Time in Maps by Caroline Winterer

Author:Caroline Winterer [Winterer, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000 History / General, TEC048000 Technology & Engineering / Cartography
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Fig. 5.8 Detail from the map of Africa in Vincenzo Coronelli’s Atlante veneto (1690–1701). Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, https://purl.stanford.edu/gv420dv9515.

On the map of Africa (fig. 5.8), for example, Fame flies over the mysterious sources of the Nile as they are being unveiled under a large cloth inscribed with ancient and contemporary speculations about its sources. The scene is balanced by another prominent veil forming the cartouche on the facing page, revealing and yet half-concealing the continent’s exotic plant and animal species.

Veils also obscure the past. At the outset of his description of the city of Ravenna, for example, Coronelli observes how “the memories of the foundation of the city are buried under the darkness of a decrepit antiquity, to such an extent that instead of shedding light on the origin through the whiteness of their sheets, authors further adumbrated it with the darkness of their ink.”59 It is the cosmographer’s task to penetrate this dark layer of misleading ink and bring truth to light: in the accompanying illustration, a drape reveals a plan of the ancient city in utmost clarity, with each of its religious buildings carefully mapped and numbered. Similar metaphors proliferate in the descriptions of the Greek islands, whose glorious memories are likewise “buried” under the veil of oblivion, due to the neglect of their current inhabitants oppressed by the Ottoman yoke.60 Once home to the Knights Hospitaller but now reduced to ruin, the islands near Rhodes (fig. 5.9) are characteristically portrayed on thin veils ready to fly away from the page, as if they were ephemeral memories of themselves and their glorious past.

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