Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [48]
This was a watershed moment in the history of cartophilia. For thousands of years, people had drawn maps because they had to: to get from one place to another, or locate taxpayers, or mark the boundaries of fields and pastures. If not for those maps, lives or property would be lost, governments might fall. But here, for the first time, we have evidence of people keeping maps just because they liked looking at them. John Dee, the court astrologer and alchemist to Queen Elizabeth I, noted the fad in 1570, writing that the hobbyists bought maps with three purposes in mind: “some to beautify their halls, parlours, and chambers with,” “some other[s] to view the large dominion of the Turk, the wide empire of the Muscovite, and the little morsel of ground where Christendom . . . is certainly known,” and “some others . . . to understand other men’s travels.” Many of the great men of the time were map geeks. During his wild Oxford days, Thomas Hobbes “took great delight there to go to the bookbinders’ shops and lie gazing on maps.” (Those political philosophers know how to party!) The diarist and secretary of the Admiralty Samuel Pepys had a vast map collection, though he lost his beloved John Speed atlas in the Great Fire of London.
A recent study of old Cambridge records has found that, by 1560, a quarter of all book owners owned maps and atlases as well. Half displayed them proudly on their walls, as can also be seen in many oil paintings of the time. Jan Vermeer was a particular map fan, faithfully reproducing period maps in the backgrounds of more than a quarter of his surviving canvases. In many cases, he seems to have gotten so carried away that his figures are dwarfed by an enormous map: the 1636 Claes Jansz. Visscher map of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands in The Art of Painting, for example, or the 1620 Balthasar Florisz. van Berckenrode map of Holland above the Officer and Laughing Girl. The fact that early collectors were so proud to display their maps tells us that there may have been some self-interest at play here, beyond just an idle aesthetic or intellectual pursuit. Displaying maps gave you prestige; it was easy shorthand for “See how educated I am!” or “See how far-reaching my business interests are!”* A college sophomore is hoping for the same effect today when he casually adds a German beer stein or a poster of the Montmartre steps to his dorm room decor after returning from a summer in Europe.
The collectors then must have been very different from today’s model. Back then, sixteenth-century maps had no patina of age and history, of course—they were contemporary items, hot off the presses. For Leonard and Phil, one of these maps will conjure up a bygone time, but to its first owner, the same map was like a “Breaking News” update on CNN, the first place they could see the latest discoveries about the world outside Europe. It occurs to me that an adult collector then may have looked at maps with an eagerness and curiosity that only children can view maps with today: the joy of seeing an unknown part of the world for the very first time.
Detail from Vermeer’s 1657 Officer and Laughing Girl. Would you care for a little painting with your map, Mr. Vermeer?
Until a wider variety of maps became available in the late sixteenth century, the Cambridge study found, collectors were interested in only two kinds of maps: world maps and maps of the Holy Land. When Leonard decided to focus his