Curious Visions of Modernity by David L Martin

Author:David L Martin [Martin, David L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262298100
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2011-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

3.7

After Francesco Rosselli, Pianta della catena (Map with Chain), woodcut, ca. 1470 (segment). Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

There is, of course, one conspicuous absence in the topographical view of Florence, one that acts as a sign of things to come for cartographic depictions of the world. Although we can make out the form of small fishing boats plying their trade on the waterways below, the general wealth of narrative elements that were a hallmark of Patinir’s Weltlandschaft are now missing; the one exception being the solitary figure of the cartographer in the immediate foreground for whom this view is laid out. The vast sweep of land that was a feature of the St. Jerome panel finds its equivalent in the pastoral land surrounding the city of Florence; however, the everyday spatial stories that brought the Weltlandschaft alive for the viewer are all but gone here. The eye is no longer allowed to wander and explore the world at large: it is now fixed to a single viewpoint, elevated and distant. Deemed superfluous to the cartographer’s task of “capturing” the city as a view, the spatial stories which once brought the depiction of the city alive are hereby written out with the stroke of a pen; only a handful of boats remaining.

Before acquiring its modern meaning as a “view of nature,” the term Landschaft commonly referred to a geographical space or politicized boundary, similar to the Latin territorium or regio.40 Most often in reference to the rural land surrounding a town or city over which that city cast its political influence, the Landschaft was precisely what was being depicted in a topographical “view.” From about the middle of the 1480s, such topographical views began to appear in printed volumes, one of the most famous being Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s oft-imitated Civitates orbis terrarum (Cologne, 1587–1617). Such topographical studies were prized by scholars, merchants, and princely rulers alike for their perceived ability to “capture” a place as if one were standing before it.41 The significance of this metaphor of “conquest” for Renaissance definitions of spatial knowledge is nowhere more clearly articulated than in the narrative of Isaac Massa and his efforts to procure a “view” of Moscow (chapter epigraph).42 That Massa’s “view” was, first, acquired on pain of death and, second, deemed a worthy gift to help ingratiate himself with Prince Maurice of the Netherlands tells us much about the epistemological status of the topographical view as a “transparent” and truth-giving technology.43

In the solitary figure of the cartographer overlooking our view of Florence, then, we can see the beginnings of the cartographic turn away from definitions of space that are “lived” or “practiced” to the flat, geometrically ordered relationships of modern mapping.44 From his vantage point above the city, the cartographer of Florence can be seen sizing it up, detailing the routes in and out of its walled surrounds, charting the strengths and the weaknesses of its fortifications; preparing it and presenting it, as it were, for “conquest” by a privileged eye.

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