Organized by Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza

DAVID WOODWARD

The taste for map projections in the Renaissance

The interest in projected maps of the world in the Renaissance is routinely ascribed to the rediscovery of Ptolemy's manual of mapmaking in the first decade of the fifteenth century. Although this was a necessary condition (that is, after all, what the Geography talks about in the opening chapters), it was not a sufficient condition. What was also needed was a desire for maps to be made by this method. This paper will propose that map projections satisfied the desires of scholars and patrons for a system of representing the world that would: (1) maintain scale or "just proportion"; (2) provide a framework for the whole earth; (3) render an apparent three-dimensional picture of the spherical earth; (4) bound a uniform space in which objects were cosynchronous; (5) provide an apparently abstract, disembodied or objective picture of the world; (6) conform to a linear style that created the illusion of precision; and ; (8) code a closed or esoteric system of knowledge known only to the elite as the variety of specialized uses for maps multiplied.
       The surface similarity of the diagrams in the Geography illustrating how map "projections" are constructed and the diagrams used to illustrate linear perspective have led to a great deal of confusion in relating the two. Some authors have even directly linked the origin of the two, arguing that Brunelleschi's experiments in Florence were somehow related to Ptolemy's Geography.
       Unfortunately, it is not that simple. "Map projection" is a complex notion that exhibits several categories dependent on quite different assumptions of purpose and viewpoint. It is difficult to relate the complex notion of "map projection" to another complex and varied concept of "linear perspective."
        The similarities between map projections and linear perspective may lie at a different level--in the taste for both concepts rather than in any affinities of mathematical construction. As artists and their clients valued the perspective way of looking at the world (pictures in perspective were the ways pictures should look), the clients and patrons of maps of the world believed that their maps should look like those that Ptolemy proposed, only obviously updated for new geographical discoveries. This paper will try to explain why they did so.

Selected bibliography

Edgerton, Samuel Youngs. 1974. "Florentine Interest in Ptolemaic Cartography as Background for Renaissance Painting, Architecture, and the Discovery of America." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33: 274-92.

------. 1975. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Harper and Row.

Gautier Dalché, Patrick. 1996. "Pour une histoire du regard géographique: Conception et usage de la carte au XV siècle." Micrologus: Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies (The Theatre of Nature) 4: 77-103.

Harley, J. B., and David Woodward, eds. 1987. History of Cartography. Vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lemoine, J. G. 1958. "Brunelleschi et Ptolémee: Les origines géographiques de la 'boite d'optique.'" Gazette des Beaux-Arts 51: 281-96.

Ptolemy's Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters. By J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Snyder, John P. 1993. Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Veltman, Kim H. 1980. "Ptolemy and the Origin of Linear Perspective, " in La Prospettiva Rinascimentale. Codificazioni e trasgressioni. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi. Milano 11-15 ottobre 1977, Florence, 1980, pp. 565-84.