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At Harvard, a map-making Renaissance

Claudius Ptolemy, Sebastian Münster, and Heinrich Petri, from "Geographic universalis: vetus et nova," 1542. Harvard Map Collection There's the otherness a 21st-century viewer feels looking at maps from half a millennium ago. The ones here range in date from 1493 to the late 17th century. But there's also a sense of the otherness, even uncertainty, that contemporaries must have felt, looking at renderings of a world expanding and altered suddenly in an unprecedented fashion. The exhibition, which has been curated by Harvard's Molly Taylor-Poleskey, runs through June 30. The three-dozen items on display nearly all come from Harvard's holdings of 1,200 maps and 64 atlases created during the European Renaissance. Planispheric astrolabe, Persia, circa 1590. Harvard Collection of Scientific Instruments 'Renaissance Treasures' includes two contemporary navigational devices, a planispheric astrolabe from Persia and a pocket compass (think of them as beta-version GPS), as well as two Advertisement Let's return, though, to those related issues of expansion, alteration, and unsettledness. Their prominence at that particular time had an obvious, outward, source: the knowledge obtained by European voyages of discovery (and conquest). It was knowledge of lands previously little known to the West, in Asia and Africa, as well as the 'New World' of the Americas. Gerhard Mercator, celestial globe, 1551, and terrestrial globe,1541. Molly Taylor-Poleskey/Harvard Map Collection Yet that expansion, alteration, and unsettledness had another source, much closer to home: the greater diffusion of knowledge driven both by the intellectual ferment of what we now know as the Renaissance and, no less important, technological innovations such as movable type. The clearest indication of that second source is where the maps and atlases in the show originated. They were variously published in London, Frankfurt, Venice, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Florence, Basel, Louvain, Paris, Leyden, and Avignon. It wasn't just that there was an ongoing abundance of new geographical information. There was an increasingly abundant system for disseminating that information, a system all the more effective for being ad hoc. John Speed, Abraham Goos, and George Humble, "Asia with Islands Adioyning Described…," circa 1626. Harvard Map Collection That dissemination could be fitful, of course. A map from 1626 or '27 (the indeterminacy of date rather nicely chimes with the indeterminacy of geographical detail) bears the imposing title 'Asia with the Islands Adioyning Described, the Atire of the People, & Townes of Importance: All of Them Newly Augmented.' More than a century after Ferdinand Magellan gave the Pacific its name, the map refers to it as 'The West Ocean.' In fairness, the facts that the map was published in London, Magellan was Spanish, and the English and Spanish were adversaries of very long standing, may have had something to do with that — in a Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of America way. Still, even if the cartographic age of 'There be monsters' was over, that of 'There be discrepancies' was not. Advertisement The range of cartographic subjects takes in places previously unimagined, such as Peru, Baja California, Canada (or New France), and others previously known but so exotic as to verge on the fictive. Those include Africa, 'Russiae, Moscoviae et Tarariae,' as one 1562 map has it, and 'Turcicum imperium,' from 1649, showing what would come to be known as the Ottoman Empire. There's also a map of that imperium/empire's capital, Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). More familiar places show up: Hungary, Austria, the Mediterranean littoral, Cambridge (the other, original one). Familiarity of a different sort is evident in one of the most beautiful maps. Published in Amsterdam, in the 1670s, it shows the sun, right down to solar flares. Those flares are a reminder of how wonderfully detailed and attractive these maps can be. Salvator Oliva's map of the Mediterranean, from 1620, is a marvel of delicacy of rendering and, along its borders, richness of color. The purpose of maps is geographic information. Anything beyond that, such as beauty, let's say, is a bonus. That particular bonus is evident throughout 'Renaissance Treasures.' There be monsters? There be beauty. The big art show at Harvard this semester is 'Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking.' It runs through July 27 at the Harvard University Art Museums. That's about a two-minute walk from the Harvard Map Collection. Go to both, and you might have a hard time deciding which offers more aesthetic pleasure. Advertisement The map collection website notes that the collection is open only by appointment. That is correct. However, the exhibition is situated outside the collection, meaning it's open to visitors during Pusey Library hours. RENAISSANCE TREASURES OF THE HARVARD MAP COLLECTION At Harvard Map Collection, Pusey Library, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, through June 30. 617-495-2417. Mark Feeney can be reached at