... um... the Magi??? The people and clothes look Arabic, but the etymological vagueness of the word's origins tell me almost nothing aside from it probably refers to peoples of Persia or India. Can someone help me?
PERNAMBUCI - People of Pernambuco
HAVANA
BRASILIANI
PERNAMBUCO - another important region to the Dutch East India Company
POLONI - People of Poland
MAGNÆ BRIT. GAL. ET. HIB. REX ET REG. - The full title of James I was His Majesty, James VI, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France(Gaul) and Ireland(Hibernia), Defender of the Faith, etc.
ARABI
ALGAR - I just don't know. There's an Algar in Spain, but I can't find any history behind it.
ÆGIPTI
REX TURCARUM - The A is encircled, presumably alluding to the mystical and alchemical abilities of the Turks.
TURCI
CONSTANTINOPOLI
SIRIACUS
SEVILLA

I want to delve into the theatrically symbolic world of this map to gain insight into the early seventeenth century people with whom van den Keere intended his images to resonate. I'll save that for after I've made a trip to the NYPL to peruse their copy of The World Map of 1611, a book about the map written by Günter Schilder and James A Welu in 1980. For now, all I can do is wonder if I'm completely off-base, or if I saw something that Peter Whitfield didn't when he wrote his book The Image of the World. Referring to the man and the skeletal figure I mentioned above, he says "...To their right is an elaborate vanitas, a man whose life and work is threatened by the figure of death." This is almost the opposite of how I interpreted it! The struggle between man and Death was particularly striking to me because the two seemed to be evenly matched in their wrestling over the hourglass, and because of the printing apparatus at the man's feet. I interpreted this as a symbol of printing as a new and almost godly power: mankind can now store and distribute knowledge much more easily, and this represents a partial defeat of death. Before the printing press, man could do nothing in the face of Time, the bringer of Death. Now, with the printing press, man has the power to hamper Death - to dampen the ravaging nature of time by projecting his knowledge - his essence - into the future. The man doesn't look threatened to me; far from it, he looks like he's now on an equal footing with Death!

*Whitfield says that "...an academy of ancient and modern scientists... are gathered around a celestial globe under the guidance of the figure of Astronomy." I tried to find a precedent for the personification of astronomy, but all I've found so far is Urania, the muse of astronomy and astrology, and Raphael's entirely human-looking figure holding a crystal sphere in The School of Athens, a fresco in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura. Darned if I can find any personification of Astronomy that looks like a warrior angel. Can anyone help me out here?

I know where I am. Now what?

2008-02-14T14:23:00.008-05:00

On Monday afternoon I was exhausted and very nearly brain-dead after a stressful weekend. I left work early so that I would be sure to be on time for my volunteer interview at the Newark branch of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of America. At Hoboken I got on what I thought was the right train. I promptly lost myself in Byzantine nuttiness, and it wasn't until I saw the LCD board at the front of the car announcing that the next stop was SUFFERN that I realized how spectacularly wrong I was. I had gotten on an express train to a small town just over the border in New York State. I fumed. To no avail I tried to go back to the Byzantine intrigue du jour. Then I brought up the map on my iPhone, located myself using the wholly awesome "pseudo-GPS" capability, and found out that I was only about ten miles from Suffern. Surely the train would make it to Suffern in plenty of time for me to catch the 6:07 inbound train - a good thing, too, because the next one wasn't for two hours. Was that good enough for me, you ask? Why, my dear, you do not know me. May I introduce you to my very special friend, M. OCD? Yes, I began compulsively pressing the little locator icon, updating my position on the map as though it had some talismanic power to draw the train to its destination one femtosecond sooner.

Yes, I know where I am. Whether I do anything useful - or whether I can do anything useful - with the information erupting in thick, chewy boluses from the ever more ubiquitous data spigots is another question entirely. Is it possible that I hear echoes? Was there a moderately successful German merchant in 1507 who, after mounting the new Waldseemüller world map on his wall, stepped back and experienced a frisson of angst over whether he would ever actually need to know that North America was distinct from Asia?

Mapping Mountains

2008-02-09T16:31:00.015-05:00

If there's one cartographic trend I noticed during my four days at the Festival of Maps, it's experimentation in the depiction of mountains. Ptolemy atlases of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries contained at least as many different styles of mountains as there were cartographers. Click on the image above for a larger version, then come back to this list describing the eight images across the top from left to right.

“Secunda Europe tabula” (Europe 2). In Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia. Edited by Domitius Calderinus; map engraver unknown. Rome: Arnold Buckinck, 1478.
“Hispania novella.” In Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia. Translated and with maps by Francesco Berlinghieri. Florence: Nicolo Todescho [Nicolaus Laurentii], 1480–1482.
“Tertia Europe tabula” (Europe 3). In Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia. Based on a manuscript edited and with maps by Donnus (Dominus) Nicolaus Germanus. Ulm: Lienhart Holle, 1482.
“Quarta Europe tabula” (Europe 4). In Claudius Ptolemy, Cosmographia. Based on a manuscript edited and with maps by Donnus (Dominus) Nicolaus Germanus. Ulm: Johann Reger, 1486.
“Tabula Europ Sexta Italiae” (Europe 6). In Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia. Edited by Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller; maps by Waldseemüller. Strasbourg: Published by Jacobus Aeszler and Georg Übelin, printed by Johann Schott, 1513.
“Tabula VIII Europ” (Europe 8). In Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia. Translated by Willibald Pirckheimer; edited by Michael Servetus (Villanovanus); maps by Martin Waldseemüller, reduced by Lorenz Fries. Lyons: Melchior and Gaspar Trechsel, 1535.
“Tabula Europae IX” (Europe 9). In Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia. Edited and with maps by Sebastian Münster. Basel: Henricus Petri, 1540.
“Aphricae Tabula II” (Africa 2). Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia. Edited and with maps by Sebastian Münster (from woodblocks used for the 1540 edition). Basel: Henricus Petri, 1545.

Some cartographers tried to show mountains from above, thus providing a perspective consistent with the rest of the landscape; others showed them more or less from the side. Within their established perspectives, some attempted to convey a true sense of texture and depth and others established only the vaguest of forms, but all were more or less cartoonish: they showed that a mountain range was there, but made no attempt to convey this peak or that particular pass. The fascinating thing to me, aside from the sheer range of experimentation, is that during this period there seems to be no correspondence between attempts at consistent perspective and attempts at [what is an art word that's equivalent to "resolution"?]. In #1 The mountains are very cartoonish and are portrayed from a land-bound vantage point with no attempt at perspective, yet some attempt was made to give them a sense of depth through shading. #2 shows refined texturing, yet is completely symbolic: mountain ranges appear as perfectly smooth, abruptly beveled plateaus. It's an interesting technique, but that smooth beveling has a major drawback: my eye keeps telling me that those are river valleys, not mountains. #3 displays a more successful attempt at realistic texture and shading than the very crude #4, yet both were clearly intended to convey a true overhead perspective. #5 really caught my eye; it was the most refined attempt that I saw from that period to realistically show textured, shaded mountains from overhead. In #6-#8 we go back to cartoonish mountains, yet these are slightly less so than #1. Also, the cartographers make some effort at perspective by making one mountain recede behind another; this allows the bird's-eye slanted view of the mountains to coexist more happily with the notion of looking down on the rest of the landscape from directly above.

Why am I making these distinctions? I think it's fascinating to back up and look at our modern assumptions about what makes a good map. We think that the "right" way to depict mountains is to show them from above, just like all the other features. We may not, however, readily see that this assumption is steeped in a world where airplanes have been around for quite some time, and even satellites are old news. In short, our mind's eye readily launches into orbit. I doubt it would be so easy for many people in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, so the orbiting perspective would be less readable for them. From a purely practical perspective, showing a mountain from the side might be the only sensible option: since they never would have conceived of seeing a mountain from directly overhead, it may never have occurred to them to show it that way. When I first noticed the various mountains I assumed that, since those cartographers would naturally have preferred both a refined image and an overhead perspective, the cartoonish representations must imply a lack of artistic skill; now I think I was wrong, and that at least one of my assumptions was based on having seen maps produced according to the needs of my own time.

Now, let's leap forward about 260 years, and look at one product of Enlightenment rationalism. See the large image on the left? It comes from Lamarck and Candolle's "Carte Botanique de France" of 1805 - and it's worth noting that, in an age long before airplanes and satellites, someone thought it was a Good Idea to draw mountains exactly as they would appear from above. They look astonishingly realistic to me. If you don't agree, then compare them to the Google Maps satellite photo on the right of a section of the Alps. Separated at birth?

Chasing a Tangent: Nolli's "Grand Plan of Rome"

2008-02-06T13:28:00.001-05:00

While writing about the Maps: Finding Our Place in the World exhibit at the Field Museum, I got involved in the following mini-investigation into the symbolism in Giambattista Nolli's "La Pianta Grande di Roma" (The Great Plan of Rome).

My notes say "Minerva(?) or some chick with keys in hand, being crowned by a cherub, holding out hand to angel, who's pointing to surveyors!" The fantastically well-designed map engine on this site tells me that the "chick" is actually a personification of modern Rome, and the angel and the surveyor are putti. OK, so what the heck are "putti"? Well, as it turns out, they're those cute little naked baby angels that one sees in Renaissance art and Hallmark stores. Only it turns out that they ain't angels; they're the personification of the child. Anyway. I - and apparently a lot of other people - thought those sickeningly cute red-heinied little guys were Cherubim. OK, so what the heck are "Cherubim"? Whoa. Check this out. Not so much with the cute. Turns out they're right up there in the heirarchy of angels, and that they're mentioned in the Bible in the book of Genesis (Gen. 3:24) as the angels who guarded the east side of the Garden of Eden with "a flaming sword which turned every way". Yikes. And they... whubbahuh??? This article mentions "the mercy seat", which is the title of one of my favorite Johnny Cash songs! Turns out the mercy seat is the object resting on the Ark of the Covenant, and that the golden statues on either end are Cherubim. As I was Wikiing, another connection cropped up when, on the Cherubim page, I saw a very familiar statue. It seems that a significant number of scholars identify the Shedu, or Lamassu, as the origin of Cherubim. The image was familiar because I saw a statue of a Shedu in the Oriental Institute on December 26 - the very day when I caught the cartography bug at their magnificent European Cartographers and The Ottoman World 1500–1750 exhibit. I love it when searches loop back on themselves.

The figure - angel, putto, whatever - standing next to the personification of modern Rome holds a flag bearing a superimposed P and X. I drew the flag in my notes and put a question mark next to it. That night, over pizza at Pequod's, I asked the Gunroom folks what it meant. Turns out that's the Chi Rho - the first two letters in the Greek spelling of the word Christ - that Constantine had on his and his soldiers' shields at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, which famously cemented his conversion to Chrisitanity.

Chasing a Tangent: the Matthew Paris Itinerary

2008-02-03T12:13:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I hoped to finish my entry on the Field Museum exhibit, but I ended up spending most of the day obsessing over the second of forty-eight items about which I wanted to write! This Google Map is the result of my running obsessively along that tangent.

I wonder if Matthew Paris's Itinerary from London to Apulia is more, or less, fascinating to me than it would have been to one of his thirteenth-century contemporaries. Paris lived in an age when cartographic sensibilities were more or less one-dimensional, so his schematic map would not have seemed at all crude; I suspect that anyone who saw it would have experienced unalloyed awe at this elegant map of a great journey both physical and spiritual. I, on the other hand, experienced a frisson of amusement at its quaint simplicity when I first saw it, and it's this very ironic detachment that ultimately makes the map all the more compelling: the more I look at it, the more I experience a very un-ironic appreciation of Paris's skill. That process of breaking down detachment and connecting with the creator, or at least the creator's intent, is what art is all about for me. I think Professor William Kloss says it very well when he speaks of the image of Mont Saint-Michel from the Bayeux Tapestry during his lectures on European art.

...but this is narrative art of the highest order: proof, if proof was needed, that seemingly naive art is often the subtlest as well as the clearest; the most moving as well as the most delightful; and most importantly the most memorable art.

Initially I got drawn into this map by the structure halfway down the left side of the second page. You can see it on the extreme right of this image. "What the heck are those waves," I asked myself, "and why is there a structure sitting on them?" The more I looked at it the more I suspected that those waves were actually a mountain. In order to know for sure, I had to find out the location of that stop on the route. I never would have been able to do this without Grace, who knows French very well. She helped me interpret the labels that looked to me like... well, not like Greek, but almost as incomprehensible. I also found this Pilgrim Wiki page on Matthew Paris, which turned out to be absolutely indispensable. Using Google Maps in Terrain mode, and with more help from Grace, I nosed around the Alps and eventually found Mont Cenis; sure enough, those waves aren't waves. They're a mountain in the Alps.

As I was making my Google map I had to back up from several cartographical cul-de-sacs; there are a lot of places in France with the same name, especially places named after saints! Eventually, though, I found the proper site that extended my route in a sensible and logical direction - in all cases but one. Fleury is a bit of a riddle. I checked and cross-checked, finding the Wikipedia article which states that Fleury Abbey "was one of the richest and most celebrated Benedictine monasteries of Western Europe". "OK," sez I. "I get that you'd want to include that on your itinerary. But why on earth wouldn't you detour south as soon as you left Paris, then return to your trail before you got so far south? The ground is flatter, and the path much shorter, between Paris and Fleury than between Chanceaux and Fleury." Well, apparently historians have spent some time discussing this very riddle. The following comes from this article from "The Art Bulletin"; thanks to Grace for finding it.

As soon as the itinerary moves south of the city of Paris, and so beyond the personal travel experience of Matthew Paris, inaccuracies creep in. [48] Historians of cartography have understandably valued the accuracy of any map's contents, and those who have commented on Matthew Paris's maps have cited the pages that follow, those beyond the city of Paris, as examples of the failure of mapmaking in the Middle Ages. Yet if we examine such artwork not for its accuracy of depiction but for the manner of that depiction--how effective it is in shaping the places of the Latin West as phenomenal experiences--then this insistence on geographic precision evaporates. [49] Rather than being a reliable guide to France, Italy, and the Holy Land, the map was far more important to the St. Albans monk for what it presented to him as he imagined movements through the famous towns and Benedictine abbeys of the Latin West on his mental journey toward the Heavenly Jerusalem. In other words, there is no "out of the way" when you imagine a journey. Thus, it made sense to have Fleury (flurie), site of Saint Benedict's bones (Fig. 2), come between Chanceaux (Charceus) and Beaune on the way to Lyons, even though it is actually located directly south of Paris. [50] This map, like other medieval images, asks to be viewed as a mediator of experience. It was designed for a Benedictine audience by a fellow monk who, as far as we know, went abroad only once. The map and its active viewing were a site of exchange not of limited geographic knowledge but of monastic desire to reach for the Heavenly Jerusalem.

I'm not sure that I buy Connolly's conclusion. It would make sense if the other fifty-three sites in the itinerary weren't laid out in a perfectly sensible order. Occam's Razor tells me that this was a mistake of some sort. Then again, there is the nagging issue of the slanted lines on the map. Look at the bottom right, where the route goes from Chanceaux to Fleury to Beune. See the way the "Jurnee" lines slant to the right on the way to Fleury, and then slant to the left on the way to Beune? That's the only place in the map where the lines don't go straight up, with the exception of the alternate routes. It sure seems to indicate a detour to the west, so in this case, Occam's Razor tells me that Connolly is correct! Regardless of that, though, I'm happy to have a nice new map of my very own.

Chicago Festival of Maps, Day 1: Field Museum

2008-02-01T22:31:00.069-05:00

On December 26 I caught the cartography bug when I went to the "European Cartographers and the Ottoman World, 1500–1750" exhibit at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. A few weeks later I started looking at the other exhibits in Chicago's Fesival of Maps, and decided I had to come back before they were gone. Having taken two days off work, I flew to Chicago on the night of Thursday, January 24. On Friday I got to the Field Museum when the doors opened at 9:00. Packed full of priceless milestones in the history of cartography, the exhibit was superlative both in quantity and quality. Here is the full list of pieces. I was completely overwhelmed by noon, yet I stayed until about 5:30; though my head was reeling, I just couldn't bring myself to walk away from it. Even so, I didn't get to see everything. In describing what I did see, I'll try to convey some of the magic I felt at the exhibit.

Text in red italics indicate questions for which I'm seeking answers. In other words, please help!

Italy
In Atlas des Groβen Kurfürsten (Atlas of the Great Elector)
Giovanni Antonio Magini, Italian
1665
Printed maps, bound in leather and gold
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Map Department

As a maps newbie I don't know all the lingo yet, but I'm pretty sure that this first atlas is what cartographers refer to as "FRIGGIN' HUGE!!!". It weighs two hundred seventy five pounds. The covers, apparently slabs of wood, are bound in leather and gold, and have three metal clasps the size of a peanut butter sandwich. Each page is the size of a twin bed. It is spread open to a map of Italy entitled "NOVA DESCRITTIONE D'ITALIA DI GIOANN. ANTONIO MAGINO". The placard says that it was created in 1665 for Friedrich Wilhelm, the Duke of Prussia, by the seventeenth century's preeminent Dutch publishers, and that it hasn't been in the U.S. since the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, also in Chicago. Giovanni Antonio Magini died in 1617, so presumably this is an enlarged version of one of his maps.

After staring at this behemoth for a while, I noticed a few interesting things.

It has a thirty-two point compass rose with the fleur-de-lis that, by the seventeenth century, was standard. A line of script radiates outward along each rhumb line, but I can't make it out.
There's the "MARE TIRRENO", or Tyrrhenian Sea, but what's that up there by Genoa - "MARE LIGVSTICO"? With Grace's help I figure out that this means "Sea of the Ligures", the Ligures being an ancient people who lived in an area stretching from Northern Italy into southern Gaul. Oh look. I just looked up the Tyrrhenian Sea on Wikipedia, and there's the Ligurian Sea. I don't remember seeing that before. Drat. And I thought I was all smart knowing about the Tyrrhenian Sea.
The Adriatic is labeled "GOLFO DI VENETIA", which I also didn't recall seeing before. A bit of Googling confirms that this was the common name for it at the time. Given the longstanding rivalry between Genoa and Venice, I suppose that must have annoyed the Genoans to no end. Wikipedia says that Genoa helped fund Magini's "Atlante geografico d'Italia" (Geographic Atlas of Italy); I wonder if that one contained the reference to the Gulf of Venice.
Across the bottom of the map appear the names of regions of Italy: "ROMA VENETIA GENUA NEAPOLIS FLORENTIA MEDIOLANUM". That last one is the only one I didn't recognize. The Wikipedia entry says that Mediolanum is ancient Milan. Ah.

Route from London, England to Apulia, Italy
In Liber Additamentorum
Matthew Paris, English
1252
Manuscript, ink and pigment on parchment
The British Library, London

Matthew Paris, the abbey chronicler at St. Albans, made a visual itinerary of the route from London to Apulia, on the heel of Italy, from which pilgrims could travel by sea to the Holy Land. I now know that during the exhibit I was reading the map wrong; the journey starts at the lower left of the page at 'pons Lond' and progresses upward through each successive column to the right. Each of the two pages on display is split into three columns. There's a charming simplicity to the schematic: my first reaction was that the buildings were very crudely rendered; my second reaction, hard on the heels of the first, was that Paris had quite skillfully reduced those buildings to their simplest identifying characteristics, thus making it easy for a pilgrim to verify his position with a glance. The way in which Paris distills his structures almost to pictographs reminds me of the image of Mont Saint-Michel from the Bayeux Tapestry. Come to think of it, since Paris made his itinerary in about 1252, there's no reason to think the Bayeux Tapestry didn't influence his compositional choices.

Take a look at the large image on this Collect Britain page. See the wavy bit just below the middle of the right edge? Those waves kept drawing my eye; something about the curving flourishes of the brush strokes reminds me of this ninth-century painting of Saint Matthew. Since there seemed to be a building sitting on top of them, though, I came to think that those waves were actually a mountain, and that led me to further investigation.

Road from Edo (Tokyo) to Kyoto
Tokaido bunkensu (An artistic map of the Eastern Sea Road)
Unidentified mapmaker, Japanese
18th century
Manuscript, ink and pigment on paper, mounted on silk
Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The only image I could find online was inside the virtual version of this same exhibit. Go to the first virtual room and click the arrow in the middle of the screen. This will give you a fairly decent taste of the map, although it doesn't show the lovely mountain with the hazy grey halo that accentuates its snow cap. Engagingly animated clouds roll across the lowlands between the lake and the mountain, and pink-topped grey hills huddle around its base. Orange brush strokes accentuate the grass in and around the lake. The sky is a study in the interplay between white, and a grey that's evocative of charcoal: here the greyness gives a cloud its brooding heart; there it forms a background for a cloud of white. Grey hilltops poke up through the nothingness in the distance. A few white-topped mountains, each one sticking up through a cluster of grey-topped hills, dominate the mid ground. The artist clearly wanted this to be not only beautiful, but functional as a road map; details such as trees atop boulders, houses, streams, and bridges fill the roadside, as do descriptive labels. Streaks of rain shroud part of the path near the lake. Small clusters of yellow and red - perhaps flowers, perhaps birch leaves - dot the path here and there. A tiny red Shinto shrine catches my eye, which keeps coming back to those playful clouds that roll along just like the sheet of clouds I saw rolling in over the mountains along route 280 south of San Francisco.

The placard says that this is the Tokai Road that was used during the Edo period (1602-1867) as a link between the Emperor in Kyoto and the Shogun in Edo, thus forming a link between Japan's symbolic and military leadership. The sixty-foot map, here rolled at both ends so that only a fraction of its length is on display, depicts the entire three hundred miles of the road.

Road network of the Holy Roman Empire
Das Ist der Rom Weg (This is the way to Rome)
Erhard Etzlaub, b. Erfurt (now Germany)
1500
Printed map
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Rosenwald Collection 1943.3.1448

Here is a good summary of the Rom Weg map, and here is a German page with an astonishingly high-resolution scan of the entire woodcut. If you're like me, the first thing you have to wrap your brain around is the orientation. See Denmark on the bottom and Rome on the top? It follows something like the opposite of our modern "north on top" convention. Of course, it's also distorted, almost certainly due to the cartographic inaccuracy of the time, and probably also because Etzlaub wanted to cram in as much as he could. Look at Italy and it seems like the landscape is rotated so that south is actually at about ten or eleven o'clock; look at the coast of Flanders and it would seem that south is at about one o'clock.

I'm absolutely tickled to have found such a good reproduction. Still, it's a perfect example of what I always say: No reproduction can compare to being in the presence of the original. That scan doesn't show you the rich, rough texture of the paper. It can't show you the deep woodcut impressions, clearly visible even under the dim exhibit lights, so it cannot bind you; you don't stand transfixed, visualizing the arms that turned a crank over five centuries ago and pressed the woodcut into that paper hanging inches from your nose.

The placard says that 1500 was a Jubilee, or special year of pardon, so Christians from all over Europe traveled to Rome; it also mentions that the distance between each one of the little circles on the map is 4.5 miles. Look for dotted lines and the pilgrimage paths converging on Rome from all over Europe jump out at you. Etzlaub accentuates Nuremberg in a way that kept drawing my eye back to it; I just found out that he was a Nuremberg citizen, which helps explain that. I see Seelande (Zeeland) over on the right edge and think of all the trouble that Philip II caused there half a century after that crank turned. The charm of this map lies in the way the artist not only knew the limitations of his instrument - in this case the wood - but actually turned those limitations to his advantage. Looking at the jumbled representations of Venice and Rome, I'm reminded of the way Johnny Cash used the tremolo in his ravaged voice on the American Recordings albums; those crooked spires draw my eye, enticing me with fairy tale glory.

What is that ring of mountains around Prague? I swear that they were labeled "Budweis" on the Mercator projection from 1569, but I didn't write it down and now I'm not sure that the label didn't refer to the city of Budweis rather than those mountains. That's something I'll have to look for when I see the exhibit again in Baltimore.

Route of a Vietnamese embassy to China
Unidentified mapmaker, Vietnamese
18th century
Manuscript, ink and pigment on paper
Société Asiatique, Paris

The placard says that the kings of Vietnam's Le Dynasty (1428-1788) wanted to consolidate control, so they mapped key military and commercial routes. This map shows the road and the river from above as intertwining red and yellow strips. The grey mountains flanking them, however, appear in profile; those on the top of the map point upward, and those on the bottom point downward. They show the features along the road, as seen from each side of the road! This technique of coupling each segment of an overhead perspective to a corresponding profile is not unlike what Waghenaer did in the late sixteenth century; his maps show a coastline's contour along with its distinguishing features as seen from offshore.

Family vacation map
Gallup’s Transcontinental Map of the United States,
Canada & Mexico
Gallup Map Company for the Keystone Automobile Club
circa 1930
Printed map with handwritten annotations
Private Collection

This charming memento has colored lines drawn by a family to record their vacations of 1934-38.

Road map of England and Wales
Angliae totius tabula cum distantiis notioribus in itinerantium usum
accomodata (Map of All of England, with the Most Important
Distances, Adapted for the Use of Travelers)
John Adams, English
1677
Printed map, hand colored
Private Collection

Click the small image on this page to get a sense of this enormous map.

Darn it! I wrote the wrong date in my notes. I was all excited to be seeing a map made in 1667; I found Chatham and imagined this being printed as Samuel Pepys wrote his 12 June diary entry about the Dutch cutting the Royal Charles out of the dockyards there the previous day! Oh well. The map was still contemporary with Pepys.

The placard tells the map's story: A Shropshire* fish merchant grumbled to a friend about the guesswork in calculating distances and travel times from his fisheries to nearby markets. The friend happened to be cartographer John Adams, who measured and plotted the road distances! I don't think this sentence is supposed to be taken literally, because it would take one man a hundred years to measure the roads linking the twenty four thousand points in his gazetteer. Oh, it's so gratifying to stand in front of this. I look at "Torr Kay" and "Torr Bay" and think of the Spanish Armada sailing by them in early August of 1588, the English fleet under Howard, Hawkyns and Drake close behind - but not close enough for their innovative gunnery to do the Spaniards' hulls any significant damage. I find Tilbury and think of the famous speech Elizabeth made as the Armada buggered off into the North Sea - a speech that most likely bears little resemblance to the accounts that weren't written until decades later, and most certainly belied her heinous disregard for the sailors in her navy, whom she allowed to die in squalor, disease and hunger rather than paying them for their service. I see "Marget" (Margate) and wonder again at the vain faith that allowed Philip II to think that Medina Sidonia and Parma would actually be able to meet there.

*Woo hoo! Because I took the time to memorize the historic counties of England, I know where Shropshire is! Note to self: It's not on the west coast, dumbass!

Mercator’s projection
Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium
emendate accomodata (New and Accurate Description of the
Terrestrial Globe, Amended to Suit the Uses of Navigation)
Gerard Mercator, Flemish
1569
Printed map
University Library Basel, Switzerland

Mercator's projection was profoundly important to navigation because it allowed mariners to plot a compass bearing as a straight line. The Wikipedia article has a good image of the map and a good explanation of the projection. This page has a larger image. The version of the map in this exhibit, split horizontally into three long individually framed strips, has a greater preponderance of decorative elements than the one-piece version.

My favorite aspect of this map is the ships proudly plying the oceans - ships with extremely tall castles both fore and aft. Since this map was published just nineteen years before the Spanish Armada, I feel like I'm looking with twenty-twenty hindsight at an unwittingly portentious capsule of history. Come to think of it, 1569 was a particularly formative year in the demise of those castles, because that was when Drake and Hawkyns met with "Spanish treachery" at San Juan de Ulúa. They made it back to England and spent the next few decades "singeing Philip's beard": in the words of David Howarth, "Hawkyns created the new kind of ship, and Drake created the way of commanding it." The revolutionary "race-built" English ships, with their razed castles, and the revolutionary method of putting a mariner rather than a soldier in charge of those ships, did more than surprise the commanders of the Spanish Armada in 1588; they established a new era in which England was to dominate the seas. The Armada dispelled the charm of those tall castles, so I'd be willing to bet that, before the end of the sixteenth century, they would be much less likely to appear on maps. I'll find out soon enough if I'm correct, but if someone more learned than I would care to confirm or refute this assertion, I'd be grateful.

By the latter part of that same century it was not uncommon for a map to include elaborate metal clasp-like structures in and around the cartouche. One of the most striking things about this map, though, is the preponderance of metal clasps in all the printed decorative elements. It's as though the engraver wasn't content to let his metalworking skill speak for itself in the fine, crisp lines of the print; no, he wanted to infuse the print itself with metalwork!

A few indicators of the cartographic sensibilities of the time:

India says "INDOSTAN", and the southern U.S. says "INDIA"!
Mexico says "Hispania nova".
England says "Anglia".
"Pars continentis avstralis" was still part of a massive southern continent.
The large northern continent, split by four rivers, formed a ring around a polar sea.

Cordiform projection
Cosmografia universalis ab Orantio olim descripta (Universal
cosmography as Described by Oronce)
Giovanni Paolo Cimerlini, Italian
1566
Printed map, hand colored
Arthur Holzheimer Collection

The placard for this map says "At a time when the world was divided by religious conflicts, some mapmakers thought that it was important to portray a world unified by love and tolerance." I wrote a one-word response to this in my notes. It was a very rude word. I thought this to be an unconscionably modern interpretation - a useless viewing of the sixteenth century through a twentieth-century lens. Now I feel abashed at my hubris. I found this Chicago Sun Times article in which Robert Karrow Jr. expounds upon this view. Still dubious, I decided to look up Mr. Karrow's book, Mapmakers in the Sixteenth Century. I found many glowing reviews in JSTOR that expounded upon his meticulous research and his focus on the personal lives of the mapmakers. I also noticed that Mr. Karrow is the curator of maps at the Newberry Library and co-curator of this exhibit. Well, Mr. Karrow, if you're reading this, then I thank you for enlightening me, and I look forward to reading your book.

View of Venice
Venetie
Jacobo de Barbari, Italian
1500
Printed map
Newberry Library, Chicago (Franco Novacco Map Collection)

These are the most amazing woodcuts I've ever seen. Each of those six panels is the size of a large dinner tray, and each has a jaw-dropping fineness of detail. I cannot begin to imagine the skill and experience required to carve wood so intricately. As breathtaking as the detail, though, is the oblique perspective; it's a view of Venice which no human at the time could have had, and it's amazingly convincing. The symbolism is very fun; both Poseidon and the sea creature he rides through the harbor dwarf the nearby trading ships. Mercury befuddles me; he's holding what I think of as a symbol of medicine, and anyway, what does Mercury have to do with Venice? Then I find out from the placard that Mercury was the patron of commerce; is there anything of which Mercury wasn't a patron? Hmmm... Wikipedia makes his symbolism seem much less ambiguous than it is in my head. It also tells me that the winged and snake-bound staff in his hand is a caduceus, "an ancient astrological symbol of commerce".

The next day, in the Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome exhibit, I noticed a reference to Barbari. "In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Rome was changing, and mapmakers and publishers had to keep up. Techniques developed in response to expanding global travel and local administrative needs. In the fifteenth century the famous scholar Leon Battista Alberti provided a systematic and highly mathematical method for measuring the topography of Rome. No map by Alberti survives, but in 1500 Jacopo de Barbari produced a gorgeous (and accurate!) aerial map of Venice that had a major influence on later publishing."

I'm pleased to see that this one is from the Newberry Library, so I hope to see it again.

Plan of Rome
La Pianta Grande di Roma (The Great Plan of Rome)
Giambattista Nolli, Italian
1748
Printed map
Vincent J. Buonanno Collection

This eighteenth-century tribute to the glories of both classical and contemporary Rome has a separate index print which identifies two thousand points of interest, including the Circus Maximus.

I made a separate entry on my investigation into this map's symbolism.

Buddhist temple complex in Japan
Saikoku zoho Koyasan saiken ezu (Detailed chart of Mt. Koya
in Saikoku)
Koei Asai, Japanese
1860
Printed map
C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley

The curious thing about this one is the patches of color; there's something slightly irregular about them that says "woodcut" to me. I have a feeling that either wooden blocks were cut to shape, coated with pigment and pressed into the appropriate region on the map, or the coloring was swabbed on through stencils.

Nanchang, China and surrounding area
In Atlas of Jiangxi Province
Unidentified mapmaker, Chinese
18th century
Manuscript, ink and pigment on paper
The British Library, London

The use of color in this map is incredibly striking. Golden rays from an unseen setting sun paint vertical stripes down the sides of mountains that fade from a vivid turquoise blue at the tops down to a duller green that matches the color of the water. More of those rolling, fluid, snaky clouds, like I saw in the map of the road from Edo to Kyoto, undulate across the lowlands like marshmallow fluff oozing with uncertain intent across the countryside.

Bouillon, Belgium
Unidentified mapmaker, French
1689
Plaster, paint, and wood
Musée des Plans-Reliefs, Paris

This is an amazing diorama, or at least what I think of as a diorama, though it's much more elaborate than anything I've seen in a museum. Military planners under Louis XIV used it during the War of the Grand Alliance (1688-1697).

Nautical chart of the Atlantic Ocean
Zuane Pizzigano, Venetian
1424
Manuscript, ink on parchment
James Ford Bell Library Collection, University of Minnesota

The placard says that this is the oldest surviving chart of the Atlantic, which is a pretty darned exciting thing to see. It also points out the vaguely-drawn islands in the west that could have been fables, or could indicate voyages to the Americas before Columbus. Explore the page linked above for much more detail on that story.

Indian ocean
From the “Miller Atlas”
Lopo Homem, Pedro Reinel, and Jorge Reinel, Portuguese
circa 1519
Manuscript, ink and pigment on parchment
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Near the bottom of this page you'll find a link to a very good zoomable image, and here's another with several decent images from the Miller Atlas, including the one in question.

I was very excited to see this because just the previous night I'd been studying the origins of the compass rose. I was interested to learn that the fleur-de-lis grew out of the initial T in Tremontana, a classical name for a northern wind. I also found out that Pedro and Jorge Reinel, in their "Miller Atlas", were the first to use that fleur, so of course that was the first thing I looked for. The north arrow in this particular map is bigger, and unlike the others it radiates from the middle, but it's not a fleur-de-lis.

I quickly noticed several major differences between this map and later maps of the sixteenth century. First of all, it's highly pictorial; the Reinels populated their terrain with exotic creatures, castles, and peoples more or less fantastical. Here stands a Yemeni warrior with shield at the ready, there a rider on horseback charges into battle. Camels, rhinos, lions, elephants, and birds of flaming red draw my eye. Secondly, this is not a map for coastal navigation; even the west coast of India, which has more detail than any of the other coastlines, is relatively sparse. Thirdly, there are none of the expected sea monsters, which I find particularly notable given the preponderance of land creatures. Adding all this up, I get the impression that the Reinels' target audience were landlubbers who wanted to thrill at, and perhaps impress their guests with, images of far-off and exotic lands; this map certainly wasn't made with mariners in mind.

Nile Delta and Cairo
Kitab-i Bahriye (Book of Maritime Matters)
Piri Reis, Turkish
17th century
Manuscript, ink, paint and gold on paper
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W.658

The placard says that Admiral Piri Reis made these both as documents and as practical manuals: "...the atlas described and help control..." Does that mean that the Caliph used it as a reference for planning, enforcement, and tax collection? Further investigation is warranted.

In these two maps I see the pyramids after which Napoleon's Battle of the Pyramids were named, palm trees, square-rigged galleys, and a lateen-rigged three-masted ship. The particularly interesting thing is the trio of high, sinusoidal hills: one green, one red, and one blue! You can see them in this e-card from the Field Museum website. Do the colors signify anything, or are they simply meant to draw the eye?

The islands of Nisyros and Kos
In Liber Insularum Archipelagi (Atlas of Aegean islands)
Christoforo Buondelmonte, Italian
circa 1450
Manuscript, ink and pigment on parchment
Kenneth and Jocelyn Nebenzahl

The placard tells me that Kos is the birthplace of Hippocrates, and I get that familiar, frustrating feeling that the name should mean something to me. Sigh. I guess it's Wiki time again. Ah, of course. Hippocrates, as in Hippocratic Oath. I learned about him in the Teaching Company lectures about the history of medicine.

Here are those exaggerated points again! I can't find an image of these particular maps, but this page has another Buondelmonte (or Buondelmonti) map that shows what I mean. See how the coastline is composed entirely of sharply-intersecting arcs, as though a celestial hand carved it with gigantic cookie-cutters? This isn't just different from the way we're used to seeing it today; it's different from the way in which many of Buondelmonte's contemporaries drew their coasts. I'm particularly attuned to such differences because the story of the Spanish Armada was my doorway into the love of history; since coastal navigation was integral to that story, the different renditions of coastlines have leapt out at me since I attended the maps exhibit at the Oriental Institute in Chicago. As a neophyte, all I can do is speculate: Did the cartographers think the coasts actually looked like this from above or, as seems more likely to me, did they intentionally exaggerate bays and promontories because they were so important to coastal navigation? I think I've seen this style more often in maps from the east, so I'm wondering if it represents a particularly Islamic influence; then again, al-Idrisi's maps don't seem to display it.

Amoltepec
From Relaciones Geograficas (Geographical Reports)
Unidentified mapmaker, Mixtec (Mexico)
1580
Manuscript, pigment on paper
Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, The University of Texas at Austin

This map dates from sixty years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. Unfamiliar with this culture as I am, I find the iconography fascinating; everything in this map is a pictorial symbol! Particularly interesting is the representation of the Amoltepec, the hill of the (agave-like) soap plant. Page 160 of The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geograficas has a good drawing of this symbol. Does the top of the "boot" represent a hill, or am I reading the symbol wrong?

View of Amsterdam
Jan Christaenszoon Micker, Dutch
circa 1644
Oil on canvas
Amsterdams Historisch Museum

This Field Museum e-card has a description of Micker's painting, along with the best image I could find. It does not, of course, convey the sense one gets when standing in front of it. The shadows are vividly lifelike, cleverly implying the presence of unseen clouds over my head, draw me into this almost photographic scene in which sunlight softly reflects off the masonry of the burgeoning town. Micker mixed styles unusually and quite playfully, creating a very engaging combination of painting and map. See how the cartouche on the bottom right casts a shadow on the water, as though it were actually a part of the landscape? Now, look closely at the very top middle. See the small reddish blotches? Thanks to Jaap, I know that's the coat of arms of Amsterdam: three white crosses on a black bar in a red shield. It is flanked by two lions of the style usually found on a cartouche, who also cast shadows as they stand quite literally upon the fields, dwarfing the local farmhouses. That brain-bending feeling I get when the external reference frame suddenly links to something inside the fourth wall reminds me of the way the Road Runner was able to run into Wile E. Coyote's painting of the mountain. The more I'm exposed to history, the more I think post-modernism ain't so modern.

I was telling Jaap, an exceedingly knowledgeable Amsterdam tour guide, about this painting, and he sent me the following in response. I've linked to the pictures of which he speaks.

I have attached two pictures, both by master Cornelis Anthonisz (1505-1553) and known as the oldest 'maps' or views of Amsterdam. The oil painting was made in 1538 commission for the burgomasters of Amsterdam. The print he made in 1544 as a commercial spin-off for sale in the market. The canvas is in the Amsterdam Historical Museum. Some prints are in museums worldwide and some years ago one was auctioned at something like €uro 40,000.

One look at the works of Cornelis Anthonisz will convince you that Micken must have seen either or both and has been strongly inspired by them. IMHO somebody has commissioned him to make a copy of the canvas.

Inclesmoor, Yorkshire
Unidentified mapmaker, English
circa 1450
Manuscript, ink and pigment on parchment
The National Archives, UK

UPDATE: The Walters Museum posted a beautiful image of this map!

This map of 1450 resulted from a property dispute that happened in 1402 between the Duchy of Lancaster and Saint Mary's Abbey. Each claimed rights to this desirable 240 square mile plot composed of pasture-land and the peat that was used as fuel.

I believe that the image on this page shows a portion of the map in question. Note the strikingly bold and flamboyant mix of black and red lettering. Another eye-catching aspect of this map that you can't see on that image is the split orientation: the word "South" appears upright near the bottom, and the word "North" appears upside upside-down on the top. Was this map meant to be set on a table between two disputants, each of whom would have an upright "North" or "South" on the end closest to him?

China
Yu Ji Tu (Places Visited by Emperor Yu)
Unidentified mapmaker, Chinese
19th century (?) print of carving made in 1136
Printed map
The Field Museum, Chicago, 2321.245523

Well, this is interesting: a map made from a seven hundred year old stone carving! The placard says that the map is highly accurate; that each square represents 100 li, or about 30 miles, on a side; and that this is one of the oldest surviving maps to use a uniform scale to depict such a large area. The lines are very smooth, the grid and the script precise and delicate. There's something highly authentic about the way the rivers meander and taper, as though this could have been traced from a satellite photo instead of carved out of stone in 1136.

Carte de France (Map of France)
César François Cassini, French
18th century
Printed map
Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

These four maps of Normandy, Paris, Bois, and Toulon kept drawing me back like an iron filing to a magnet. The Mercator projection, the Waghenaer coastal map, and the Ptolemy Geographia filled me with awe at being in the presence of such potent bits of history. This one, however, beats them all in its almost unbelievable level of detail; I could lose myself in it for days. In order to fully appreciate that detail I had to take my glasses off, place my nose an inch or two from the glass, and let my nearsightedness work to my advantage. Minutiae that had before gone unnoticed then leapt out at me, such as the tiny windmill here, near St. Etienne. To get an even better sense of the level of thorough detail of this map, see this field of windmills in Moulins - which, Grace tells me, means "windmill". The printing is exquisite: fonts of all different sizes are represented, some words are italicized, and some form smooth arcs that fit snugly around the noted feature.

!!! Oh my gosh! It just clicked: the sheets on display here represent only a small fraction of Cassini's "Carte de France". Wikipedia has this to say:

In the 1670s, Cassini began work on a project to create a topographic map of France, using Reiner Gemma Frisius's technique of triangulation. The project was continued by his son Jacques Cassini and eventually finished by his grandson Cassini de Thury[César François Cassini] and published as the Carte de Cassini in 1789 or 1793. It was the first topographic map of an entire country.

Here are three links borrowed from this Harvard University site.

Interactive map of France
Carte de Cassini Type in the name of a village and find it on the famous Carte de Cassini. Includes an excellent legend of the symbols used.
Carte de Cassini - BNF Interactive map of Paris region - zoom in and out without reloading the page.

Celestial and terrestrial globes
Vicenzo Maria Coronelli, Italian
1698
Ink on paper, plaster, brass, and oak
Private Collection

UPDATE: The Walters Museum posted a beautiful image of the celestial globe!

Greaves & Thomas, a company based on the Isle of Wight, makes these replicas that will give you an excellent idea of how imposing these massive globes are. Guy gets impressed by these suckers, he knows he's been impressed, by gosh. Words like "lavish" and "sumptuous" come to mind as my eye roves over the polished three hundred year old oak, the brass meridian and the meticulously printed and plastered gores that showed some very, very rich folk ocean currents, habitats, constellations, and contours of far-off continents.

A few things caught my eye during the short time I had before the van den Keere double hemisphere projection drew me into its event horizon. I see IL MARE DI CALIFORNIA in the obvious place. There is a MARE DI CANADA near northern Canada and a MARE DELLA NUOVA FRANCIA near New England, with a MARE DEL NORT in between and a MARE ATLANTICO, in much smaller print, off to the east! In between the Caribbean and Mexico is ARCIPELAGO DEL MEXICO. Up until just moments ago I thought that OCCIDENTALE meant "equator", because that's where it appears on the globe. Google made me remember that Occidental means "west". That label wasn't for the equator, but for the western part of the world, i.e. Europe and the New World.

Double hemisphere projection
Nova totius orbis mappa ex optimus auctoribus desumta (New Map
of the Whole Earth Drawn from the Best Authorities)
Pieter van den Keere, Dutch
1611
Printed Map
Sutro Library (California State Library), San Francisco

I was awestruck before the Ptolemy atlas on loan from the Vatican and the Waghenaer coastal atlas. I was mesmerized by the four sections of the Cassini Carte de France, lost in their near bottomless depth of detail. This one, however, fascinated me the most. It fascinated me so much that I've killed another bloody day researching a single item in this exhibit. This gets a separate entry.

Buddhist world map
Nanzenbushu bankoku shoka no zu (All the Countries in Jambudvipa)
Shoshun (Hotan), Japanese
1710
Printed map
C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley

This map includes geographical knowledge that was new at the time of Europe and Japan. Mount Meru, the center of all physical and spiritual universes in Buddhist cosmology, appears in a mystical-looking swirl at its center. The swirl turns out to be the sacred rivers of India flowing from the Himilayas.

In order to see a truly excellent zoomable image from the David Rumsey collection you have to jump through a few easy hoops. It's worth it. Go here and click on the "insight Browser" link. If your browser disallows the davidrumsey.com popups, set it to allow popups from that site. Once you're in the Japanese Historical Maps section, click "search" and click "by keywords". Type the word Nanzenbushu in the box and click "submit". You should see two items. Double-click the black-and-white one. Now you should have the viewer open. Pan and zoom to your heart's content.

If you have problems with any of that, here is a decent image. This article has a closeup of the mystical Mount Meru, complete with the animals whose mouths are disgorging the source of the four great rivers of India in the Himilayas.

Buddhist cosmology map
Trai phum (Story of Three Worlds)
Unidentified mapmaker, Thai
1776
Pigment on bark paper
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Asiatische Kunst

Here is a fascinating account of the Traiphum in Early Mapping of Southeast Asia by Thomas Suárez. Scroll down to see some good illustrations.

The placard says that the one hundred foot long map depicts three worlds: sensual desire (the realm of men and various hells); the world of the Brahma; and the realm of infinite space and mental processes. The worlds are stacked along Mount Meru. The map, compiled from thirty Buddhist sources, depicts the life of Buddha and the geography of Southeast Asia.

Medieval Christian world map
In Etymologiae (First Things)
Isidore of Seville, Spanish
1448 interpretation of original drawn circa 600
Manuscript, pigment on parchment
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, W.422

In the seventh century Isidore of Seville compiled his encyclopedia of all learning both ancient and modern, the Etymologiae. Its popularity continued through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, as can be seen by this manuscript of 1448. The drawing here has the typical ring of ocean surrounding a circle that is divided by a T-shaped Mediterranean. Each of the three landmasses had been assigned to the sons of Noah: Asia, on top, went to Shem; Europe, on the bottom left, went to Japhet; and Africa, on the bottom right, went to Ham. It looks crude to the modern eye, but this Wikipedia page on the T-O map gives a good account of the pitfalls of assuming that early scholars, who had little if any ability to draw a sphere, thought the world was round; the diagram was meant to depict only the top half of a spherical earth.

Medieval Islamic world map
From Nuzhat al-mushtaq (The book of pleasant journeys)
Muhammad al-Idrisi, b.Ceuta (now Morocco)
1553 interpretation of original drawn circa 1135
Manuscript, ink and pigment on parchment
The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
MS. Pococke 375, fols. 3-4

It takes me a minute to get my brain around this map, partly because south is on the top and partly because it represents a nascent stage of world geographical knowledge. The placard points out one of its flaws: a major connection between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. I went around to the side of the exhibit case and peered at it from as close to an upside-down perspective as I could, and wrote in my notes "Boy, is Europe messed up! Very crude." This goes to show the vast amounts of knowledge and learning that had to be distilled over the centuries to give us the geographical knowledge we take for granted; this Wikipedia page, which also has a good image of this map, tells how al-Idrisi worked on his illustrations and commentaries for eighteen years, and how influential they were in the centuries to come. The following is from Peter Whitfield's Image of the World.

After the ferocious conquests with which Islam emerged onto the world stage, in the calm which followed, the caliphate courts became centres of precocious cultural activity. Early medieval Europe had nothing to compare with the scientific and literary achievements of the Abbasid court in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. Arab geographers translated Ptolemy's Geography before the end of the ninth century, compiled their own co-ordinated gazetteers of the world, and were open also to influences from the east, from Persia, India and even China. Against this background it should not be surprising that of all medieval geographers, the one whose work is most complete and coherent, and the one of whom we have most knowledge, is not a western Christian, but an Arab. Al-Idrisi was of a royal family, born in Morocco c.1100 A.D. and travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa. About the year 1140 he entered the service of the Norman King of Sicily, Roger II. Sicily was then a meeting-place of cultures, and Roger's court one of the most diverse and intellectual in Europe. Idrisi's appointed task was to draw up a comprehensive map of the world with a full descriptive commentary, and this he achieved, completing after some fifteen years' research The Book of Pleasant Journeys to Faraway Lands commonly known as The Book of Roger. At its heart lay a group of seventy regional maps, conceived and drawn separately, but forming when assembled the most detailed world map of its time.

World map
In Geographia
Claudius Ptolemy, Greek
15th century
Manuscript, ink and pigment on parchment
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Urb. lat 275

I stood before a sight much like this one gaping, thunderstruck with the weight of history within arm's length. Of course it helped that, just the night before, I'd read about Ptolemy for the first time in Peter Whitfield's Image of the World, and was full of curiosity over how Ptolemy's knowledge could have been largely unknown in Europe for well over a millennium, and yet still form the basis of Renaissance cartography. That night also I first heard the name al-Idrisi, so I had only the vaguest notion of how Ptolemy's data wended its way through the pens of eastern scribes and eventually back onto the pages that were destined for the Vatican, and briefly for the glass case before me. There are a lot of exclamation points on that page of my steno book. The gold border that blazed even under the dim exhibit lights caught my eye immediately, but it wasn't until I came back to look at those pages for a third time that I noticed the delicate, swirling etchings on that thin layer. I also noticed that the map displays only twelve winds, a Roman convention that I had also read about just the previous evening.

What are those thick, perfectly straight red lines that run neither north nor south, e.g. the one that starts on the west coast of Africa and runs east by southeast all the way to the east coast?

The southern sea is labeled "MARE PRASODVM", and I wondered what that meant. A bit of creative Googling has taught me that prason is Latin for "leek", that kelp was known as sea-leek, and that prasodum is the genitive plural of prason. Sigh. Now I need to know what genitive means. Ah. It's the case that marks a noun as modifying another noun. Right. So MARE PRASODVM means "Kelp Sea".

Stick chart
Unidentified mapmaker, Marshallese (Republic of the Marshall Islands)
1940s
Wood and twine
The Field Museum, Chicago
2399.107959

Judging from all the pictures I saw of it in articles about the exhibit, this one really seems to have caught visitors' imaginations. It's an assemblage of sticks lashed together in a configuration that represents the patterns and directions of ocean swells between Majuro and the Jaluit Atolls. Each stick is a swell, in some cases reflecting off one or more islands. For an image of this stick chart, along with some explanatory text, scroll down to the third item on this page. For a detailed explanation of stick chart design and function, go here.

Part of Greenland coast and islands
Kunit fra Umivik, Inuit (Greenland)
1884
Wood
Greenland National Museum and Archives, Nuuk

UPDATE: The Walters Museum posted a beautiful image of this map!

This one was fascinating to me in a very personal way, since I've spent so much time in a canoe with my friend Jeff attempting to divine our position: look at the shoreline; attempt to translate my view from the canoe into a bird's-eye view; superimpose that image in my mind's eye onto the map in our hands; put my head together with Jeff's and decide which way to go; and, occasionally, swear a whole lot when we figure out just how far off we were in our divinations. I feel - if not a faint kinship with, then at least an understanding of the motivations of - the Inuit who carved this block of wood so that its edges depicted part of the Greenland coast.

Unable to take pictures, and wanting to have some record of this fascinating map, I began drawing it. Immediately my profound inability to estimate margins reared its ugly head, and my drawing ended up superimposed on a scribbled-out first attempt at the Marshall Islands map. I made a tracing of my original, and that's what you'll see if you follow the link above. The caption describes how to read the map.

Road network of Japan during the Edo period
Nihon kaisan chorikuzu zu (Map of the Seas and Islands of Japan)
Ishikawa Ryusen, Japanese
1694
Printed map, hand colored
C.V. Starr East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley

From the placard: This wood block map showed the territories of powerful warlords, or daimyo, at a time when relations between them had stabilized. It fostered a sense of Japanese national identity by allowing and inspiring the people to travel.

I don't see any impressions from the blocks, as I could in other woodblock pressings, nor can I see any of those telltale faint strips that indicate breaks between the blocks. Can this possibly have been a single, gigantic wood block?

French aeronautical chart and holder
Service des Fabrications Aéronautiques, French
circa 1914
Printed map, aluminum
Ralph E. Ehrenberg Collection

This is a glass-fronted aluminum box roughly the size of a large photo album. Two aluminum dials stick out of either end of the front, and connect to rollers that run along the length of the interior and connect in turn to matching dials on the back. The map unscrolls along the inside of the glass at the turn of a dial, thus allowing a pilot to read a map without taking his hands off the controls.

Segment of Portugal’s coastline
In Du miroir de la navigation (The Mirror of Navigation)
Lucas Janszoon Waghenaer, Dutch
1590
Printed map
Courtesy of Harvard Map Collection, Harvard College Library

A Waghenaer from 1590. A Waghenaer... from 1590! A WAGHENAER FROM 1590!!! Gosh, seeing this was exciting for me. This definitely deserves a separate entry.

England
Gough Map
Unidentified mapmaker, English
1360
Manuscript, ink and pigment on parchment
The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

The placard says that this map, showing six hundred settlements and two hundred rivers, was made for merchants, and possibly reflected imperial aspirations to expand into Wales and Scotland. Wikipedia has a very interesting summary of the map's mysteries, along with its many distinctions: with its inclusion of roads and their lengths, its level of geographical accuracy that would not be exceeded until the sixteenth century, and its lack of theological content, it represents a heady bundle of "firsts". Check out this fantastic map viewer, which allows you to select specific layers such as roads, rivers and lakes.

The Americas
Americae sive quartae orbis parties nova et exactissima descriptio
(America, The Fourth Part of the World Newly and Exactly
Described)
Diego Gutiérrez, Spanish
1562
Printed map
Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Ian Albert has an amazing map viewer that lets you easily pan and zoom through this map with as much detail as you could want. Zoom in on the left edge and see one of the earliest cartographic references to California. Note the bold hatching and cross-hatching that so captivated me as I stood before it, marveling at the almost palpable texture of the waves that reminded me of Bernie Wrightson's art in Swamp Thing. Look at the dramatic sea battle going on in the southern Atlantic: is that an Ottoman galley - in the south Atlantic??? In any event, between seaborne menaces, sea monsters, and waves that would look dangerous even without the prominent shipwrecks, this map was clearly designed to make Spanish sailors look very brave! For an excellent synopsis of the political atmosphere in which this map was produced, go here.

Here is the Library of Congress page, which has a viewer that may be better for slow connections.

Belcher Islands, Canada
Wetalltok, Inuit (Canada)
circa 1909
Manuscript, graphite on paper
The American Geographical Society Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In 1909 an Inuit named Wetalltok drew a map of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. The map, based on Wetalltok's experiences in kayaking the three thousand square mile area, was quite precise; it was displayed next to a satellite map of the same area, and although an overall similarity didn't leap out at me, once I studied the details I was quite impressed with the correspondences. This page has an image of the sketch.

World map showing the Americas
Francesco Rosselli, Italian
1508
Printed map
Arthur Holzheimer Collection

A product of a period of uncertainty and discovery in cartography, Roselli's map shows North America as an extension of Asia, and South America as a separate continent. Contrast this with the revolutionary Waldseemüller world map; published in the previous year, it nonetheless shows North America as separate from Asia.

Gulf of Mexico
Mapa de las costas de Tierra Firme descubiertas por Juan Ponce, Francisco Garay, Diego Velazquez y otros (Map of the Terra Firma Coasts Discovered by Juan Ponce, Francisco Garay, Diego Velazquez and Others)
Alonso Álvarez de Piñeda, Spanish
1519
Manuscript, ink on paper
Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla, MP-MEXICO, 5

This is the first known drawing of the entire Gulf of Mexico. See the Wikipedia article for information on Pineda and his expedition, and an image of the sketch.

Central Italy
Leonardo da Vinci, Italian
circa 1502
Manuscript, chalk and pigment on paper
Lent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

In this map, Leonardo da Vinci used shades of color instead of cone-shaped symbols to depict terrain. The Field Museum has a sample image with summary.

Early New France
Descripsion des costs, pts., rades, illes de la nouvelle france
(Description of the Coasts, Ports, Roads, Islands of New France)
Samuel de Champlain, French
1607
Manuscript, ink and watercolor on parchment
Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Boy, this exhibit is just chock full of maps from historical flash points. Champlain made this map of "New France" in 1607, the same year in which the English founded Jamestown!

The Low Countries
Germania Inferior (Lower Germany)
Jodocus Hondius, Hugo Allard, Dutch
circa 1595, reprinted 1671
Printed map

Hey! It's the map on the wall in "Young Woman With a Water Pitcher", the Vermeer painting I saw at the Age of Rembrandt exhibit at the Met in December! Well this is just... neat! Unfortunately I can't find an online image.

Sir Francis Drake’s world circumnavigation
Michael Mercator, German
1581
Silver
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven

By the time I got this far into the exhibit, I was so overwhelmed that I very nearly walked right by this "silver map". I saw it, stopped, gaped, scribbled three stars and a description in my notes, and then spent some time trying different angles from which to better view the fine engraving. There's something about standing mere inches from this tarnished silver medallion that makes history come alive in the most palpable sense.

The Library of Congress has an online Rare Book & Special Collections Reading Room with a wealth of information and images pertaining to Drake's life. This page tells of the circumnavigation; click on the images of the medallions down near the bottom of the page, and you'll get a view just as good as I had at exhibit.

Chronometer used by Captain Cook
Larcum Kendall, British
1769
Metal and glass
MOD Art Collection, London

Another exciting find! Since I had just read the book about the Bounty mutiny, I was excited to be in the presence of the chronometer used by the captain - even if it wasn't the one used during that ill-fated breadfruit expedition. Just now, when I got around to writing up this bit of my visit, I became extremely embarrassed. I had mixed up Bligh, commander of the Bounty, with Captain Cook, the man who had appointed him to his position. I can only plead brain deadness after an eight hour barrage of priceless historical artifacts. And, as it turns out, I wasn't wrong to think that Bligh held this chronometer! I see that Cook selected Bligh as his Sailing Master on the Resolution during his third voyage, so Bligh would certainly have used it.

Mediterranean sea chart
Carte pisane (Chart from Pisa)
Unidentified cartographer, Italian
circa 1290
Manuscript, ink on parchment
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Another breathtaking "first" of sorts, this is the oldest surviving portolan chart! Here is the best image I could find. Note the two sets of sixteen-point rhumb lines, and the grid formed by the lines drawn from the points of intersection between the rhumb lines and the circle drawn around the center. I don't know enough cartography yet to understand the significance of this, but it's something I'll be looking out for as I read.

Magnetic compass
Iver Jensen, Danish
18th century
Rosewood, ink, and paper
Courtesy of Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, Chicago

Sometime in the thirteenth century, the knowledge of how to satisfactorily mount a needle to make a magnetic compass became widespread; mariners knew which way was north, and portolan charts like the one above, with their rhumb lines based on the use of the compass, followed soon after. This particular compass was made much later, during a century when two new cartographic milestones were set: with the perfection of the sextant and the chronometer, mariners could also know their latitude and longitude. To look at the colored paper disc inside this small rosewood box is to see history being built upon history.

But that's not the story.

The story is that I couldn't think of a blasted thing to write in my journal as I stood in front of this old compass. The only reason I spent any time at all with it was because I had a vague sense that I should. Why did this icon of navigation fail to excite my imagination? Perhaps it's because I've used compasses since I was a small boy, and familiarity breeds contempt. That doesn't seem right, though, because I've used maps for a long time too. Is it simply because I'm here to see maps, not compasses? Well, the Cook chronometer excited me plenty, and that's not a map, although it must be said that I had just read of the Bounty mutiny, and there's nothing like a good story to make history come alive. Anyway, none of these attempts to explain my apathy ring true. I think the real reason for it is simply that I have a fascination not with the magic of floating needles, but with the magic of floating reference frames - in other words, maps. Maps assist with something that my brain doesn't do well: conceptualization of and navigation within three-dimensional space. This is the closest I can come to explaining the obsession that drew me to, and through, this superlative exhibit.

NYPL Map Room

2008-02-01T19:27:00.001-05:00

Woo hoo! Thanks to Soc for sending me an article on the New York Public Library's Room 117. I knew the NYPL had tons of old maps, but I didn't know that the general public could handle them, let alone that there was a special room for them. Soc, let's plan a field trip for an upcoming Saturday!

Pitfall of Outline Maps

2008-01-23T11:48:00.000-05:00

This morning I had a major "D'oh!" moment when I realized that Wales does, in fact, exist.

In the preface of The Image of the World, author Peter Whitfield mentions the Evesham Mappa Mundi. I went to the Wikipedia page on Evesham, looked at the little red dot, and said to myself "That doesn't look right. Hmmmm, where is that?" Scanning the article, I found that Evesham is in Worcestershire, and that really didn't seem right. After all, Worcestershire is much closer to the western coast of England. Or so I thought. Then a lightbulb appeared over my fat head. I had used Wikipedia's map to memorize the historic counties of England. The historic counties. Of England. England does not include Wales. So now I have to un-learn the "fact" that Herefordshire, Shropshire, and parts of Gloucestershire are on the west coast of England.

16th Century English Wool Trade

2008-01-15T10:43:00.000-05:00

On pages 22 and 23 of The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588, Felipe Fernández-Armesto tells how the war with Spain affected English towns, giving them excuses - often very good ones - for refusing to meet levies imposed in the face of the Armada.

These hints of social tension have to be understood against a background of genuine hardships. Economic distress, caused in trading communitites by the commercial disruption of the war with Spain, was a frequently alleged ground of inability to pay for defence against the Armada. Ipswich claimed to be unable to pay for the ordnance charged against her. To the Privy Council's insistence that the cost be met by merchants who had profited from wartime reprisals against Spanish shipping, the municipal authorities 'for answer thereof affirm that they have thereby rather sustained loss than gain'. The port of Southampton wrote with a similar complaint in greater detail on 17 April: two large ships and a pinnace had been required of that town but its 'poor and insufficient number of inhabitants' would have been hard pressed to raise even the fourth part of the £500 this would have cost. War with Spain and consequent loss of trade was the main reason alleged--plausibly enough, in a place traditionally prominent in the Spanish trade and heavily concerned in its chief commodity, cloth. During the sixteen years of the Spanish embargo, the burghers said, there had been 'almost no other trade or traffic'; reprisals, as at Ipswich, had brought no relief--only a net loss of £4,000; native townspeople of substance had all gone away and there were virtually no gentlemen left. The community had already been taxed to its limit: a subsidy of £120 had been levied with difficulty; a recent charge of £250 for munitions 'remaineth dead and without profit to the town'; repairs to the seabanks and 'some little fortification' had exhausted the town's resources. To cap it all, the press had taken 110 mariners away to the fleet; so the town would have been unable to find men to sail the ships even 'if we were able to levy the charge among us.' In less strident, but equally self-righteous terms, the magistrates of East Bergholt also appealed to the economic effects of the Spanish embargo to explain their refusal to contribute, for the town's cloths

were best saleable in Spain and now through long want of vent into those parts, we find not only the stocks and wealth of the said inhabitants greatly decayed, but withal they, being very charitable and godly bent, are driven, out of their own purses, to see all the poor and needy artificers pertaining to the trade provided for sufficiently with meat, drink and clothes.

I found this a bit confusing because I'd read of how sales of raw wool to Flanders were so vital to the English economy at that time, yet here Fernández-Armesto talks of English coastal towns selling cloth. Also, since Elizabeth was supporting the Dutch Protestants who were draining Philip's resources, wouldn't those Channel merchants have had new Flemish buyers to replace the lost Spanish ones? As a matter of fact, wasn't the wool trade with Flanders one of the reasons for Elizabeth's support in the first place? Thinking it likely that "raw wool" didn't mean what I had thought it meant, and that I didn't understand the complexities of the English Channel trade, I consulted the Gunroom.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Mapmaker's Opera, Fight Club, and the Byzantines

2008-01-09T09:43:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I finished two novels: The Mapmaker's Opera by Bea Gonzalez; Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. They make an odd pair, to say the least. The first is about preservation: all through the book people variously try to preserve the memory of a beloved grandmother, a song, a species of bird, their honor, their family, their individuality, their posessions, their culture. The second is about the desire to dissolve individuality and tear down history with a world-encompassing tantrum.

Gonzalez laments the extinction of the passenger pigeon:

As for the fate of the Passenger Pigeon--that, alas, is all too well know. In 1896 the last significant chapter for these birds was written in the state of Ohio. By then, only a quarter of a million remained of the billions that had once filled the sky. In April of that year they came together in one last great nesting flock in the forest on Green River near Mammoth Cave. Recently installed telegraph lines were used to notify the hunters of the appearance of this flock and they arrived by railway from far and wide. The result was catastrophic--two hundred thousand carcasses were taken, another forty thousand were mutilated and wasted, one hundred thousand newborn chicks were destroyed or abandoned to predators in their nests. Only five thousand were thought to have escaped.
The hunters' efforts were wasted in the end. The birds--packaged for shipment to markets in the East--rotted under a scorching sun when a derailment prevented them from being shipped as planned. The putrefied carcasses of two hundred thousand birds were disposed of in a nearby ravine.
The last bird of its kind, Martha, died alone at the age of twenty-nine inside the Cincinnati Zoo at about one o'clock on September 1, 1914. There were few then who understood the significance of what had just come to pass. A bird that had once thundered across open skies had been vanquished for good--driven to extinction by man's ignorance and greed.

Palahniuk's nihilistic pique stands in counterpoint.

Tyler asked what I was really fighting.
What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.
I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground.

At the very end of the book, our protagonist takes a parting shot at the beauty of the individual with one of his most memorably snarky lines.

I've met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, "Why?" Why did I cause so much pain? Didn't I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can't I see how we're all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God's got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, "No, that's not right." Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything.

The interesting thing about Gonzalez's story is how she portrays those who seek revolution vs. those who seek beauty. Naturalist Edward Nelson spends his life observing and documenting birds. His friend Robert Duarte, a grower of the henequin plant that is in such high demand by the Americans, shares in his passion; he loses himself in books and birds, occasionally intervening on the side of leniency for his workers but generally preferring to know as little as possible about how his overseer does his job. One could present these characters as morally bankrupt dreamers, but instead they are some of the most likeable characters in Gonzalez's story. The Mexican revolutionaries, on the other hand, get short shrift: amid the smoke of a burning plantation, an unseen and anonymous member of the rioting mob unknowingly causes the book's greatest tragedy. Gonzalez seems to be saying that, for the most part, humans can't help themselves because their endeavors inevitably become chaotic and corrupt. I think the following may be the most telling quote in the book.

"Forget about it, muchacho," Mr. Nelson says again, gently, and he places his arm around the young man's shoulder, delivers some reassuring pats to his back and then returns to the bounties of nature that, alone on earth, have the power to make things right.

This is not Nelson talking, but Gonzalez! I think that in her cosmology nature is the only bootstrap by which humans may pull themselves above their own flaws. I tend to agree with her.

The interesting thing here is that Gonzalez and Palahniuk aren't as dissimilar as they first appear. The way in which Gonzalez pointedly de-glorifies the Mexican revolutionaries isn't all that different from Palahniuk's pathetic portrayal of Tyler Durden's "space monkeys". Of course the main difference between the two is that, for Gonzalez, salvation lies in nature. For Palahniuk, man has no salvation; man just is.

All these thoughts of chaos and anarchy lead me inevitably to thoughts of the 12 Byzantine Rulers series I've been listening to. I know that my perception of chaos is somewhat exaggerated because the lectures compress a hell of a lot of history into each lecture, and the chaotic bits get the most attention. Still... just look at the events surrounding the reign of Andronicus, and the whole notion of history as ordered progression becomes a Brobdingnagian joke. Manuel, grandson of Alexius I, dies, leaving his wife, Maria, to piss off Constantinople with her westernness. Italian and French merchants jump at the opportunity to renew their trade stranglehold, and things go from bad to worse. Nutty, charismatic, buff, exiled old Andronicus catches wind of all this and sweeps into Constantinople, having been cheered on the whole way. He slaughters all the Italians in town and everyone related to Manuel except Alexius II, the son of Manuel and Maria. Then he slaughters Maria and declares himself co-emperor with Alexius. Then he slaughters Alexius. Then he marries Alexius's thirteen-year old widow. Then he compiles a list of all the people he's slaughtered and he slaughters all their dogs. The last sentence was the only one I made up.

Andronicus, inspired by all this slaughtering, turns his energies to dealing with corruption. By slaughtering everyone who's corrupt. Thirty seven of the fifty nine people left in Constantinople are all "Corruption sucks. Andronicus is cool." but the rest think he's gone too far and start hatching plots to take him out. Andronicus, having had one too many nutbars, really concentrates his vital energies on being the best slaughterer he can be. King William the Good of Sicily, always eager for a chunk of the Byzantine pie, welcomes refugees from the nuttiness and comes up with an ersatz Alexius II to legitimize a move on Constantinople. His army easily takes Thessalonica, and Andronicus responds by going for ISO 9000 certification on his slaughter industry. His cousin Isaac Angelus, after narrowly avoiding execution, gathers support, captures Andronicus and leaves him to the mob, who treats him to a nice slow slaughter of his own. Isaac trounces the Sicilians, marries the daughter of the Hungarian king, and proceeds to completely destroy the economy, get humiliated by the Bulgarians, and go nuts à la Andronicus. But wait, what news from the east and west? "You got your Muslims in my Jerusalem!" "You got your Crusaders in my Constantinople!" This time the English and French aren't a problem because they go by water, but Frederick Barbarossa wants to march through and Isaac is forced to comply. Frederick, totally pumped from having shown off his power, blows a raspberry over his shoulder at Isaac, makes his way across most of Anatolia, and then gets his ass drowned in a river.

So one of Frederick's generals turns to his men and says "Buck up, lads! We're a massive and utterly directionless army hanging out in Asia Minor. What could possibly go wrong?" Cut to Venice, where the Doge Enrico Dandolo is listening to the soothing, far-off sounds of Isaac's older brother Alexius, who is: deposing Isaac and having him blinded; crowing himself Alexius III; messing up the economy even worse; allowing more and more of his empire to be whittled away by the Turks. When the Crusaders come to Dandolo for support he spins a story about invading Egypt and then pulls a monumental bait-and-switch; as he must have known would happen, the Crusaders can't come up with the money they promised, and they effectively become indentured to Venice. He sics them on the Hungarian coast of Dalmatia, ignoring the Pope's wagging finger. Here he meets Alexius Angelus, who had headed west to drum up support for a coup. In exchange for help he promises to end the schism and reunite the Orthodox and Cathoic churches, but Dandolo really has his eye on Constantinople. As the Crusaders lay seige to the city, Alexius III buggers off. His ministers look blankly at each other and then one of them says "Um, the Crusaders came to overthrow Isaac's usurper, yeah? So, like... they might go away if we restore Isaac. (beat) Yes, that blind old Isaac whom we've had rotting in a dungeon for eight years, what, you got a better idea??" They quickly realize that Isaac is too far gone to rule, so they crown Alexius Angelus to rule alongside his father. It doesn't help. Alexius strips the church of its wealth in a desperate attempt to pay the Crusaders, thus further enraging a populace that already hates him for his promise of unification. As Dandolo encourages the Crusaders to invade, Alexios Doukas has Isaac and his son killed and assumes the throne. He does a pretty good job of defending Constantinople - for a short time. Cut to smoke, thuds, men going gaga over shiny gold, screaming, raping, pillaging, murdering. Entropy descends, ravening, on the greatest city in Christendom. It never recovers.

Is this any less anarchic than the space monkeys?

Age of Rembrandt exhibit at the Met

2008-01-06T17:26:00.000-05:00

Notes from my visit to the Met on January 6, the last day of this exhibit.

Woodland Road, probably ca. 1670
Meindert Hobbema (Dutch, 1638–1709)
"The trees are beautifully textured and lit, but the rest of the painting - the people, the cottages - doesn't seem that impressive to me." After I wrote this, I was very surprised to read the placard claiming that, to American collectors of the Gilded Age, Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Hobbema were the three greatest Dutch landscapists!

Piping Shepherds, ca. 1643–44
Aelbert Cuyp (Dutch, 1620–1691)
The shiny hair on the cow and the textures of the instruments - in fact, all the textures, are lovely. The musicians' faces are very well-rendered, and the gentle, cloudy sky tugs at my emotions.

The Forest Stream, ca. 1660
Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael (Dutch, 1628/29–1682)
The placard says this was inspired by a trip to Westphalia. In any event, I can see that this man knew trees! He captures the horizontal layering, the way the leaves cluster, the deep shadows and the reflections and the sparse patches. Warmly textured foliage is revealed by gentle light peeking through the clouds. The reflections on the water pooling in the stream are stunning. I find his stone surfaces to be better than Hobbema's, yet still not quite believable. Perhaps the geology is different, and this is actually realistic; however, the stones just seem too soft to me, as if they, like Hobbema's buildings, are filmed through cheesecloth.

Man in Oriental Costume ("The Noble Slav"), 1632
Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn) (Dutch, 1606–1669)
Unlike the figures in the other big Rembrandts, the man has a sort of aura of light that delineates his shadowed shoulder. This one was inspired at least partially by trade with the Ottomans (a mutual enemy of Spain!) and the diplomatic mission from Persia to the Dutch Republic (1627-28). Were this a lesser painting, the historical connections would be the most interesting thing for me. This is not a lesser painting. I know that no reproduction can convey how the light hits that turban; it's as though spiders spun a latticework over it. What sort of brush makes those thick, rough runnels of paint that so adroitly catch the light and spray it back out so enthusiastically? Could it be very thick horsehair? The two primary focus points are the sumptuous flowered gold fabric on his shoulder, and the turban. The secondary points are his face, the translucent blue-streaked sash, and the gold tassels and pendant hanging from it. Move to one side and you can see how Rembrandt used thick globs of paint to make the jewel high in the turban sparkle. The lower jewel does not stand out as much; perhaps it's a polished stone rather than a gem.

I can't say enough about the way Rembrandt conveys depth. The turban leaps out of the canvas, protruding inches forward from the face! This is a study in contrasts: the soft, slack, old-man's skin on the neck, not reflective at all, could hardly stand out more in both texture and in depth from the glittering turban.

Bellona, 1633
Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn) (Dutch, 1606–1669)
According to the audio guide, this was probably made for an Amsterdam civic guard house. The shield carries a very dramatic likeness of Medusa. Hanging from the armor is a sheet of sumptuous blood-red velvet with an overwhelming array of gleaming gold highlighting the trim. The helmet, typical of Rembrandt's skill, is amazingly lifelike; it seems I could almost touch its burnished curves. The figure within the glittering armor is strikingly unglamorous; she has a homely, big-sisterly air about her, yet upon close examination I saw how ready she is for action, and not simply because she's the sister of Mars. The heavily armored right hand, lurking in deep shadow and looking for all the world like Hellboy's stone hand, is not readily noticeable. Once I did notice it, however, I couldn't stop noticing it, resting there on the golden hilt of a rather nasty-looking sword. Together, the gleaming contents of the left hand and the shadowed contents of the right convey a powerful message: not only is the Dutch Republic ready to defend herself at a moment's notice, but she will conduct a potent offensive war if necessary! The overall impression is of a plump woman with broad hips: a big sister or cousin for whom kicking ass comes in a close second to having babies.

There's a great deal of green in this painting that one doesn't notice at first: eventually the sash on her sword arm draws my eye, as does the sapphire green in the sword strap with the gold gilt and the blue gems. The greenish blue in the neck scarf reminds me of the sea, and the deep forest green of the helmet's plume is so dark that the very way in which it mingles with the shadows draws my eye.

Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan, 1633
Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn) (Dutch, 1606–1669)
Look at the way the "petals" of the ribbons protrude from the canvas! Look at how the fabric of the sleeves bulges outward in between the gathers, and the way the tips of the sleeves stick out! Even the beads on her left wrist look like they're sticking out of the painting! From ten feet back the lace frills at her sleeves look almost absurdly intricate; I take a few steps forward and see that Rembrandt made those intricate gaps in the lace by scraping away the white paint while it was wet!

The young woman's left hand rests on a brick-red cloth with gold embroidery. It caught my eye because something about it said Mexico to me. I couldn't remember whether the Dutch were trading in the West Indies at this point, so I went to Wikipedia and found this article. Rembrandt painted this just twelve years after the Dutch West India Company got its charter! More curious than ever as to whether the cloth might indeed be South American, or perhaps Ottoman, I consulted Gwyn, a costuming and fabrics expert. She said

It looks like it came from the Spanish design world, but woven on French machines. Silk and wool, from the sheen. Color is a nice deep wine/burgundy, so may be momentous for the Bourbon family, who threw off relations across Europe like the Saxe-Coburgs did a couple of centuries later, but with better outcomes.

I read the word "wool" and gears started to turn. Here are my thoughts, with some [responses] by Jaap, an awesomely knowledgeable tour guide in Amsterdam, who provides some balance for my speculation.

Just the day before I had looked up the "Spanish Fury" in Wikipedia, attempting to refresh my vague memory from a history lecture. Wikipedia mentions that the sack of Antwerp in November of 1576 "encouraged the decline of the Antwerp Cloth Market as English traders sought out new commercial links, not wishing to risk visiting the town that now resembled a war zone. By 1582, all English trade to Antwerp had ceased." Then I started thinking about Catherine of Aragon, in which author Garrett Mattingly tells of how, by the early sixteenth century, the export of raw wool to Flanders had become so important to the English economy that the enclosure of pasture land was displacing roughly five percent of the English population.

So. In the early sixteenth century, Flanders is sitting pretty because England needs it a lot more than it needs England. Philip II, to whom a single Protestant within his domains is like a raspberry seed between his teeth, drains the Spanish treasury trying to subdue the Dutch Protestants, and finally manages to accidentally maul Antwerp via the ugly and inevitable side-effects of not paying a standing army. My memory of what happened between Spain and the Netherlands in sixty years after the Armada is hazy, but Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam and painted this right in the middle of both the Thirty Years War and the Dutch West India Company's brief period of prosperity. [Don't overestimate the importance of the WIC. It was nothing compared to the VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company) and today attracts not a tenth of the attention we pay to the VOC.] In light of all this, and especially what Gwyn told me about the Spanish design and the French machines and the silk, it seems pretty reasonable to think that this cloth is a potent symbol. Here's the plucky Dutch Republic, battered and bruised but not beaten, still resisting juggernauts with one hand while carrying on a thriving trade empire with the other, saying "We have far-flung trade connections bringing in designs and/or designers from Spain. We have silk from the east. We have French machines. We have the artisans to run them. We RULE. Nyah nyah." [I don't think Rembrandt had any need to say that. All this was obvious both to him and his clients who commissioned these paintings and decided what was worn and how it was to be depicted.]

Question:

What is that gold pendant, and is it hanging from her fan or from her dress?

Old Woman in an Armchair, 1635
Attributed to Jacob Adriaensz. Backer (Dutch, 1608–1651)
The placard says this used to be considered a Rembrandt. I take one look and say "Oh HELL no! Those hands were not painted by Rembrandt!" They do not protrude from the canvas the way the hand of the Young Woman with a Fan does, and the brush strokes, especially those composing the chair, are just too crude. The two paintings seem like completely different animals. Also, the depth is far too static to have been painted by him. Look at "Man in Oriental Costume" or "Bellona", and see how Rembrandt conveys even the slightest variance in depth; now look at how this woman's dress seems to be all on a single plane. Her face, and her headpiece and neck frill certainly convey something of that mastery of depth, though; I could see how someone could think it was a rushed Rembrandt.

A Vase of Flowers, ca. 1618
Jacob Vosmaer (Dutch, 1584–1641)
This is nice, but it's nowhere near what Abraham Mignon achieved. I fell in love with Mignon's work at the Louvre two years ago, and for the life of me I can't see why the man is so unknown; I've almost never seen any other artist's still life that, to me, compares to his work.

Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, ca. 1640
Jan Davidsz. de Heem (Dutch, 1606–1683/84)
WOW! How the hell did he get that bubbly texture on the lemon rind?? It almost looks like kilned enamel.

Interior of a Kitchen
Willem Kalf (Dutch, 1619–1693)
The highlights in this one are particularly striking, although I don't get much else out of it. The pumpkin, leeks(?), cucumbers, platter, mirror, and glass vessel in the wall niche all catch the light dramatically, leaping out of the gloom.

Vanitas, 1662
Edwaert Collier (Dutch, active by 1662, died after 1706)
This is one of the most memorable paintings in the whole wing. It embraces a common dichotomy of seventeenth century Dutch still life, which is to say that it calls attention both to the power and riches of the patron, and to the futility of acquisitiveness in the face of time, decay, and death. With this work, though, it seems to me that Collier takes that dichotomy to almost absurd heights, and the result is undeniably playful.

Among the signs of culture, influence and affluence such as the resplendent whip-handled money bag, the expensive metal and glass vessels, and the violin, we see a portrait of Holland's favorite moralist, Jacob Cats. The large book, The Decades by Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger, is open to a chapter condemning material goods. We see the perfectly distorted image of the violin neck through a glass goblet which, along with the gleaming silver chalice, is tipped on its side. That which filled the vessels is gone, and this seems like a sly reference to death that Collier hid in plain sight, presenting a delightful counterpoint to the symbolically obvious skull and hourglass that are partially hidden in the shadowy background.

One of the most interesting things about this painting is how Collier's techniques compare and contrast with Rembrandt's. Collier's paper surfaces are superlative; one can almost feel the weight, texture, and thickness of the pages, almost smell their mustiness. At first the perfect texture and reflectiveness of the silver chalice dazzled me as much as any Rembrandt. However, after my eye failed to "follow" the chalice into the canvas I came to see this extra gaudiness as a way for Collier to mask a command of depth that is far inferior to Rembrandt's. If you need further convincing, just look at the necklace hanging off the edge of the table. Those beads don't look three-dimensional at all! Compare them to the beads held by "Young Lady With a Fan"; Rembrandt's wilder brush strokes somehow convey an undeniable depth, his beads receding from the viewer in a way that Collier's beads utterly fail to do.

A Vase of Flowers, 1716
Margareta Haverman (Dutch, active by 1716, died after 1750)
Ahhhh, now that's what I'm talkin' about!! Hell yeah! The texture, the depth, it's all there! The variable shading between the brightly lit flowers in front and the shaded ones in back! The roundness and the shininess and the texture of the grapes... the dimple in the peach... the tiny, delicate, wispy stalks of wheat, the beads of water with the reflections, the palpable depth variance within each crinkly leaf... oooh, forget-me-nots! There's a tiny bug on the peach, with a tiny glint of light reflecting off its black carapace. The butterfly looks alive! Look at the shading! Such depth!!! Another little butterfly and a second snail, each one assiduously, delicately rendered!

Portrait of a Man, possibly 1650s
Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn) (Dutch, 1606–1669)
His hands are hidden, and then I go back past the other Rembrandts: "Man in Oriental Costume" has his hand in shadow; "Young Woman with a Fan" has her right hand obscured by the fan. He, like many artists, obviously didn't like taking the time to draw hands. The difference between him and those other artists, though, is that when he did draw hands, they reached out of the frame. Again, take a close look at "Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan" and then take a close look at "Old Woman in Armchair"; the hands will tell you which one was a Rembrandt, and which was only attributed to him.

Portrait of a Man, early 1650s
Frans Hals (Dutch, born after 1580, died 1666)
I've seen this painting, or one like it, somewhere else. The cuffs are electric, edgy, geometric. The angular patches of paint are almost reminiscent of the way you can see the polygons that form the surface of a computer generated image. There's lovely depth in the hat, lovely dim reflectance in the satin sheen on the hat and the outfit. He's ruddy, defiant, bold, alive!

Man with a Beard
Style of Rembrandt (17th century or later)
This imitation of Rembrandt, possibly Dutch, has really striking depth: his hat brim pokes right out; his face recedes into the shadows! There's something not quite Rembrandt, though: in the patchy brush strokes around the eyes that remind me of van Gogh; and in the slightly electric look in the strokes defining the shirt. However, the way the artist troweled on thickly stepped layers of paint to highlight the neck frill really reminds me of Rembrandt's "Jewish Bride" in the Rijksmuseum.

Portrait of a Woman, ca. 1650, reworked 1660s or later
Frans Hals (Dutch, born after 1580, died 1666)
The guide says that the background is incongruous because it's not original; it was painted in later! I take a close look at her sleeves and find that, unlike Rembrandt's technique of scraping the white paint away in "Young Lady With a Fan", Hals added streaks of black paint; I like Rembrandt's effect much better.

As in "Portrait of a Man", the way Hals uses triangular or rectangular patches of paint gives the fabrics a kinetic, charged feel. The flesh, though, does not display this polygonal aspect, and that contrast certainly makes the composition more interesting.

Portrait of a Woman
Adriaen Hanneman (Dutch, born about 1601, died 1671)
I find this style to be both compelling and challenging: compelling because the opalescent luster is so invitingly sumptuous, and challenging because everything from her face to her hair to her clothes has this same texture. It's as though everything is made of very fine velvet; it's striking, although I don't know if I could stomach too much of this not-strictly-realistic style. The weakness, as far as I'm concerned, is the lack of textural variance to accompany the depth variance - and there is some incredibly well-conveyed depth here. The hand and the face both have intricate variances of depth, and the nose in particular sticks out perceptibly from the rest of the face. The silver pendant and the hairpiece have a fantastic luster.

Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662
Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632–1675)
The patches of color from the cloth, reflected off the underside of the basin, look like stained glass! I wouldn't have noticed this if not for the guide.

I was anxious to get close to this painting because I wanted to see if Vermeer used the same tiny, bold medallions of paint that lent such fabulous textures to his paintings that I saw in the Rijksmuseum, especially Milkmaid. No, there's only the barest hint of this bold pointillist style in the gold thread and reflective metal of the box. "Milkmaid" was painted in 1658, only four years before this one; could Vermeer have discarded that style in those four years, or did the textures in this composition simply not call for it?

Enough of my fine-toothed-combing; time to take a step back. Like the other Vermeers I've seen, this is stunning. It's interesting to me how Vermeer conveyed light so differently than Rembrandt. Vermeer's reflections are dots and solid patches - pools of light! He conveys depth with haziness which, though it could hardly be more different than Rembrandt's bold, rough-edged streaks of reflected light, serve just as well to draw my eye into his composition. The cloth on the table in the foreground is hardly hazy at all, whereas surfaces farther back are moreso. I can't say enough about how each softened facet of the lovely crumpled fabrics reflects the light differently!

A Kitchen
Hendrick Martensz. Sorgh (Dutch, 1609/11–1670)
Depth is not this guy's forte. He gets some mileage from shiny, burnished objects, but the composition seems contrived solely for that purpose.

The Smoker, ca. 1623–25
Frans Hals (Dutch, born after 1580, died 1666)
Very bold, crude brush strokes. Obviously meant to be viewed from some distance.

The placard says that one of Hals's paintings bore the inscription "indecent lovemaking and smoking are both bad for the soul, but only the latter will harm the body." I guess that VD was just something that happened to other people!

Landscape with a Cottage, 1629
Pieter de Molijn (Dutch, 1595–1661)
This is interesting in a way I find very hard to articulate. The light is muted, almost smeared: there's a sense of greyness uniting the different surfaces and depths. The texture of the trees is lovely. There's something sad about the way the eye is drawn from the trees, out to the tiny figures on shore, out to sea, then back with the spilling light through the path and back to the trees. It conveys an emptiness with that slice of sea, the expanse of sky, and the way the brooding quality of the sky leaks into and suffuses the trees.

Still Life with Fruit, Glassware, and a Wan-li Bowl, 1659
Willem Kalf (Dutch, 1619–1693)
This one is very dark, very subtle. The first thing I notice is the lovely wavy texture on the lemon rind - it's not blotchy like de Heem's lemon rind, but wavy like light reflected off rippling water and onto a shaded yellow wall. It's patchy, a bit like sponge work. Then I see lovely, subtle, sumptuous reflections, and admire how Kalf led me to them: the peel drew my eye and then, BAM!, the depth variance between the peel and the platter grabbed me. My eye moves back to that platter and then futher, delighting in the exquisite texture of the reflective porcelain. The reflections off the glassware lurking in the shadowy background invite a more languorous, contemplative examination.

The more I look at this, the more I like it. Again, the things I notice first draw my attention to subtler elements on which I then linger. My eye moves from the porcelain and the lemon to the moldy fruit and the platter, then I notice the soft cloth bulging into the foreground! I can hardly believe it took me this long to notice it, because now that I see it I can't take my eyes off it! The reflections, so restrained yet so refined, are endlessly inviting. This is a very, very skillful composition that invites me to rove within it, to hang out a while. I notice that there are, in general, three planes of depth with contrasting permutations of elements: the closest is soft and dark; the middle is shiny, crisp and reflective; and the farthest is dark and shiny!

Still Life with Lobster and Fruit, 1650s
Abraham van Beyeren (Dutch, 1620/21–1690)
Oh, here we go with the lemon peel again. I wonder if this is like a signature of the artist, because each one seems to have a distinct way of rendering the texture. This peel reminds me just a bit of John Singer Sargent; although I could be just imagining things, there's something about the cascades of streaky blobs in his brush strokes that remind me of the light in Sargent's Fumée d'Ambre Gris.

This one interests me most for the quality of its light: it has an immense array of reflections, but they are all soft. This painting is the definition of "lambent". I wrote "Lousy/nonexistent foreshortening", but then I took a few steps back and reconsidered. "Oh, that's better!" I wrote. "Now I can see depth! Well, look at that!" Clearly, this one is meant to be viewed from a distance. Ten feet seems about right. The color is soft, yet vibrant; the textures are muted, yet the reflections make them very inviting.

Peacocks, 1683
Melchior d' Hondecoeter (Dutch, 1636–1695)
The monkey looks amazing! The peacocks are incredible, but lack the depth they should have (the word "should", here, having been defined when I walked in and saw the Rembrandts). There should be more perceptible depth between the head and the shoulders and the rump. Oh, look at the angry squirrel! The sheen of its fur is exquisite, like the nearly palpable monkey. The melon is lovely, but the peaches and apricots and such get a meh, and the grapes a meh+. The grape leaves, however, are stellar! Vibrant light shows every fold, every dimple and wrinkle. A+ on those!

Overall, the main flaw in this one is a lack of depth. Jeez, Mr. Rembrandt, did you have to go and ruin everyone else's work for me??

Still Life: A Banqueting Scene, 1670s
Jan Jansz. de Heem (Flemish, born 1650, died after 1695)
The guide says that de Heem lived in Antwerp, possibly for the fruit!

Something about the chair in the foreground seems not up to the standards of the rest of the painting; the foreshortening seems imperfect, the surface a bit crudely rendered. In contrast, the pitcher is fantastic... and yet again, the foreshortening isn't quite convincing. That's a damned nice silver coffee urn, though; the foreshortening there is unimpeachable . The reflections are lovely and inviting, especially the ones in the gold... whatever that gold thing is... and in the lobster which, along with the small crust of bread, looks real enough to touch. I give this one an A. Depth is very well conveyed through alternating sharpness and haziness, and by very well rendered smooth curves; these elements make up for the imperfect foreshortening.

And AGAIN with the lemon! De Heem's rind has a very fine texture that's different from the others, including his own in "Still Life with a Glass and Oysters"; the blotches bespeak a "dab and streak" brush stroke. I think I like this one the best!

Falconer's Bag, 1695
Jan Weenix (Dutch, 1642–1719)
Aha! Like the Hanneman, this one has a satiny suffusion of light, but unlike the Hanneman this texture doesn't cover all of it! Weenix varied his surfaces, so it's much more interesting. Holy crap, the birds look amazing! You can almost run your fingers through the feathers! The leaves are perhaps not quite as believable as some of the others I've seen today, but they're still very good. As we pass into the background the light gradually fades into shade. The eye lingers on the birds for a while, then moves back in curiosity to the background scene: people, swans, a boat, the water, stone arches, trees, sky... GOOD GOD, that buckle in the foreground is fantastic! So is the red and gold tassle! Yeah! I like the way things are sharp in the foreground and get gradually softer as the eye moves back. Aha, but there's a hint of light way off at the horizon! This strikes me as a lovely rhetorical device: objects in the distance face into haziness, but the corresponding fade into darkness is punctuated with the promise of sunlight around the corner, thus avoiding any potentially depressing overtones, not to mention forthright symbols of mortality that permeate many of the still lifes!

Maps Exhibit at Oriental Institute in Chicago

2008-01-05T20:51:00.000-05:00

European Cartographers and the Ottoman World, 1500–1750: Maps from the Collection of O.J. Sopranos

Following is a foolscap full of my jottings from several rapturous hours spent at the exhibit on December 26.

"Asia Minor", from Prima Asia Tabvla by Bernardus Sylvanus, Venice, 1511
This was the first Ptolemy atlas to be printed, rather than hand- illuminated, in more than one color! It was quite striking to see the difference in appearance between this map, with its red place names that were obviously made with moveable type, next to the hand-illuminated pieces from around the same time.

"Asia Minor", from Tabula Nova Asiae Minoris by Lorenz Fries, Viennae, 1541
Fries simplified and reduced maps by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, removing some classical elements. This was the first Ptolemaic map to make specific reference to sixteenth-century political realities, with it inscription "Asia Minor Sive Maior Tvrchia" (Asia Minor or Greater Turkey). The text for Fries's edition was prepared by Michel de Villeneve, ake Servetus. Among the charges against him during the Inquisition was that his atlas described Palestine as being largely infertile. At the time of his execution in 1553, many of his works, including copies of Ptolemy maps, were burned.

Giacomo Gastaldi, 1500-1566, was perhaps the biggest name in sixteenth century cartography. He had the advantage of a friendship with Ramusio, secretary to Venice's Council of Ten. Ortelios, another big name, 1527- 1598, systematized his map collections, adopting a uniform scale and presenting each map as a part of the greater world.

The "Lost map of Hajji Ahmed" is an interesting story. Apparently Oronce Fine, a Parisian, based this map on woodcuts from 1534 and spun a fanciful story about a captive Turk making the map. Someone posted a video from the symposium about the exhibit on YouTube. There's also a link on the exhibit page to this.

"Mediterranean Sea" from Caertboeck van de Midlandtsche Zee, by William Parentsz, Amsterdam, 1595
This was the first waggoner* to extend the Dutch approach to sea charting into the Mediterranean. You can really see the Dutch influence, and the fact that this map was made primarily for coastal reference, as the coastlines are packed full of detail but that of the inland areas is relatively sparse.
*Woo hoo! Thanks to David Howarth's The Voyage of the Armada, I know the story behind the waggoners! In 1588 a Dutch man named Waghenaer became the first person to compile an exhaustive collection of coastal route maps, or "rutters". Each rutter had two elements: a detailed drawing of the profile of a particular section of coast; a highly exacting set of instructions on how to navigate around obstacles. These instructions would run along the lines of "When the steeple of this church is in line with that hill, there you must turn west in order to avoid the shoals ahead..." Wagenhaer's books of rutters were so useful to mariners that they became known as waggoners!

"Mediterranean Sea", from Carte Nouvelle de la Mer Mediterraneé by Romeijn de Hooghe, Amsterdam, [1694] 1711
The dedication in the cartouche (I learned that word at the exhibit!) is to William of Orange, who was king of both the Netherlands and Great Britain at the time. The Black Sea is very oddly-shaped, not only in this one, but in several maps from around this time; also, Italy is oddly misshapen, with a too-high instep here and an oddly swept-back heel there. It would seem that cartographers' notions of some areas had not yet achieved a high level of accuracy.

One of the most striking pieces is a map of the Mediterranean and Black Seas that was hand-painted on vellum by Domenico Olivia in 1568. On the "neck" of the vellum is a depiction of Christ on the cross, supposedly watching over mariners. Vibrantly multi-colored "Rhumb-lines" (another term I learned at the exhibit) radiate from the compass roses.

"Ottoman Empire", from Speculum Orbis Terrarum by Gerard de Jode, Amsterdam, 1578
De Jode came into conflict with Ortelius; there is evidence that Ortelius used his influence to delay the licensing of de Jode's atlas. The most interesting thing about this map, especially in relation to those around it, is that de Jode paid no attention to political boundaries. This illustrates the sixteenth-century way of thinking about political aggregates, so very different from modern notions, that Garrett Mattingly wrote about in his book Catherine of Aragon. As the exhibit placard says, de Jode's map illustrates the different conceptualization of political space. Sovereignty in the late sixteenth century remained fundamentally a matter of personal allegiance and dynastic influence. In such circumstances boundaries were more fluid and remained un-demarcated on the ground, more easily described than mapped.

Frederick de Witt, Amsterdam, [1635] 1680
This map shows the persistence with which information, sometimes inaccurate, passed down through generations of cartographers. His maps contained Ortelius's naming and configurations.

Faden (book of maps - late eighteenth century?)
Faden started out importing and reselling European maps, and eventually began to commission and engrave his own. This map of the Arabian peninsula was updated to include observations made by Carsten Niebuhr in the course of the Royal Danish Expedition that took place in 1761-67**.

"Western Mediterranean", anonymous, Cedid Atlas Tercumesi, Istanbul, 1803
This striking map was printed for the Ottoman Military Engineering School. It was linked to early nineteenth-century efforts to modernize the Ottoman military. All maps in the atlas were taken from Faden's "General Atlas" that had been acquired by the private secretary to the Ottoman ambassador in London! This was translated into Ottoman Turkish and re-engraved. From this point on, Ottoman maps increasingly reflected western geographical science and cartographic practices.

As we move along the wall adjacent to the de Jode, we see a striking aspect of the evolution of cartography between the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth. By then, the French had taken the lead in cartography, and their focus on rational order shows in the way maps became intricately ramified. The astonishingly busy map of Hungary by Guillaume de L'Isle, Paris, 1717, is among the first to show the course of the Danube correctly.

The last section illustrates how trade and travel were inextricably bound to cartography, as map-makers relied upon information brought back by travelers, and how the increasing availability of this information forced them to become more accurate.

"Rhodes", from Peregrinato in Terram Sanctam by Bernhard von Breydenbach
Erhard Reuwich accompanied Breydenbach on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1483- 84. His woodcut represented an entirely new approach to topography: showing the "true likeness", as opposed to more fanciful representations. You can see the damage inflicted on the harbor during the Ottoman siege of 1480.

**Niebuhr was the sole surviving member of the Royal Danish Expedition to the Arabian Peninsula between 1761 and 1767. Niebuhr's maps of interior Arabia remained the standard reference for cartographers until well into the twentieth century!

"Constantinople" (Plan de la ville de Constantinople et de ses Faubourgs) from Voyage Pittoresque de la Greece, Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, Vol. I by Fr. Kauffer, Paris, 1782
Kauffer was an engineer attached to the staff of the French embassy in Istanbul. This is a bloody AMAZING map! The precision and delicacy of detail is akin to something one would see in a very good American Civil War-era map.

"Constantinopolis" from De Rebuspublicus Hanseaticis by Matthaus Merian, Frankfurt, 1641
This panoramic view shows a concern with realism. Even the reproduction in the exhibit book, though, doesn't show the thing I find most striking: the refined use of cross-hatching, so much more prevalent than in any other map in the exhibit, gives this panorama a highly distinctive, warm, and lavishly textured style.

The exhibit has some travel journals of one Lady Mary Worley Montague, wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Court in 1717 and 1718. She sounds like an interesting character: she was openly scornful of earlier authors, whom she claimed never actually witnessed the people and events they write of; she was also a steadfast advocate of inoculation during a time when the medical community was very much against it.

"Itinerario, Voyage of te Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Amsterdam, 1596
Van linschoten knew the spice trade from six years in Portuguese Goa, and this apparently had quite an influence on Dutch commercial expansion into the East Indies. At some point he got his hands on some secret Portuguese rutters. The maps for the Itinerario, drawn by Henricus Langene, were far more accurate than Gastaldi or Ortelius, and were quickly reproduced.

View of Tunis from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, Braun & Hogenberg, Cologne, 1572-1617, ed. 1633
This view of Tunis narrates an attack on the city, at the time under the protection of Barbarossa, by Habsburg forces in 1535 in an effort to contain Ottoman expansion into the western Mediterranean. How gratifying it is to see this woodcut, produced in a time when Europeans and Ottomans were fighting so desperately to conquer, or more likely reconquer, any and all territory on the northern coast of Africa! In his book The Victory of the West, which I highly recommend, Niccolo Capponi writes in detail of this near-stalemate that lasted for decades, and was broken only by the hugely important Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

The book that goes along with the exhibit is a bit pricey at $42, but when Grace asked me if I wanted it I said "Yes". The reproductions, though at times disappointingly lacking in fine detail, are exhaustive. A surprising number of them come from local sources such as the University of Chicago. I think the book is probably worth the price, especially given the pleasing amount of detail and thematic planning that went into the exhibit.

Reaping the benefits of geography

2008-01-05T19:32:00.000-05:00

Since I've been reading history it's become more and more apparent that my lack of geographical knowledge causes me to spin my wheels, pausing to look up a place or fuming over not having an atlas with me. During the last year I've spent a lot of time boning up on geography, mainly using these outline tests. I've memorized the U.S. capitals, the English historical counties, all the countries of the world, and all the capitals except those in Oceania and the Caribbean. Recently I had a great moment when I realized the fruits of my labors. I was listening to the twelfth podcast in the 12 Byzantine Rulers series, and Brownworth was talking about Michael III's Patriarch Photios. The Bulgarians were making overtures to join the Orthodox Christian fold at around the same time when some Scandanavian Slavs in Armenia were making folks in Constantinople nervous. In 863, under Photios's guidance, Micael took the opportunity to attempt to convert all of them to Christianity. As I was listening I realized that I wasn't spinning my wheels at all, because I knew where all those places were! It may not sound like much, but to someone who's always been not only historically but geographically challenged, it was a real watershed.

Here I go.

2008-01-05T18:00:00.000-05:00

My friend Karen told me that our mutual friend Catalina wants to start a blog. I assumed it was easy, but since I'd never done it I figured I should just start my own so that I could tell her how to do it. The problem was that I think that blogging is nothing but masturbation, and since so much that passes for discourse is also masturbatory, the notion has always seemed particularly unsavory. Then it occurred to me that a blog could serve a useful purpose: it could help me by serving as a journal for my historical studies; and it might convey some of my newfound enthusiasm for history. If I can put an extra coat on the very thin paint that is my memory, while potentially helping someone else to discover the excitement of history, then a little wanking might not be out of order. There's also the nice fringe benefit of the release valve: maybe writing about my enthusiasm du jour will help me refrain from talking my friends' ears off about it.