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This sale only lasts for a month, so go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network. I'm Caleb Dachron, Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Today, speaking with Chet Mendoza, the store and project manager, the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester.
We're discussing this book, Frames That Speak, Cartouches on Early Modern Maps, a truly gorgeous book. Chet brings to life some of the greatest documents in human history. Chet, thank you for joining me today on the new books network. It's a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having me. Of course, this is a book. As much as it should be read, it also should be seen. And I'll just note for listeners that in the show notes, you can find a link to this open access project.
So you can go and you can see all of the images that we'll discuss today if you want to see them. And also read the text as well. But before talking about the book, I just want to be a little bit about yourself and your background. Sure.
Well, I guess I should begin by saying how and when I got interested in maps, it was a very specific moment. I was in the Vatican Museum, just as a tourist. And they had on display a manuscript world map, a hand-painted world map that was made in about 1530. And at that time, people believed that there had to be a southern continent, just as a theoretical construct, not on the basis of any early encounter with Antarctica.
And other maps from the 16th century show this hypothetical southern continent. But this map was different. Instead of being basically a huge island at the South Pole, it was a ring of land around the South Pole with open water at the Pole. And despite being twice labeled Terra and Cognita, it was full of place names.
And this map really sparked my curiosity. I wanted to find out why the continent had this strange shape, why it was a ring of land instead of basically a large island. And I wanted to know where all these place names came from that were distributed on this continent that was supposed to be Terra and Cognita. So that was the moment and the map that started my fascination with maps.
And it's only grown since then, as I came to appreciate just how rich maps are, how much they can teach us, how much they can show us, how much they can delight us. And I'll just mention a few of my other projects involving maps. I wrote a book titled Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps that was published by the British Library in 2013. I studied a large world map, a manuscript world map by Enricas Martellus, which is in the Bineke Library at Yale.
And it was a sort of famous, un-studiable object that Martellus had made in about 1491. It surfaced in the 1950s. It was acknowledged to be authentic and important. But most of the writing on the map had faded to eligibility.
So it wasn't really possible to study the map in any detail. And working with a team called the Lazarus Project, which is now at the University of Rochester, we made multi-spectral images of the map, which is a technology that allows one to recover information from damaged manuscripts and other documents. And using those images, I was able to study the map in detail and ended up writing a book about it. I've also studied another large world map made by another German cartographer, Martin Valtsemiller, his Cartamorina of 1516.
It's a printed world map, a young, a surviving exemplar of which is at the Library of Congress in Washington, BC. And I had a fellowship to study that map from the Kislak Foundation and published a book about it. And I've also studied a beautiful manuscript world map by a French cartographer Pierre de Salle, which is at the British Library and was made in about 1550. And I published a book about that with the British Library.
So yes, since that moment in the Vatican Museums, I've ended up dedicating myself to the history of cartography and I've had a lot of fun with it. Yeah, I'm sure many listeners, especially the new books network, are the types of people that find maps, especially old maps, extremely fascinating. Certainly, it's a thing, I've such early memories of being a kid and first seeing old maps and just being absolutely blown away by the creativity and sometimes how incorrect and then also sometimes how correct maps were. It's remarkable that people were able to figure out what things looked like without having a sort of satellite view that we have now.
But this book, it's about particular designs on maps, cartouches. And I'm sure listeners are wondering what the hell is a cartouche. So I would love if you could tell us what a cartouche is and the origin of the term. Yes, so it's a great question.
That's sort of one of the challenges of the book is that it's about a subject whose name most people haven't heard. And another challenge of the book was I found that there really wasn't a good definition of cartouche. So the definition I developed was a framed device on a map, containing text or decorative elements together with associated adjacent imagery. So I think there are two things to emphasize there.
First, this idea of a frame. In order to qualify as a cartouche, the image has to be framed in one way or another. And the frame can be composed of various different things. Sometimes it's a simple rectangle or oval or circle.
But another times, one example comes to mind where the frame around the title information on the map is composed of a landscape and then two trees that grow on the left and right and bends together at the top. So the frame can be composed of many different things, but it's an essential part of a cartouche is the frame. And then the other important thing to emphasize is associated adjacent imagery. So many times the parts of the cartouche are not just inside the frame, they're outside the frame, but adjacent to it.
And it just doesn't make any sense to try and separate what is inside the cartouche from what is outside and adjacent to it and clearly associated, clearly part of a unified design. One of the things that attracted me to the subject was that multiple historians of cartography have remarked on the importance of cartouches. For example, J.B. Harley remarked that the cartouche is the pictura loquins, the speaking picture of cartography.
Like an emblematic title page or frontispiece, it serves to abstract and epitomize some of the meaning of the work as a whole, so end quotation. And so if this image is about the meaning of the work of the whole, it's tremendously important in interpreting maps. And so I realized, well, the fact that there wasn't already a book about cartouches meant that I had in front of me a great opportunity. But going back to the origin of the term cartouche, the English word was adopted from the French and the French word comes from the Italian cartochio, which means a paper container.
And so we have this idea of containment. And in fact, before the word cartouche was adopted into English from French, other words were used in English to describe cartouches. One of the most significant of those was compartments, which also clearly involves the idea of separation and containment or framing. So setting aside of the cartouche from the surrounding geography.
And as far as your study of these cartouches, what was the main inspiration of this? But was it a particular map that you saw that you said, this story needs to be told? Or was it a part of a larger project or an archive? Yes, well, there were really two different specific cartouches inspired the book and made me realize what a rich subject it would be.
The first of those, I encountered in 2017, I was working with a Canadian colleague of mine, Lauren Beck, on a project to a project about the early exploration and cartography of Canada, which was connected with the 150th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada. So Lauren and I decided to do an exhibition of maps related to the early exploration of Canada. And we ended up writing a full book link exhibition catalog. And one of the maps we were looking at was a manuscript map by Claude Bernou made in about 1682.
And it has an absolutely extraordinary and visually spectacular cartouche with rich, elaborate symbolism that was challenging to interpret. And Lauren and I spent a lot of time talking about the meaning of this cartouche and the richness of its symbolism and that the challenges of interpreting it helped me realize what a great subject is, not an easy subject, but a great one in terms of the importance of interpreting the cartouche to understanding the real meaning of a map. And the second cartouche that really helped inspire the book was one on Urbano Monte's spectacular world map of 1587, which is at Stafford University. And it's a map on 60 sheets that were designed to be assembled into a huge circular world map about 10 feet in diameter.
And the David Rumsie map center at Stafford has done that digitally. They've digitally assembled those sheets and created this spectacular image of this, a composite image of this world map. And I had a fellowship at the David Rumsie map center to study this map. And I, there's an interesting cartouche design on the map.
And I realized that if I could determine where the, what the source was for that cartouche design, it might give me some insight into other sources that Urbano Monte was using. And it, in part, through hard work and in part through good luck, I was able to figure out the pattern he had copied, the design he had copied in his cartouche. Urbano Monte was not a great artist. And so it was to be expected that he would copy the design from one that was well executed, one by a good artist.
And that's what he did. And in fact, finding the source of that cartouche was a good clue into maps that he was using for other purposes and making his huge world map. And this brought home the fact that cartouches are important to understanding maps and the context of their creation. So those two specific cartouches were the most important in inspiring me to pursue this book.
There are many cartouches present in this book. How did you go about selecting cartouches that you've included and how did you decide which ones would end up making the cut? It was in very long process. So I wanted to cast as wide a net as possible.
And so I initially made a file that anything that caught my eye, any cartouche caught my eye, I took some initial notes about it, I found a good image of it and brought them all together. So there's a long phase of just gathering data. And then eventually I found that one good way to help narrow down the selection was to just make a PowerPoint of all the candidates and go through them and compare them. But my criteria were that I wanted to choose the cartouches with the richest symbolism that were challenging to interpret or that were particularly interesting as venues for communication between the cartographer and the viewer or show the possibilities of the genre.
And what I mean by venues for communication between the cartographer and the viewer is that, as I said, the decoration, the symbolism in cartouches often communicates the cartographers or the patron's interests. And thus the cartouche becomes a really primary venue for this direct communication between the cartographer and viewer. And so those were my criteria. And my hope was that by examining these challenging examples in detail, I would provide the reader with some tools, some experience that would be helpful in interpreting other cartouches.
The second criterion I had was that once I had chosen a cartouche, I saw out maps on which the cartouches were hand colored. And that wasn't always possible. There's not always an exemplar of a map that has a cartouche hand colored. But I wanted the book to be visually attractive, both simply because that's more pleasurable for the reader, and also because I thought that that would help the reader engage with the details of cartouches.
So the color was a way to help draw the reader into the subject. Describe why and how the 16th and 17th centuries were such revolutionary periods for maps and cartouches? Yes. Well, the 16th and 17th centuries in general were exciting periods for the history of cartography.
For several reasons. First, there was the challenge of incorporating the Americas, these huge, largely unknown lands into maps, and into the intellectual framework of cartographers. Second, there was a greater diffusion of maps through printing, which of course started in the 15th century, but in the 16th and 17th century maps had a much, much greater diffusion through printing. And third, there was the advent of using maps as tools for the administration of territory around the middle of the 16th century, which there are a few examples of the use of maps for the administration of territory before the middle of the 16th century.
But really, that time period was when maps began to have that use more and more and thus had a greater presence and influence in society. In terms of cartouches specifically, in the course of the 16th and 17th century, cartouches very quickly became more and more artistically elaborate. So initially, cartouches incorporated vegetal motifs, so images of plants was called strap work, which is a sort of decoration that looks like leather, and then also grotesque, which are monstrous figures. And this type of cartouche decoration was very common early in the 16th century.
Then in 1572, we have the first cartouche I've encountered whose figures tell a story, which is an important step forward in the elaboration of cartouches. And in particularly in the early 17th century, we start to get cartouches that have images of the typical animals or products or inhabitants of a region. And this is a very important development, because then we can see how the cartographer or else the cartographer's patron perceived that region. So the imagery of the cartouche communicates to the viewer the cartographer's perceptions of the region, the cartographer's desires, ambitions, and prejudices about the region and its inhabitants.
And it's at this point that cartouches become really essential to interpreting maps, where there is that special communication between the cartographer and the viewer about the cartographer's interests and looking at the cartouche becomes essential to interpreting maps. What are some of your favorite cartouches that appear in the book and why? Yes, well, the process of selecting the cartouche was difficult. I had to leave out a number of very appealing cartouches.
Obviously, the ones that are in the book are the ones that I found the most engaging. One of them is a map of eastern Canada made by a German cartographer, Namaste Süter, in about 1756. And as I say in the book, Süter is one of my favorite cartouche, well, the cartouches on his maps are among my favorites. We don't know that Süter himself was designing the cartouches, and we know that some of them were designed by a specialist whom he hired.
But in any case, in this map of eastern Canada, at the bottom of the cartouche, there's a cartographer depicted at work making a map of eastern Canada. That is to say, the map being depicted made on the cartouche in the cartouches depicts the same region as the larger map itself. So we have this image of a cartographer making a map of eastern Canada. With one hand, in the other hand, he holds the scales of justice.
Why is that? Well, just below the cartographer's feet, we see the arms of the coats of arms of England and France, which at the time were competing for control of North America. And the idea is that this map will represent the interests and territorial possessions of England and France in North America and America, equitably and justly. And one thing that's interesting about this cartouche is that there's no claim on the map textually, either in title or in any other part of the map, that this was the cartographer's name.
There's no claim that this is a map that depicts the competing interests of England and France equitably. We only see that in the cartouchely, only you see it by taking the time to interpret the cartouche. So we have this cartographer making this map of eastern Canada, holding the scales of justice, trying to balance the interests of England and France over his shoulders, pure a heavily armed soldier and mercury, the Roman god of commerce. And they show what is at stake in the creation of a map that depicts the political situation accurately.
So there could be both economic and military consequences if the cartographer does not depict the situation accurately. Another of my favorite cartouches, which I discussed at the very end of the book, is by the Spanish cartographer Francisco Riccania, who lived from 1743 to 1824. And in 1789, he made a manuscript map, a hand-painted map of part of the country of Colombia. The map is now in the Library of Congress.
And in the title cartouche on that map, he represents himself twice. At the top of the cartouche, he shows himself doing the surveying that made the map possible. And this is something we see on several occasions in cartouches is an image of the surveying work, and that the image functions as sort of a guarantee of the quality of the map. It's a claim that the map was made on the basis of firsthand investigation of the territory, and therefore it's trustworthy.
The second image of Riccania is at the bottom of the cartouche. And he shows himself seated on a stool and looking up at the cartouche in front of him, and he's drawing the cartouche. He's holding a pen paper, and he's looking up at the cartouche and drawing the cartouche. So we here in this map have a depiction of the process of the creation of a cartouche.
And it's really a wonderfully self-conscious image, and that's part of what I like about it. And it creates this possibility of an endless nested sequence of images of the cartographer drawing himself, drawing himself, drawing himself, and so forth. As it happens, that's not the case here. In the image of the cartouche that he's drawing, we don't see the part where he himself is drawing the cartouche.
But nonetheless, philosophically, that possibility of that infinite regression is there, and that's one of the things that I find intriguing. And of course, listeners, if they want to see these images, go ahead and click the link in the show notes. You'll be able to find them there. You talked about cartouche about the rise of them, but you also discussed in the book their decline.
So what led to the decline of cartouche in the 18th century? Yes, the short answer to the question is that these elaborately decorated cartouches declined because of the rise of neoclassicism in the visual arts, which began around 1760, and favored a return to simplicity in artistic design. And the neoclassical aesthetic, of course, contrasted with the Rococo aesthetic that preceded it, which favored elaborate ornamentation. So with neoclassicism, that is at the root of the decline of these elaborately decorated and elaborately symbolic cartouches in the 18th century.
And of course, we should see neoclassicism as part of the age of enlightenment. I should say though that while elaborately decorated cartouches declined in the course of the 18th century, particularly in the latter part of the 18th century, cartouches made a resurgence in the 20th and 21st century in a genre called pictorial maps, which revived several of the graphic traditions of earlier maps, including cartouches. And perhaps cartouches on pictorial maps are a subject that I will pursue in the future. One of the things that that came out in working on this book was just how rich a subject this is.
And I don't think that one book is enough. I've already published an article about a number of cartouches that have particularly colonialist imagery in them. And I have in mind other articles about cartouches that I certainly wasn't able to address in the book. So perhaps at some point I'll do something about the cartouches in 20th and 21st century pictorial maps.
Something about cartouches that are federally fascinating is that they appear on the maps. They're not like a legend appearing off to the side. So they always inevitably are going to cover up some bit of a map. And I wonder if you noticed any patterns of what information of maps were often deemed worthy of covering up.
Yes. Well, as you say, the placement of cartouches on maps is a very interesting question. And I think it's worthwhile comparing cartouches, which often but not always contain the title information about a map with the title page of a book. So the title page of a book is never in competition with the contents of a book.
We have the title page has its place followed by the contents of the book and there's no sort of interference between them. Whereas on a map, the cartouche inevitably covers up with covers up and thus competes with the geography. And in terms of patterns in the deployment of cartouches, one that I discussed in the book is that in some cases, cartographers deploy their cartouches strategically, positioning them specifically to cover up areas about whose geography they were unsure. And I'll just mention a couple of examples.
So on Gereroysch's World Map of 1507, he places cartouches directly over the western coasts of the New World, which at that time were unknown. And this is his way of avoiding the necessity to give some contours to a coastline that was completely unknown, just cover them with a cartouche. Very similarly, Gerard Ricator on his famous world map of 1569, which is the source of the Mercator projection, places a huge cartouche in North America. And at the time, there was a great debate about the possible existence of a Northwest Passage around North America to reach the Pacific.
That is, it was hoped that one could sail north of North America, and that there would be a passage that would enable one to emerge into the North Pacific and thus reach Asia. And where Cater placed this huge cartouche precisely over this region, he shows open water to the west and open water to the east. But right in the middle, where we might wonder, do these passages join? Is it possible to sail through there?
We have this cartouche, and he used that to avoid committing one way or the other with regards to the existence of this Northwest Passage. So that's definitely a pattern in the deployment of cartouches that we see, I think it's fair to say, particularly in the 16th century. So would you say that part of the as much of a stylistic choice, it might also be that we learned more about what we're in different locations. So there wasn't a need to have these beautiful ornaments to paper over our lack of knowledge.
That's certainly part of it. The whole question of how cartographers depict uncertain regions is a very, very interesting one. And they had different techniques for doing that. So some cartographers, for example, if they don't know a coastline, if they're not confident they're not confident they're knowledge of a coastline, they'll depict it as a straight line or they have some other graphic convention for indicating their uncertainty.
But yes, covering coastlines with cartouches was another way to do that. And I think you're right, Caleb, that that was particularly common in the 16th century, because there were so many unknown coastlines at that time. Just more generally, for those interested in looking at old maps, and I will say to listeners, if you haven't, it's extremely interesting to look at old maps, just endlessly fascinating how, as I said before, how wrong and how right we have been about certain certain things. But what advice would you give people for different ways to look at them that might not necessarily be obvious?
Well, for Christ, I'll say a few words about where to find some good images, good high resolution images of early maps. So one great resource is the website of the Library of Congress, the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress is the largest map collection in the world. They've digitized a number of their most important, most striking and most interesting maps, and they make them freely available at very high resolution. Another good site to find high resolution images of maps is the David Rumsey website, davidrumsie.com.
He's a collector in California who makes, again, very high resolution images of his maps freely available. Another site is the website of the National Library of France. It's Galica.BNF.FR has zoomable images of a number of historic maps. But I'll also mention some strategies for examining old maps, so ways to look at them.
I think one important way is to choose a theme that interests you, and explore that theme in the map thoroughly. And the theme could be anything. It could be how mountains are depicted, the images of sovereigns, the compass roses, the decorative compass roses, the run-line network, really anything. If you investigate that aspect of the map systematically, it's a great way to draw yourself into the details.
Another important strategy is to think about what is missing from the map and what is not depicted, what is the cartographer chosen to leave out. Sometimes this is just as revealing as what is depicted in terms of the cartographer's interests. And the third, I think it's key to think about what the cartographer's interests were, and to try and find signs for what those interests were in the map. And circling back here, one of the best places to do that is by looking at the cartouche, as we were saying.
And another thing I'll add is that if we're looking at a map and we don't have any inherent reason to be interested in the geography of whatever the region is, if we're not planning a trip there, we haven't in the past been curious about it, the cartouche is a great way to engage with the map. It's almost always engaging and interesting, and it could be a great entry point for for investigating the map visually and for finding out more about it. Something that I mentioned at the beginning is that this is an open access project. And you've also given many great recommendations for places where people can go and see maps at no cost.
And of course, I'll include all those in the show notes. But I was going to talk a little about the importance of making this sort of work really accessible and what you hope from this type of open access project. Well, that's a great question. So, cartouche's are very visually engaging, and I wanted the book to reach a broad audience.
And the reason I want that first is that, as I said, cartouches are essential tools for interpreting maps. And second, I think they're a great way to draw people to maps. So that was a goal of my book about sea monsters on maps. I think sea monsters are very visually appealing.
Once people engage with sea monsters, they'll start to see how much more there is in maps. My hope with the cartouche book is exactly the same that once people start to see how intriguing and engaging cartouches is, that will be that they will function as that entry point and draw people into maps and attract them to engage more profoundly with them. And as we said at the beginning, most people don't know what a cartouche is. And so there was that marketing challenge that was part of the book right from the beginning.
And making the book open access means basically makes that problem disappear. All it takes is one click to engage with the book and seeking what a cartouche is and see why they're so interesting. So yes, the open access for this book was a way, first, around that marketing challenge of what is a cartouche and one really knows. And second, a way to get the book in front of people easily so that they can see how fascinating cartouches are and be drawn into all the other interesting aspects of maps.
And I want to reiterate here my profuse thanks to the two foundations that made it possible for the book to be in open access. First, the Kiss Black Family Foundation in Florida, and second, SIGCO, which is a financial services company in New York and has a corporate map collection and shares with me this interest in bringing maps to a wider audience. It's so wonderful that open access movement and it's really in recent years has just proliferated where there's so many incredible open access projects. Real, especially the publisher has done, has also done lots of other open access works.
So I recommend if listeners are interested in different open access projects, real, discrete work, MIT press, discrete open access work. There are tons of incredible, just the breadth on the internet of freely available information is just remarkable. It really goes around every single day. And it's wonderful that you've clearly extremely passionate about this and have done a lot of thinking about this.
And especially, as we were discussing before, this is just people have not done work on this particular project of examining cartouches. So it's great that you are going and breaking that ground. Well, Chet, thank you so much for being a guest on the new book's network. The book is frames that speak cartouches on early modern maps.
Thank you very much. This has been a pleasure.