The Genoese World Map of 1457: Image and Voice of an Ambiguous World

More than twenty years ago, Brian Harley published his seminal argument that maps were means of understanding the human world spatially. Since then, communicative, medial and epistemic aspects of maps have received ample attention. Yet questions about the relationships that emerge through this process of communication still invite questions such as: At the time the map was drawn, was transmission conceivable not only among people but also between human reason and nature, and between humans and God? What kind of reference axes were used for transmission? Were there concepts of, for example, presence and absence, identity and difference, availability and unavailability, immanence and transcendence? My research tries to fill some of these gaps with respect to the GenoeseWorldMap of 1457 by asking what kind of content was transmitted in map form and what was the nature of its makers and recipients. I have adapted the sociological model of Martina Löw. Consequently, I regard a map as the result of the actions of various groups of makers, with some, like cartographers and other specialists, exerting direct influence, and others, like potential buyers, having only indirect influence. Their actions are in turn determined by the interplay of the structural limits and opportunities of the mapmaking context, the medium of the map and the conflicting objectives involved, which include the degree of accuracy needed in the placing of the different elements of the map’s content, the integration of new information, and the transmission of specific messages aiming to promote certain actions. The background to my deliberations is the manifold ambiguities of the mapmakers’ world in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They considered their world as a divine creation, God’s veiled ‘second book’, which, if rightly read, could reveal to the reader the mind of God. As empirically derived knowledge increased and more classical knowledge was rediscovered, the prevailing image of the world, transmitted through the Bible and antique texts, was challenged. The medieval mappaemundi were understood in the four senses in which Scripture itself was interpreted: that is, not only in the literal sense (to glean information about the topographical layout of the world) but also in the moral, allegorical and eschatological senses (for guidance in personal matters such as what I should do, what I should believe and what I can hope for). Then, in about 1409, the translation of Ptolemy’s Geography into Latin provided methods to project a three-dimensional globe onto a two-dimensional surface that, together with the body of coordinates for specific places and features contained in the Geography, had the potential to change the mode of map making decisively. My research aims to show that readings in multi-layered senses may also be applied to maps influenced by nautical charts and Ptolemy’s Geography such as the Genoese World Map on which I am concentrating here. The map called the Genoese World Map has no known author or place of origin. Written in Latin, it shows the known parts of the inhabitable earth covered by a geometrical system of orthogonal lines and diagonals. It has been studied mainly from the perspective of progress, with scholars regarding it as a possible precursor to the voyage to the Americas of Christopher Columbus (c.1451–1506)—a theory which has been disproved—or as a stepping stone in the path to modern cartography.