Artifex Ars Cartographica: Collaboration Between Portuguese Painters and Cartographers in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

ABSTRACT During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was no statutory difference between cartography, drawing and painting. These activities were performed then by craftsmen who were part of a vast group under the umbrella of ‘mechanical arts’ and fell under the ‘artifex’ category. Artifex were experts in any particular art, whether a craftsman, an artisan, an artist, a performer or a creator. The scientific or artistic nature of their work had little bearing on this status. There is nothing new about high levels of discovery and cooperation between activities commonly using drawing, mathematics and geometry. Art and science shared common methods and disciplines in their pursuit of a single goal—to know, understand and represent the world. The particular nature of the Portuguese artistic and scientific panorama, and its intrinsic link to the art and craft of navigation, provokes several questions: What kind of relationship was there between cartographers and painters? How did epistemic exchanges unfold between both activities? To which extent did perspective and geometry interact with painting and cartography? Did painters participate in the decoration of maps, charts and atlases? And how did this joint work influence the landscape representations of the vast extra‐European space? Were there, for example, any painters on board ships? We may refer to two different documental sources to find answers to many of these questions, in particular the pictorial and cartographic collections produced between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By investigating processes of cooperation between cartographers and painters, I posit that we unveil hidden ‘trading zones’ to explain the epistemic transfer processes and visual representational models which would become commonplace in the modern age.