Historical Links between Cartography and Art

IN a footnote to her study of the Renaissance polymath, Leon Battista Alberti, Joan Gadol rebuked a historian of science and cartography for denying the existence of a reciprocal relationship between Renaissance painting and cartography.' Although the position of the historian was extreme, his denial pointed to an aspect of the history of cartography neglected by both historians and geographers. While most authors readily acknowledge a connection between early maps and paintings, few do more than comment on the evident similarities between them. To go further would mean foraging in the history of art, or, to borrow a phrase from John Speed, the eighteenth-century cartographer, dipping one's sickle in other men's corn. The contention here is that an extensive trespass would broaden an interesting facet of the history of cartography and would serve as a reminder that important branches of geography and art are rooted in common ground. Until science claimed cartography, mapmaking and landscape painting were kindred activities, often performed by the same hand. As miniatures of landscape or the earth, maps and paintings were artifacts in the particular Levi-Straussian sense as well as in the popular sense: making a map invariably was an occasion for the display of artistry.2 Cartography and landscape painting were also connected by the fact that their practitioners held common conceptions of the earth and shared the problems of selecting phenomena and of representing them coherently on a plane surface. They are similar arts in that they both present phenomena in context rather than in isolation-mountains, rivers, roads and towns are inconceivable outside a physical setting. So alike were the approaches and the products of painters and cartographers that until the Renaissance there was no terminology to distinguish clearly between maps and paintings. Cartography and landscape painting were also linked by cosmic as well as terrestrial considerations; maps and paintings reflected prevailing notions of space and the cosmos. What follows is a tentative amplification of each of these points of contact.