And so, to-day, too, a true map would circumscribe our globe—not with the equally non-existent circles of the spatial latitude and longitude, but with those of the spiritual latitude and longitude in which we float—only, I fear, our modern Mappamondo would be girdled with dark rings marked “Survival of the Fittest,” “Necessity for Navies,” “The Need of Expansion,” “The Divinity of the Dollar”; soldiers and syndicates would float around in lieu of cherubs, nor would any divine hands appear upbearing us amid the infinite spaces.
That old Pisan map leads me to suspect that Swift saw only half a fact when he complained that
“Geographers in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gaps.”
True, many an old map might seem to attest the truth of the accusation. There is a map of the Dark Continent in the Museum of Venice, dated 1651, with a camel, a unicorn, a dromedary, and a lion’s tail—all put in by hand. But in another map of “Apphrica” in the Arsenal of Venice there are not only lions and tigers, but tents and veiled figures, and the turrets and spires of strange buildings, and a gay sprinkling of flags. Surely the old cartographer was less concerned to fill his gaps than to express the poetry of geography. Maps were, in truth, of mediocre use in ancient times when the old Roman roads took one from town to town. What profited an aeronaut’s panorama? Maps were only indispensable on the roadless seas. The first maps in the modern sense were thus pragmatic, not scientific, for it was from the mariner’s map, or Portolano, that rigid cartography arose. But even these coast charts refused to be prosaic. There is one in the Venice Museum—a view of Italy lying sideways, as if its famous foot were asleep. Never have I seen a more joyous chart. It is all glorious with the gold and vermilion of compasses and crests and flying banners, while mountains stand out in red and gold. It must have belonged to a jolly mariner. In a complete Portolano of Europe each country flies its national flag, amid a whirl of crests and compasses. And the “Portolano del 1561 di Giacomo Maggiolo,” which may be seen in the Palazzo Bianco of Genoa, is illuminated in gold and blue and vermilion and green, sprinkled with compasses, sown with towered cities crowned by golden flags, and a-flutter with flying angels and banners and the bellying sails of carracks, with kings seated on their thrones in the middle of the sea, under glorious canopies crowned with angels, while over the whole presides the Madonna in her golden chair. Most taking of the monarchs is the King of Tartary, wearing a large moustache and surrounded by golden scimitars.
There were no gaps to fill up in these Portolani. No, the cynical Swift has missed the inwardness of these old maps, in which Art was called in to give the touch of life and reality and to eke out, not the barrenness of knowledge in particular, but of science in general. There is in the Uffizi an old map of Italy which fills the Mediterranean with boats and compasses, draws the mountains, sketches the towered cities, and illumines the names with gold-leaf. There is an old map of Venice which perches Father Neptune dominatingly in the middle, and symbolises the winds by the curly locks of children blowing every way, and fills the canals with sailing-boats and galleys and gondolas. This is something like a map of Venice. On another, which is more of a plan of the city with its buildings named, Venice is alive with heraldic figures, and over the roofs and domes fly winged lions and Neptune and Venus and angels and warriors, while a stout-lunged angel blows two trumpets at once. And the spaces of the sea are full of brave beflagged vessels with swelling sails, and galleys with many oars. Surely all this is less false than the dead reticulation which expresses Venice in your modern map. The map of Genoa, too, shows the arms of the city floating over a sea crowded with red galleys and black merchant ships and white sailing-boats.
In these old maps the dull spaces of the world are lit up by fiery stars, trumpeting angels, and allegorical figures, while another symbolic group, upholding a titulary tablet, serves, as it were, to introduce the territory to the spectator. A wreathed lady and a male student thus combine to present Arabia. Greece is introduced and presided over by angels. “Terra nova detecta et Floridae promontorium” are presented by a man holding a tablet, which records how Henry VII of England sent out John Cabot and his son Sebastian, while the dry details are further vivified by a superdominant figure of a gallant signor in a feathered cap, hand on globe and learnèd tome at feet. Asia, as a nymph with a camel, presides over a map of her continent, while a prodigious Latin title—“Quae Asiae Regna et Provinciae Hac Tabula Continentur a Propontide usque ad Indos,” &c. &c.—records how its three makers were sent to Russia in the fifteenth-century and how they ripped up (dissuerunt) much in the published itineraries. One of the trio, Ambrosius Contaremus, remained long in Russia to study the less-known portions; another, Josaphat Barbarus, devoted himself for sixteen years to the provinces round the Euxine and the Mæotian marsh. “Perlustrata commentariolo exponunt.”
That old map of Frau Mauro which I have already mentioned belongs to this same century, being dated 1459; a circular map this, in a gilded frame, with little ships floating around and America away from home, perhaps enjoying itself in Paris. Here our familiar world shows upside down, which is, of course, as scientific as being downside up. It is notable how Anglia and Caledonia (or Anglia Barbara, as she is styled in Church Latin) are disguised by this simple shifting of the point of view, and how much like herself Hibernia looks, even topsy-turvy. Another pre-American map in the University of Ferrara pictures the winds personified, blowing from every quarter.
The Stones of Venice also assume the forms of maps, as in those stone reliefs on the rococo façade of S. Maria Zobenigo opposite the Traghetto of the Lily. These are town-maps—Candia, its name upborne by a flying boy angel; Roma with its twin brethren at the wolf’s breast; Corfu, characterised by its castle and its beflagged galleys. The symbolic shorthand, which I have already noted in pictures, spread also to map-decoration as in a map at the Arsenal, wherein Ægyptus is figured by an elephant, Libia by giraffes, Judea by the crescent and minarets, Germany by a winged sage, and “Holy Russia” by churches.
If these old maps erred in the courses of rivers and the lines of mountains and in ratios of space, they are not so misleading as your modern atlas with its all too accurate earth-measurements. For even your most primitive map, your mediæval figment, with Paradise on the East, a gigantic Jerusalem in the centre, great spaces for Gryphons and Cynocephali, Sciapodes and Anthropophagi, and St. Brendan’s Isles of the Blest marked clearly west of the Canaries, gave in its way a less distortive impression than that which we obtain from the most scientific chart on Mercator’s projection. Your modern cartographer would persuade you that Canada is fifty times as large as Italy, and Canada, contemplating herself on a school globe, already pouts her breast with the illusion. In a true map, as distinguished from a geographical, dead Space would shrink to its spiritual nullity, and for its contribution to the human spirit, for its amplitude of history and poesy, Sicily—Italy’s mere foot-note—would loom larger than all the provinces of the Canadian Confederation.