Signs on Printed Topographical Maps, Ca
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21 • Signs on Printed Topographical Maps, ca. 1470 – ca. 1640 Catherine Delano-Smith Although signs have been used over the centuries to raw material supplied and to Alessandro Scafi for the fair copy of figure 21.7. My thanks also go to all staff in the various library reading rooms record and communicate information on maps, there has who have been unfailingly kind in accommodating outsized requests for 1 never been a standard term for them. In the Renaissance, maps and early books. map signs were described in Latin or the vernacular by Abbreviations used in this chapter include: Plantejaments for David polysemous general words such as “marks,” “notes,” Woodward, Catherine Delano-Smith, and Cordell D. K. Yee, Planteja- ϭ “characters,” or “characteristics.” More often than not, ments i objectius d’una història universal de la cartografia Approaches and Challenges in a Worldwide History of Cartography (Barcelona: Ins- they were called nothing at all. In 1570, John Dee talked titut Cartogràfic Catalunya, 2001). Many of the maps mentioned in this about features’ being “described” or “represented” on chapter are illustrated and/or discussed in other chapters in this volume maps.2 A century later, August Lubin was also alluding to and can be found using the general index. signs as the way engravers “distinguished” places by 1. In this chapter, the word “sign,” not “symbol,” is used through- “marking” them differently on their maps.3 out. Two basic categories of map signs are recognized: abstract signs (geometric shapes that stand on a map for a geographical feature on the Today, map signs are described indiscriminately by car- ground) and pictorial signs. The huge variety of the latter derived from tographers and map historians as signs or symbols, despite the various permutations of the composition, perspective, and style of the inappropriateness of the word “symbol” in most car- individual signs. tographic contexts. Semioticists and philosophers are 2. “Geographie teacheth wayes, by which... the Situation of Cities, more disciplined. Firth, for example, talks about a sym- Townes, Villages, Fortes, Castells, Mountaines, Woods, Hauens, Riuers, ineffectuality Crekes... may be described and designed [on maps]... and most aptly bol’s having a “certain ”—meaning that “a to our vew may be represented.” See John Dee, The Mathematicall Prae- ‘symbolic’ gesture does not attempt to get immediate con- face to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclide of Megara (1570), intro crete effects” in the way a sign does.4 Even in these fields, Allen G. Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1975), Aiiii. though, not all attempts to instill order into the deploy- 3. Augustin Lubin, Mercure geographique; ou, Le guide du curieux ment of the two words have been successful; Eco com- des cartes geographiques (Paris: Christophle Remy, 1678), 134: “The engravers are careful to distinguish these towns from the others, plac- ments on the attempt to define “symbol” in a technical lex- ing a double Cross over the Archbishoprics and a single Cross over the icon as “one of the most pathetic moments in the history Bishoprics.” The circumlocutions continued into the eighteenth century. of philosophical terminology.” 5 Apart from Harley, who John Green explained that “the Sea-Coasts are known by a thick Shad- applied the distinction between sign and symbol to the first owing, the Sea is all white. Rivers are mark’d by a full black serpentine and third of Erwin Panofsky’s levels of meaning in works Line, and sometimes by two lines. Lakes are denoted by irregular Lines shadow’d inwards.” See The Construction of Maps and Globes (Lon- of art, and Woodward, who has reflected on the nature of don: Printed for T. Horne, 1717), 9. cartographic sign systems both in the present volume and 4. Raymond William Firth, Symbols: Public and Private (London: Allen elsewhere, the majority of cartographers and historians of and Unwin, 1973), 74 –75, cited approvingly by Umberto Eco, Semiotics cartography are not so careful with their words.6 One and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984), 132. influential handbook of mapping terms offers no overall 5. Eco, Semiotics, 130. For a summary of the debate in linguistic phi- losophy between followers of Fernand de Saussure and those of Charles definition of a symbol, referring indiscriminately—under Sanders Peirce through the twentieth century, and its implications for yet another confusing heading, that of “conventional historians of cartography, see David Woodward, “‘Theory’ and the His- tory of Cartography,” in Plantejaments, 31– 48, esp. 39– 41 and n. 19. In social anthropology (ethnography), the notion of a coherent “sym- Acknowledgments: I am grateful to the British Academy for assis- bol system” lies at the core of the study of different cultures; see Clif- tance with the costs of research over a protracted period of study and ford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: for financial assistance with the photography. I am also grateful to the Basic Books, 1973), 17–18, 46 – 47, 208–9, and 215–20. Newberry Library, Hermon Dunlap Smith Center, for two research fel- 6. J. B. Harley, “Texts and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early lowships. My thanks are also due to Richard Oliver for invaluable as- Maps,” in From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North sistance in the early stages of completing record sheets. For help with American History through Maps, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: Uni- specific academic points, I owe much to many people over the years, not versity of Chicago Press, 1990), 3–15, republished in J. B. Harley, The least Peter Barber, Tony Campbell, Paul Harvey, Markus Heinz, Fran- New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul cis Herbert, Roger Kain, Jan Mokre, Ludvík Mucha, Günter Schilder, Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 31– 49, René Tabel, and Franz Wawrik. I am most grateful to the University of esp. 36 –37 and 47– 48; Woodward, “‘Theory’ and The History of Car- Wisconsin Cartographic Laboratory for creating the matrixes from the tography”; and Woodward’s introduction to this volume. 528 Signs on Printed Topographical Maps, ca. 1470 – ca. 1640 529 sign”—to signs and symbols in a chapter headed “Sym- to homogenize disparate signs on source maps to a single bolism” but dealing in effect with map signs.7 In an inter- specification, a policy amply recorded in the mindless pro- national glossary of cartographic terms, definitions are cess of copying and recopying from sources sometimes far complicated by linguistic differences.8 Some modern writ- removed from the original.16 ers have simply ducked the issue. In Robinson and Another enduring myth insists that the introduction of Petchenik’s discussion of symbolism in the context of the printing led to fundamental changes in the visual appear- relationship between language and (map) image, they ance of Renaissance maps.17 Again, the evidence fails to avoid using the word “sign” for maps altogether; instead support such a notion. Nonpictorial signs were used on they refer to “representational techniques” and to “unitary graphic elements” that the cartographer calls “map 7. Helen Wallis and Arthur Howard Robinson, eds., Cartographical marks.” 9 In most cartographic textbooks, the word “sym- Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900 bol” is used to denote a map sign without comment.10 (Tring, Eng.: Map Collector Publications in association with the Inter- national Cartographic Association, 1987). The semantic waters are muddied still further when 8. Multilingual Dictionary of Technical Terms in Cartography “conventional signs” are referred to in a premodern con- (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1973), 88–89 and 92–93. The Dictionary was text. No evidence has been found of the use of that term prepared under the chairmanship of E. Meynen for Commission II of before the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1802, in the International Cartographic Association. France, a commission set up by the Dépôt de la Guerre to 9. Arthur Howard Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik, The Na- ture of Maps: Essays toward Understanding Maps and Mapping (Chi- establish “ways of simplifying and making uniform the cago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 52 and 57, respectively. various signs that are used on maps to express the acci- 10. See, for example, Arthur Howard Robinson et al., Elements of dents of terrain” used the term in its report, boldly head- Cartography, 6th ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995), 11, and ing the engraved plate that illustrated the signs that are to the still much-used David Greenhood, Down to Earth: Mapping for be used “Signes conventionels.” 11 Until then, French map- Everybody (New York: Holiday House, 1944), 75 (later editions pub- lished under the title Mapping). makers such as César-François Cassini de Thury were still 11. Mémorial du Dépôt Générale de la Guerre, imprimé par ordre du alluding obliquely, in the manner of their Renaissance pre- ministre: Tome II, 1803–1805 et 1810 (Paris: Ch. Picquet, 1831), 1– 40 decessors, to the “choice of models [engravers] had to fol- and pls. 3–21. François de Dainville, Le langage des géographes: low to express woods, rivers [and] . the configuration of Termes, signes, couleurs des cartes anciennes, 1500 –1800 (Paris: A. et the region.” 12 In Germany, Johann Georg Lehmann was J. Picard, 1964), 58, also cites the work of the 1802 commission as the signes conventionels. Zeichen 13 first publication of the term using in the traditional manner. When William 12. César-François Cassini de Thury, Description géométrique de la Siborne translated Lehmann’s essay into English, he se- France (Paris: J. Ch. Desaint, 1783), 18. lected the word “sign” for Lehmann’s Zeichen.14 13. Johann Georg Lehmann, Darstellung einer neuen Theorie der The notion that there was such a thing as a conven- Bezeichnung der Schiefen Flächen im Grundriss oder der Situation- tional sign in the context of premodern printed topo- zeichung der Berge (Leipzig: J.