Maps and globes

Gerardus Mercator illustrated the Newport Tower within Narragansett Bay on his 1541 terrestrial globe. The tower illustration, while important historically, is secondary to the superlative restoration and imagery performed by UNIL Université de Lausanne (CH) of their edition of the globe.

The Illuminati (plural of Latin illuminatus, 'enlightened') is a name given to several groups, both real and fictitious.
Historically, the name usually refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, an Enlightenment-era secret society founded on 1 May 1776 in Bavaria, today part of Germany.
The society's goals were to oppose superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power. "The order of the day," they wrote in their general statutes, "is to put an end to the machinations of the purveyors of injustice, to control them without dominating them." The Illuminati—along with Freemasonry and other secret societies—were outlawed through edict by Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria with the encouragement of the Catholic Church, in 1784, 1785, 1787, and 1790.
In the following several years, the group was vilified by conservative and religious critics who claimed that they continued underground and were responsible for the French Revolution.

Many influential intellectuals and progressive politicians counted themselves as members, including Ferdinand of Brunswick and the diplomat Franz Xaver von Zwackh [de], who was the Order's second-in-command. It attracted literary men such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder and the reigning Duke of Gotha and of Weimar.

In subsequent use, "Illuminati" has referred to various organisations which have claimed or have been claimed to be connected to the original Bavarian Illuminati or similar secret societies, though these links have been unsubstantiated. These organisations have often been alleged to conspire to control world affairs, by masterminding events and planting agents in government and corporations, in order to gain political power and influence and to establish a New World Order. Central to some of the more widely known and elaborate conspiracy theories, the Illuminati have been depicted as lurking in the shadows and pulling the strings and levers of power in dozens of novels, films, television shows, comics, video games, and music videos.

This article explores the production and possible uses of globe objects big and small, with an especial focus on table and pocket globes. It seeks to better understand how globes as objects can change in use and meaning over time.

IMCos, no. 141 (summer 2015), pgs. 47-53

Of Stars, And Travels:
An astronomic cycle in the main portal of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice* is the English version, revised and enlarged, of an article appeared in Italian in ABAV- Annuario dell'Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia 2014 (2015), pp. 235-275. Some errors have been emendated, and text and pictures have been increased.
The main portal of San Marco in Venice (second half of the thirteenth century), contains an hitherto unnoticed solilunar calendar, carved into the sculptural cycle of the lower archivolt and intradox. The figures (hybrid figures, animal chases, etc.) do not have a merely decorative purpose, as believed up to now, nor they respond to a generic allegorical-moral program; rather, they represent single stars or constellations, arranged in a calculated order, as to compose a rigorous model of the celestial sphere.
Stars and constellations are not always represented  according to the Western Greek-Latin  tradition, but with symbols that refer to a plurality of legends and cultures of the Mediterranean, the Near, and the Far East, according to the cosmopolitan vocation of this town of travellers.
These visual symbols have become now totally obscure; but they were probably of common access in an epoch in which the celestial navigation was at the base of the long journeys, not only by sea, but also by land.
The astronomical representations of this portal are also connected with the system, no less obscure, of the Venetian patere, the characteristic round stone ornaments on the facades of the oldest civil buildings and of some churches in town. Thanks to the contextual clarification of the symbols offered by the Marcian cycle, the patere can now be read as possible emblems of traveling merchants, placed on the facades to remember or indicate destinations and itineraries.
The name of the great master who sculpted this cycle, a contemporary of Antelami and of the Master of the Ferrara Months, is not known. Who was the remarkable artist, which were the sources of his astronomical information, who were the patrons and political advisors that encoureged a so powerfully innovative work as the stone clock of St. Mark?
A multidisciplinary research in depth, ranging from iconography, ancient astronomy, celestial navigation, Oriental languages ​​and cultures, will be probably be necessary to further the very complex world that St.Mark’s oldest extant portal is beginning to reveal.

Anaximander is credited, i.a., for having been the author of the very first graphic rendering of the whole known world, thus with the invention of a successful protype, that of large scale maps. For a very long time, this prototype has been treated as but a secondary achievement of his, while paying the greatest attention to the ‘philosophical’ doctrine of apeiron in the vein of a celebrated page of Aristotle. My paper, inspired as it is to a substantial disagreement from such a portrayal, is devoted to reach a more definite idea of what the rendering based on the coastline is likely to have meant for him as well as for his fellow citizens, an undertaking completely autonomous with respect to the sort of investigations to which Thales was most intensely committed.

In the medieval world, geographical knowledge was influenced by religious ideas and beliefs. Whereas this point is well analysed for the Latin-Christian world, the religious character of the Arabic-Islamic geographic tradition has not yet been scrutinised in detail.

This volume addresses this desideratum and combines case studies from both traditions of geographic thinking. The contributions comprise in-depth analyses of individual geographical works as for example those of al-Idrisi or Lambert of Saint-Omer, different forms of presenting geographical knowledge such as TO-diagrams or globes as well as performative aspects of studying and meditating geographical knowledge.

Focussing on texts as well as on maps, the contributions open up a comparative perspective on how religious knowledge influenced the way the world and its geography were perceived and described int the medieval world.

The importance of the celestial sphere in the so called Atlas Farnesianus has been undervalued in the last two centuries due to the scant attention paid to it and to the lack of any serious study. We find discrepancies even in the number of constellations registered in the globe.
This work Is only Intended to be a starting point for further studies, trying to collect and discuss as many references as possible on the subject and to give a detailed description of the sphere.
The paper, though appeared in 1987, is still an obliged starting point for any scholar who wishes to treat the subject.

In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these ‘flat Earth’ conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of ‘New Medievalism’.
By tracing visual representations of the planet across Western history and culture, Peraica provides support for a media-based explanation behind the reappearance of flat Earth theories. Through an adventurous exploration of the ways the Earth has been represented in sculptural globes, landscape painting, aerial photography, and even new media art, she proposes that a significant reason for the reemergence today in the belief that the world is flat lies in processes and practices of representation which flatten it during the compositing of photographs into ‘total images’. Such images, Peraica argues, are principally characterized by the disappearance of the subjective point of view and angle of view from photography, as the perspectival tool of the camera is being replaced with the technical perspective of the map, and human perception with machine vision, within a polyperspectival assemblage. In the media constellation of these total images, photography is but one layer of visual information among many, serving not to represent some part of the Earth, but to provide an illusion of realism.

REPORT ON A GLOBE BY CORNELIS DE JODE, ANTWERP 1594 – The study was carried out as a report for the authorization to the export of a rare Dutch globe, made in Antwerp by Cornelis de Jode in 1594. The study was developed according to the guidelines outlined in a methodological premise needed to establish the value and importance of the globe as a document of material history. To this end, formal, biographical and geographic and literary aspects of the globe are analyzed, according to a philological approach.

During the last years, many solutions have been proposed for 3D Virtual Heritage representations. Recently, also new technologies for online gaming evolved, based on javascript libraries (WebGL), used to create and publish virtual interactive environments. They are based on recent Web browser's functionalities, surpassing some limitations of VRML technologies. On the side of geospatial information, technology has evolved from desktop GIS to 2D WebGIS and globe applications. The use of globe applications is, today, very diffused due to its immediate and at the same time impressive representation of the earth surface and territories. These technologies have been, also, applied to Virtual Heritage 3D reconstructions, to improve the fruition of Cultural Heritage (CH), with the achievement of interesting results. The topic of this paper is the experimentation on the fusion between globe based and gaming technologies (in our case WebGL) that allow achieving a more user-centric and powerful solution useful for publishing 3D geospatial information of CH on Web. This choice allows obtaining GIS oriented 3D models, typical of globe applications, and, at the same time, a more immersive exploration of CH and its surrounding environment. In particular, it also gives complementary text and multimedia information on the history, architectural features of each cultural good, based on querying of semantic information. The test field of the research is the construction of the 3D GIS virtual globe model of the Manfredonic Castle of Mussomeli (Sicily-Italy), developed for PON-NEPTIS EU Project, to compare open-source technologies and commercial proprietary applications.

During the last years, many solutions have been proposed for 3D Virtual Heritage representations. Recently, also new technologies for online gaming evolved, based on javascript libraries (WebGL), used to create and publish virtual interactive environments. They are based on recent Web browser's functionalities, surpassing some limitations of VRML technologies. On the side of geospatial information, technology has evolved from desktop GIS to 2D WebGIS and globe applications. The use of globe applications is, today, very diffused due to its immediate and at the same time impressive representation of the earth surface and territories. These technologies have been, also, applied to Virtual Heritage 3D reconstructions, to improve the fruition of Cultural Heritage (CH), with the achievement of interesting results. The topic of this paper is the experimentation on the fusion between globe based and gaming technologies (in our case WebGL) that allow achieving a more user-centric and powerful solution useful for publishing 3D geospatial information of CH on Web. This choice allows obtaining GIS oriented 3D models, typical of globe applications, and, at the same time, a more immersive exploration of CH and its surrounding environment. In particular, it also gives complementary text and multimedia information on the history, architectural features of each cultural good, based on querying of semantic information. The test field of the research is the construction of the 3D GIS virtual globe model of the Manfredonic Castle of Mussomeli (Sicily-Italy), developed for PON-NEPTIS EU Project, to compare open-source technologies and commercial proprietary applications.

annuale studi originali, riguardanti la storia del Palazzo e le collezioni museali, e insieme rende nota l'attività del Museo nel campo della ricerca storica, della conservazione e dell'educazione. La rivista è coordinata e curata dallo staff del Museo ed è aperta a contributi esterni, da indirizzare alla redazione.

L’ouvrage réunit trente-six articles offerts à Patrick Gautier Dalché par ses amis, ses élèves et ses collègues à l’occasion de son départ en retraite.

Pour rendre hommage à ses travaux, qui ont renouvelé les recherches sur l’histoire des perceptions et représentations de l’espace, les éditeurs ont souhaité rassembler des contributions qui pour l’essentiel s’inscrivent dans cette même perspective, traitant des représentations spatiales aussi bien textuelles que cartographiques, savantes ou empiriques, dans la longue période que lui-même étudie, allant de l’Antiquité tardive au XVIe siècle.

Die Ausstellung "Weltansichten. Vom Globus zur Globalisierung" präsentiert eine Vielzahl historischer Erd-und Himmelsgloben sowie globenverwandte Instrumente wie Planetarien, Tellurien und Lunarien. In Form historischer Objekte zeigen diese, wie Raum und Zeit konstruiert und mehrdimensional abgebildet wurden. Diese Modelle dokumentieren zugleich die Entstehung wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen wie Astronomie, Geographie und Kartographie. Der vorliegende Katalog führt mit zwei Textbeiträgen in die Thematik ein und stellt wichtige Entwicklungsschritte, mitwirkende Protagonisten und ausgewählte Objekte vor. Der bebilderte Katalogteil zeigt anhand einer repräsentativen Auswahl, wie in der entsprechenden Zeit die ‚Globalität' der Welt verstanden wurde. Die Ausstellung ist ein Kooperationsprojekt des Ernst-Haeckel-Hauses in Jena mit der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina.

A set of virtual globes of Mars -a topographic, a photomosaic (albedo) and a historic globehas been made as the extension and continuation of the map series "Multilingual Maps of Terrestrial Planets and the Moon" coordinated by the Commission on Planetary Cartography of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) [1] .

In 1802 the Amsterdam map maker Cornelis Covens (1764-1825) published a terrestrial globe (12 inches) with a new construction, accompanied by a manual. By means of a complex mounting with numerous brass rings, this Copernican globe – which was inspired by the one brought out by the English instrument maker George Adams sr. (1704-1772) – had the intention to show the real movement of the earth and other related phenomena. Initially Covens didn’t intend to make a new construction for his celestial globe, because in his opinion the common celestial globe sufficiently shows the apparent movement of the sky. The Leiden professor Jacob de Gelder (1765-1848), however, didn’t agree with him. According to De Gelder, the ideal celestial globe was one, which could be adjusted to an arbitrary epoche. Therefore he advised Covens to make a ‘new’ celestial globe as well. Shortly afterwards, Covens indeed designed a precession globe, which served as the counterpart of his new terrestrial globe. The ‘new’ globe-pair of Covens got an enthusiastic scholarly reception. Because the mounting included many brass rings, however, the globes were very expensive compared to common globes. Consequently, Covens’s ‘unusual’ globe-pair was a commercial disaster. Rather than a defending of his position as an entrepreneur, it was Covens’s interest in astronomy that took him into constructing such exceptional globes. It represented a last twitching of the euphoria, characterising the transition to the Newtonian scientific thinking. Covens’s ‘innovation’ became therefore nothing more than a curiosity.

Throughout the early modern period, the intellectual and symbolic value of globes ensured these objects enjoyed a broad cultural appeal. Consequently, their design was subject to a wide range of social, commercial and intellectual pressures. The ways in which the intellectual and cultural concerns of seventeenth-century England became manifest in the cartographic design, resulting in a culturally specific product with broad appeal to an English audience, are highlighted in the case of a terrestrial globe constructed by Robert Morden, William Berry and Philip Lea, c.1683−1690, now in the Whipple Museum, Cambridge. Since this particular globe was produced at an early stage in the history of English globe making, light is shed on the emergence of a national globe-making tradition.

Globen und ihre Gestelle gehören unzweifelhaft als Einheit zusammen. Während der älteste erhaltene Erdglobus, der sogenannte Behaim-Globus von 1492/94 häufig im Mittelpunkt der Forschung stand, blieb das wissenschaftliche Interesse an seinem Gestell bisher aus. Der Beitrag widmet sich der Konstruktion und des kulturhistorischen Kontexts des geschmiedeten Gestells des Globus.
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Globes and their frames undoubtedly belong together as a unit. While the oldest preserved earth globe, the so-called Behaim globe from 1492/94, was often in the focus of research, the scientific interest has not yet been shown to its frame. This article is dedicated to the construction and the cultural-historical context of the forged frame of the globe.

Documents the history of the giant globe the chancellor of Makassar ordered from the Dutch East India Company, and how this history relates to Makassar's activities to obtain western knowledge, technology and know-how, as well as its diplomatic relations to the various European trading companies.
Published in Lodewijk Wagenaar ed., Aan de overkant: ontmoetingen in dienst van de VOC en WIC, 1600-1800 (Leiden 2015).

This paper focuses on the globe in depictions of the Salvator Mundi (Redeemer of the World), in which Christ is shown blessing with His right hand and holding the globe of the world in His left hand. From the end of the fifteenth to the start of the seventeenth century these globes show a remarkable diversity which is not observed either earlier or later, and the current paper relates this to the vibrant cosmological, astronomical and also geographical discussions and discoveries of the period. Also discussed is the influence that the theological topic of salvation may have had on the artistic appropriation of cosmographical ideas and their adaption in depictions of the Salvator Mundi’s globe.

The assimilation of astronomical knowledge transmitted from the Islamic world to Europe is manifest in many works, yet not one medieval celestial map is currently known to have been made in the Muslim world. Against this background, the pair of celestial hemispheres in a compendium of Hebrew astronomical and astrological treatises, dated to ca. 1400 CE and of Spanish provenance, raises a number of questions. The analysis has made it clear that a tenth-century Islamic globe based on al-Ṣūfī’s iconography served as the model for the Hebrew pair of hemispheres, and that the Hebrew celestial maps are not the link that connects map making in the Islamic World to the Latin West.

The Rock of Guatape (Spanish: El Peñón de Guatapé), or simply La Piedra or El Peñol, is a landmark inselberg also known as The Stone of El Peñol in Colombia.
It is located in the town and municipality of Guatapé, Antioquia. The town of El Peñol, which borders Guatapé, has also historically claimed the rock as their own and thus has led to different names for the site.

The landform is a granitic rock remnant that has resisted weathering and erosion, likely as result of being less fractured than the surrounding bedrock. Peñón de Guatapé is an outcrop of the Antioquia Batholith and towers up to 200 meters (656 feet) above its base. Visitors can scale the rock via a staircase built into one side, a path that includes more than 649 steps to the top.

Near the base of the Rock, there are food and market stalls for shopping. About halfway up the stairs, there is a shrine to the Virgin Mary. The summit contains a three-story viewpoint tower, a convenience store, and a seating area.

The World is not what you think it is. History is largely written from the point of view of Giant beings. Therefore, everything has to be interpreted from a different scale. Both in terms of calendar time and spatially. In this context, 'The Garden of Eden' is much larger than just an island in the ocean. The entire 'planet' is the garden. This is where the knowledge of the average citizen reaches. The world view was completely distorted during the 16th century reformation. For this I refer to previous works and publications from 1994-2006, and since 2012.

The Virtual Globes Museum web page was opened in 2007 with only five virtual globe models. Since then, the number of globes was raised over one hundred. The amount and heterogeneity of data made it necessary to rethink the underlying database structure. The new version of the web site introduces several new functions such as the possibility of adding multiple descriptions to globes in various languages and creating collections from a subset of globes. The most important improvement, however, is the crowd sourcing of the site: registered users can add or update descriptions and collections, which can fasten the growth of the database. Another novelty is the replacement of the old VRML plug-in used for displaying the globe models to a new WebGL or Flash-based visualization. This paper introduces the technical details of the new version and sketches the further plans of development.

The Virtual Globes Museum web page was opened in 2007 with only five virtual globe models. Since then, the number of globes was raised over one hundred. The amount and heterogeneity of data made it necessary to rethink the underlying database structure. The new version of the web site introduces several new functions such as the possibility of adding multiple descriptions to globes in various languages and creating collections from a subset of globes. The most important improvement, however, is the crowd sourcing of the site: registered users can add or update descriptions and collections, which can fasten the growth of the database. Another novelty is the replacement of the old VRML plug-in used for displaying the globe models to a new WebGL or Flash-based visualization. This paper introduces the technical details of the new version and sketches the further plans of development.

As I have repeatedly referred to in previous works; the earth is not a planet but a plant. The pun was made almost poetically invisible by those who wrote our history. The earth was part of the big tree, which was destroyed for unprecedented reasons. All human races have their origin is a tree species. Hence their diversity. Yggdrasil was real and stood on the spot that we now know as the Himalayas. The plateau of Tibet, the Everest, the roof of the world.After the great flood, a considerable part of the former surface remained buried under a thick layer of mud. Throughout history this formed the invisible part of our past.

In examining geography as a subject of study, Charles W. J. Withers has explained how eighteenth-century peoples developed a “set of intellectual practices” meant to apply spatial knowledge to life and examine it as “an object of science, art and wonder.”  Due to its wide audience and perceived benefits, geography, and the objects associated with it, increasingly became important vehicles by which readers organized information about their world.  Emblematic of the contemporary hunger for geographic knowledge, maps proliferated as decorative accents in boxes, as standing globes, pocket globes, wallpaper, screens, wine coasters, and jigsaw puzzles.  This prevalence suggests that historians of print culture should pay special attention to the practices surrounding the production and reception of objects which utilized maps as a medium of representation. I seek to interrogate how and where cartographic objects were made and used in the long eighteenth century, their interaction with the print industry, as well as offer preliminary conclusions as to how these objects may have affected contemporary worldviews—especially about newly encountered areas. Specifically, I will ask how the Pacific Ocean, first explored extensively by Europeans at this time, was presented to an audience that had heard of its existence but could never see it.  After discussing the particular way in which maps were made for the British market, I will draw on cartographic objects within the Gough Map Collection and the Oriel College Senior Library to show how a region new to Europeans was captured in print and other materials.  I will conclude with a discussion of how these objects were displayed and consumed to offer a better understanding of the role geography played in the quotidian lives of eighteenth-century peoples.