The Plane! The Plane!
Recently, and mind
you only recently, the uncouth Neanderthal in me took steps to become more
gentrified. After all, since we aren’t
overly excited about “Game of Thrones”, there are just so many catch-up Amazon
Prime episodes of “Suits” we can watch at one sitting. Besides, my guess is, it’s never too late to
learn to appreciate finer things in life, especially during the quiet hibernating
interlude of winter. So, as a departure
from a couch potato existence, “sour cream on the side please”, we’ve since taken
up going to plays, taken online Masterclass tutorials on subjects like wine and
photography, perused a few local museums, and attended lectures, some so interesting
that a sharp pencil under my chin was just the prop I’d have welcomed in order to
stay alert enough to appreciate the influx of some of these verbal refinements. There were relapses of course, as for
instance the Cinco de Mayo jalapeno eating contest, but I categorize that as a
cultural broadening experience, if not a cultural appropriation outright.
One interesting
venue, where the only handy prop needed was a seat in an overfilled room of
attendees, was a lecture by Dr. Jessica Maier of Mount Holyoke College, located
in western Massachusetts. Dr. Maier’s
specialty at Mount Holyoke is art history.
Hers was not the type of art history you’d normally expect,
however. For example, she didn’t attempt
to wow us with an explanation into some veiled meaning behind Mona Lisa’s smile,
the microscopic presence of the artist’s initials L.V. in Mona’s right eye, some
additional Da Vinci Code-like hidden Mary Magdalene symbol in Leonardo’s Last
Supper, or the meaning of
the spilled salt container near Judas’s elbow. I’d have loved it if she had, but nowadays delving
into speculation about symbolism in artwork, which speaks in its own jargon, is
rather common and goes a long way toward explaining its ample occurrence. No, she took a different tact.
Art being a
visual medium, her concentration is on traditionally overlooked categories
of imagery such as those found in prints, illustrated books, maps, including historic
city views that in themselves can easily be appreciated as works of art. Her lecture topic the afternoon we met was on
early maps of the Eternal City in which she wove a story that interleaved Roman
urban development with early cartography tracing Rome’s history through the
silent witness of maps. It was a
fascinating tour that featured screen projections throughout to illustrate her
points.
Personally, we
still rely on maps when we travel.
Oh yes, we have talking mapping services on our cellphones, our car has
a navigation feature (the word “navigation” bodes far more than maps alone, which
I still don’t know how to fully use), and then, there is aging Margaret, our
dashboard Garmin GPS, that when coupled with our car “Bianca”, is now regulated
to use only to get us around while in Italy.
And getting us around and around is exactly what Margaret sometimes does
to us. There have been some wild times
with Marge, many of which I’ve mentioned in the past, as for instance the times
we saw the same road repeatedly, taken shortcuts that never materialized, and the
time when evidently an errant electron had her dupe us into believing the cow
pasture, that included a brook, was, in fact, a road. NOT, NOT, and for a third time, NOT! Most recently in lemminglike fashion, we once
followed Margaret to near oblivion while driving to the town of Taurasi to
visit a famous winery. I doubt it was
with malice aforethought, because she’s just not that smart, but on that recent
visit to Italy in her starched English voice, she just about “done us in”, as
Eliza Doolittle might have put it. This
once-road narrowed as I foolheartedly attempted to follow it. All downhill mind you. I finally realized what was afoot, and with a
falsetto screech of the tires, announced our retreat when the bushes were
practically inside the windows and the pavement had been replaced by deep
washouts. It was almost too late. The road, in conspiracy with Margaret, but
maybe I give them too much credit, was too narrow to attempt to turn around and
Bianca’s wheels just couldn’t carry all of us in reverse back up the hillside
with four aboard. Once the excess load
was removed, I was able to reverse back to civilization but not before the
clutch had strained so much that in payment, we could smell at least a year’s
worth of smoldering clutch lining. So
over time, we’ve learned not to put all our trust into these electronic mapping
wonderments. In the meantime, as a form
of back-up insurance, we’ve accumulated a sizable stack of maps. It began on our first visit to Italy in 2006
with a stop at the map department of Barnes & Noble before we departed and
hasn’t stopped since. Now, wherever we
visit, obtaining a paper map to get oriented and to verify the short of
artificial intelligent voices in our ears is a must.
Some people have
difficulty with paper maps. Could it
be a left brain, right brain thing … sequencing against imagination, thinking
in words as opposed to projecting feelings, math set against rhythm? I doubt one is dominant over the other. I prefer to believe it’s rather more like a
little contribution from each. Left or
right, it’s only a theory of how our brains process information, lying
somewhere along the continuum between myth and hard fact. Maria Elena still recounts the story of how
on her first day in High School geometry, which was also mine, how she was lost
the moment Mr. Fava moved his extended arm up and down while saying, “this is a
plane”. It was somewhat along the lines
that little Tatoo of Fantasy Island fame
would weekly cry from our TV sets, “The plane! The plane!” in greetings to arriving
guests versus math students. She
couldn’t see it, at least not at first. Like
Mr. Fava’s arm so long ago had tried to model a flat plane in space, maps are
simply conceptual models of reality. Some
are indeed simple, but others can accumulate complex sophistication as they
attempt to present terrain with physical features such as roads and cities
superimposed onto topographical details.
Much of course depends on the purpose of the map. When I flew, we used specialized sky maps of
imaginary highways in the heavens and turn points, like corners, to get us from
here to there. What all this is intent on
relaying in abstract diagrammatic fashion, including our geometry teacher’s
waving arm, is specialized information. I prefer to think that while maps do their
best to relay information, the visual of a painting, like the “Mona Lisa”, is
intent on conveying mood, but this may just be the left side of my brain
speaking.
 |
| Val Camonica Italian Alpine Cave Map |
 |
The proper name for map making is
cartography. I can only imagine the product
of the very first cartographer. Could it
have been a rudimentary depiction of a hunting area? Directions to some food or water source? In any case, it was likely a simple drawing, nothing
more than an etch-a-sketch tracing in the dirt, drawn with a finger, maybe a stick, with perhaps the high-tech use of a stone or two to indicate some feature like a mountain or village. Certainly, early
Babylonian Map of Their Known World
man must have illustrated ideas this way.
Among the evidence are the prehistoric rock
carvings of Val Camonica, a part of Italy near the
Swiss border. They date to the 4th millennium BCE. Just thinking back 6000 years to the
beginning of the Bronze Age is enough to trigger a migraine. These early maps consist of dotted geometric
patterns and lines thought to depict cultivated plots 1.
If they really were intended to lay out real estate holdings, they just
may have been the first multiple listing.
In any case, the first true cartographers appeared in about 600
BCE. These geographers were Babylonians
who represented their reality on clay tablets.
It
was interesting when Dr. Maier mentioned that early maps
were not oriented to the North as they are today. Magnetic compasses hadn’t been invented. Not until the 11th
century were compasses used for navigation, first on land and then over
water. Early naval compasses were made
in the form of a magnetic needle that floated in a bowl of water which served
as a gimble to allow the needle to stay in a horizontal position, especially on
rough seas. It wasn’t until somewhere
between the 12th and 13th century that compasses had successfully migrated from
China to Europe. Even following their
introduction, they were known to relatively few. For hundreds of years, North and South had no
particular meaning. “That way” or the direction of sunrise and sunset were
enough to get by. Whoever drew a map,
whether of terrain or a city layout, centered it and oriented it as they
wished. Today, beyond a GPS option to
orient its map display to what is ahead of us, whether that be north, south,
east, west, or some variant in between, north to the top of the screen or map
is pretty much-settled convention.
Italian
mapmaking, since first being uncovered
at Val Comonica, if that’s what they actually were, has come a very long way. Moving forward centuries, urged on by the
development of large cities like Rome, there came a time when maps, far more
informative and detailed than cave wall sketches, were needed. If you were a traveler in medieval times,
there was nothing to help you navigate Rome.
The paramount problem was how to portray the complex urban
topography of a place like Rome on paper. Today, if we even bother to think about it, we
may feel that maps are trivial, useful for orientation to be quickly
discarded. It wasn’t until 1551 that cartographer
and
engraver Leonardo Bufalini was able to meet the challenge. His work occupies a preeminent position in
the history of cartography because his creation was a first of its kind - the
first comprehensive map of Rome since
antiquity. Drawn
to scale and based on survey results, his two-meter square masterpiece took up
24 sheets. His measured portrayal of
Rome included natural features and the fabric of the city down to street
names. Early Rome, right on through the
era of religious pilgrimages to Rome and the Grand Tour rite of passage
for young European aristocrats, had
nothing similar
to today’s tourist maps. This was, she
emphasizes, a mapping culture remote from today’s functional concerns and well
before mass tourism
necessitated a proliferation of maps.
His map today serves as a historical record presenting ancient ruins and
contemporary structures of his day. When
later maps, such as those by Battisti Nolli appeared approximately 200 years
later, it served to help pinpoint changes in Rome’s development over time. In some ancient form of Twitter, changes communicated by comparing the two, unveiled the
history of Rome’s evolution which otherwise would have been lost.
 |
Portion of
Bufalini's Map of Rome
|
About
thirty years later, to
underscore the
importance of maps, the Vatican Museum created an entire gallery
devoted to its accumulated knowledge of the world. These depictions are more on the order of
works of art, much like the decor of the Sistine Chapel created approximately
70 years earlier. The Galleria delle Carte
was commissioned in 1580 by Pope Gregory XII. The Pope recruited Medici
cosmographer Ignazio Danti from the University of
Bologna for the job as part of other ongoing work at the time to decorate the
Vatican. It took this
multi-talented Dominican priest, whose interests also extended into mathematics and geography, three years to complete this remarkable project. At its completion, it included forty
large-scale topographical maps. These
were not simply paintings, mind you, but as we noted when we’d visited, they
consisted of frescoes as in the Sistine Chapel. Each depicts a political region of the Italian
peninsula as well as a perspective view of Rome displayed along both sides of
the almost 400 foot length of the gallery.
Surprisingly, many of these brightly colored maps present these Italian scenes
from high altitude, which in itself is amazing considering the era. Equally amazing, these highly detailed
depictions beneath the gallery’s vaulted ceiling
are today estimated to be 80-85% accurate. The gallery lies along the route to the
Sistine
Chapel which clearly enjoys a more prominent reputation than the Gallery
of Maps. It is unfortunate that people practically run when they can, while others jostle
and elbow their way through the map gallery to quickly get to the nearby
Sistine Chapel, whose fame most likely can be attributed to the notoriety
of its artist creator. It is equally
unfortunate that the map’s detailed artwork, its vivid colors, the topographical
details that range from mountains, cities, and rivers, and which incorporate even
out of scale allegorical elements including depictions of sea creatures,
compass roses, and ships, can be so undervalued. I particularly enjoyed the embedded
historical incidents found in many of the map frescoes, as for instance a
depiction of Hannibal and his elephants
defeating the Romans at the Battle of the Trebbia River in 218 BCE; the Ottoman Siege
of Malta; and the naval
Battle of Lepanto to mention a few. On one map fresco, we caught a glimpse of
Calitri, represented by a castle, near a reference to Aquilonia, north of us,
where the Romans are thought to have fought the Samnites in 293 BCE. Imagine what they saw as their history rolled
into what we see as Renaissance history today.
In our haste to see the headliners, Danti’s spectacular tour de force deserves
its own attention. It should not be overlooked but equally
appreciated and enjoyed.
 |
Vatican Galleria della Carte
|
 |
Ottoman Siege of Malta
|
 |
Map with Calitri Castle Icon
(right of center, below Aquilonia, mid-way up)
|
Jumping
backward a moment by two centuries we find Ambrogio Lorenzetti Lorenzet (1290–1348), an artist, cosmographer,
and cartographer. He was an Italian painter of the elegant Sienese
school said to have rivaled the works of Florentine painters. His medieval, wheel-shaped Map of the World, “Mappamondo”,
which brought the world to the attention of Siena’s people, has long since
vanished. Its cartographic content has
been lost. What does remain,
interestingly located in the same building that hosted this rotating map, is a
pictorial representation of life in Siena.
It
was his inventive use of iconographic imagery, where he used illustrations to add
to the subject matter, that marked him as a standout artist in the early 14th century. His were
not customary depictions of religious icons.
Instead, in addition to maps, he “mapped” secular city views, in themselves appreciated as works of art, of
everyday people going about their lives in a peaceful medieval city setting.
One of
Ambrogio’s encyclopedic pictorials of
medieval life hangs by my desk. The
original,
painted from
1337 to1339, is the largest
pre-Renaissance pictorial ever produced.
Too large in scope to
capture the scene in a single frame, mine occupy two very wide, albeit narrow
scenes, that when knitted together in your mind, mimic the scale of his
masterpiece. The original is one of the fresco series collectively known as the Allegory and
Effects of Good and Bad Government that cover three walls in the Palazzo Pubblico near the clock tower in the piazza of Siena. This is the same piazza that when covered
with dirt twice a year, hosts the famous seventy-five second Palio horserace. In total, these
fresco’s sum up much of the ideals of 14th-century Tuscany. Mine along with its two accompanying
masterpieces fill the large Sala dei Nove
(Hall of the Nine) of Siena's city
hall where its chief magistrates, known as the Nine,
once held their meetings. The
subject of this series of frescos is government, both in good and bad form. The complex scene of one pictorial, known as The Allegory of Good Government, depicts how a republic was governed. A large secular representation of allegorical
figures including Wisdom, Justice, Concordance, representatives of the people,
and the cardinal virtues such as Peace,
Prudence, and Magnanimity work in stable
harmony for the good of all. If the
allegorical figures did their jobs, there was peace, harmony, and prosperity. Interestingly,
amidst this complex scene of interrelated virtues and relationships, Ambrosio
depicts Temperance holding an hourglass.
Historically, this is the first pictorial documentation of the existence
of an hourglass.
 |
My Office’s Allegorical Artwork
|
 |
Palazzo Pubblico Siena & Home to the Palio
|
From this astute political and moral vision of how government should work for the
common good of its people, he next portrays the utopia of good government alongside
the dystopia of bad government. For easy
comparison and as a dire warning to members of the Nove, he presents this dichotomy on two facing side walls within
easy view of the nine magistrates. In an
upside down reversal of life, he
employed comparable scenes and events to portray a Siena dominated by vice, and
in an alternate panorama, one where virtue is supreme.
In a comprehensive vision entitled “The Effects
of Good Government on Town and Country” hanging beside my desk, I see just government prevailing in
Siena. This pictorial compendium depicts a prosperous
city. Probity abides here. Its residents
look healthy, its buildings well maintained, new construction is underway,
shops and markets bustle with activity, while in the foreground, young women holding
hands, sing and dance. Outside the
walls, a lush
countryside unfolds. Trade is apparent
as people, pack animals and livestock enter while others depart on horseback into
a landscape where fields are being worked, trees are fruitful, and crops are being
harvested. Clearly, peace and prosperity
carry the day in this everyday scene of the good life.
 |
“Effects
of Good Government on
Town and Country”
|
I didn’t know Naturalism from Photorealism when I began. I’m still not sure how
they differ in the cacophony of artistic terminology. However, as part of my burgeoning
gentrification, I have learned something about iconography and medieval map
making in the process. It is clear we
owe much to men like Leonardo
Bufalini, Ignazio Danti, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who whether as mapmakers
called attention to our surroundings by modeling the reality of our broader
world, or as iconographers, illustrated important concepts and in so doing “mapped”
the realism of everyday life and customs of a past era so they were not lost to
those who followed.
The abstract concept of “the plane” that first day of geometry class, in fact, a plane of no
thickness that went on forever, was hard for young brains to absorb. Waving a hand in 3D space to describe a 2D
world or better still, representing a three-dimensional world in two
dimensions, in the form of a paper map, have their challenges. People like our teacher, Mr. Fava, and
thousands before him helped blaze that trail so that over the year or so we
absorbed the knowledge accumulated over thousands of years. On a similar vein,
the words of Isaac Newton come to mind when he said, “If I have seen further
than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”. Newton certainly had. So when we use our GPS, turn on Google Maps, enter
an address in our car’s “navi”, or like us, unfold our excessively tape-repaired
paper maps to bolster confidence in our wayward Margaret, we do so supported by
the cumulative accomplishments of those way, way back before us, as for
instance that Bronze age Italian in Val Comonica. The 12th-century idiom, “All roads
lead to Rome”, also holds true. But for
a little water between here and there, I have maps to prove it!
1. 1 - Arcà , Andrea (2004). The topographic engravings of
the Alpine rock-art: fields, settlements and agricultural landscapes. In
Chippindale C., Nash G. (eds.) The figured landscapes of Rock-Art,
Cambridge University Press, pp. 318-349; online academia.edu, retrieved December 2, 2014.
From that Rogue
Tourist
Paolo
