Sea Monsters on Medieval & Renaissance Maps

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you good afternoon I guess I can say good afternoon it's a minute or two afternoon I'm Ralph Arenberg chief with geography and map division as my pleasure on behalf of the John W Kluge Center and the geography and map division to welcome you to shut the van Doozers discussion of his new book sea monsters on medieval and renaissance maps recently published by the British Library the John W Kluge Center brings together scholars and researchers to study and learn about the library's rich resources through fellowships and public programs such as this one I encourage those of you who have not done so to sign the Kluge register and to learn more about future Kluge events and fellowships Travis Hensley program Support Specialist is here to help you if you have any questions Travis in the back chuck was a Kluge fellow in 2012 which provided the support for his study of Martin Baltimore's Carter marina a 1516 this research formed the basis of his book seeing the world anew the radical versions of Martin bolts email was 1507 and 15/16 world maps which Chuck co-authored with John Hessler and we do have copies in our bookshop and I strongly recommend you to buy one if you haven't zapped you tafiq Judd has written and lectured extensively on Medieval and Renaissance maps and cartography is published nearly 30 articles in journals such as imago Mundi terra incognita and world and word and images and lectured in most of the major research centers and libraries in the United States in Europe he is also the author of Johann shonas Globa 1515 transcription and study published by the american philosophical society in 2010 the first detailed analysis of one of the earliest surviving terrestrial globes I include the new world I'm also pleased to announce that Chet has recently joined the geography map division primarily process our vault similar archives and to edit publications of the divisions two conference conferences that were devote to martin waldseemüller on his world maps I'll now ask check shut to tape podium and tell us about sea monsters and medieval and renaissance maps thank you very much Ralph and I want to begin by thanking the Kluge Center and the geography and maps division for having me here today the subject this afternoon is a fun one the sea monster is on medieval and renaissance maps the sea monsters on these maps are one of the most lively and visually engaging elements and they form an important chapter in the history of the scientific illustration of animals and in the history of art further as we will see they can provide interesting and important information about the sources that cartographers were using and making their maps it strangely they have received very little study in what follows we will look at images of sea monsters on maps from the 10th until the early 17th century but will be we will begin with some preliminary matters some thoughts on the definition of sea monster a brief look at a classical Medieval and Renaissance theory that generated many sea monsters a review of an ancient story about whales that is illustrated on some of the maps you'll see and a look at the different types of medieval maps so I'll begin with what is a sea monster the word Monster is notoriously difficult to define and indeed some of the definitions offered by medieval authors are contradictory while many authors both classical and medieval define a monster as being in some way against nature for Saint Augustine and Isidora Seville a monster was a part of God's plan an adornment of the universe that can also teach about the dangers of sin the 13th century writer and theologian Thomas of Canton pray in his encyclopedia titled on the nature of things singles out rarity and large-sized as two of the distinguishing characteristics of sea monsters but I think we would all accept that some creatures that are not very large can be monsters for the purposes of this talk a sea monster will be defined as an aquatic creature that was thought astonishing and exotic regardless of whether it was real or mythical in classical Medieval and Renaissance times I also want to emphasize how the idea of what a monster is has changed over time today when we see a picture of a whale for example we see a mighty and intelligent animal that is to be protected and the same is true of walruses yet these creatures were considered monsters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and we see here a map from 1595 on which a walrus is explicitly identified as a monster it is interesting to think about how our definitions of what is monstrous might change in the future a number of the sea monsters that appear on medieval maps are hybrids such as the aquatic lion that we see here and the source of many of these creatures is and it was the ancient and medieval theory that every land creature had its equivalent in the sea this theory which is mentioned by Pliny the Elder Isidora Seville and gervase of tilbury among others is illustrated in a number of Roman mosaics such as this one here we have the aquatic goat and here an aquatic eagle which is quite an unusual combination and so the this theory is illustrated not only in Roman mosaics but also on a number of the maps we will be seeing and it was a fertile generator of exactly this type of hybrid sea creature again continuing with preliminary matters a look at a widespread ancient and medieval story about whales which is a story that whales that sailors mistaking a whale for an island the story first appears in the physio longus which was written in the 3rd century AD the book consists of brief stories about animals birds fantastic creatures and some stories some about stones and plants as well each provided with a moral interpretation the chapter about the whale says that the whale has the appearance of an island and sailors fixed stakes on the suppose a Thailand tie their ship and descend upon the island and light fires to cook food when the whale feels the burning of the fire it plunges into the depths of the sea and carries with it the ships and all the moral is that if one puts one faith one faith in the devil one will be carried by him to the depths of hell variants of the story are illustrated in medieval bestiaries as we see in this image here the whale is quite fish like but in other illustrations of the same scene we see different conceptions of the whale so here on the forehead of the whale we see a plant growing which was part of what deceived the sailors into thinking it was an island here again we see the plants growing and also the the cauldron boiling here we have a truer conception of the size of the whale and we I'll point out the the whiskers there which is something that we'll come back to later and finally I want to mention that the story of the whale mistaken for an island in addition to appearing in bestiaries also appears in the life of st. Brendan medieval Irish Saint who was said to have gone on an extensive voyage in Atlantic visiting various islands including one that turned out to be a whale and here's an illustration from a manuscript of that saint since we don't see medieval maps or Renaissance maps every day I'm going to believe briefly review the three principal types of them the first is Matt by Monday or world maps then we'll look at briefly at nautical charts and then manuscripts of Ptolemies geography map by Mundi our maps of the world they tend to be very schematic and I'm going to show you what a map ammonia is by starting with a more familiar image of the world and then I'll crop it down to the area depicted on map by Mundi and then rotate it to have the same orientation as a mappa Mundi and then set it next to a mappa Mundi so we can see here the map ammonia is very schematic very simplified you're not going to be able to find your way anywhere using it but it does it is helpful in indicating the relative positions locations of the continents and the even we call these maps sometimes teo maps and that name goes back to the 15th century as we can see in this manuscript the au for the circum fluent ocean and the t for this the bodies of water that divide the continents and identify those here separating Europe and Africa we have the Mediterranean of course the Nile was thought to separate Asia from Africa and the Tana is River Asia from Europe and there are although most of the map immunity that exist today are like the simple schematic ones I just showed there are more elaborate examples such as this one and then still more elaborate examples like this one and of course it's the larger and more elaborate ones that it's only that category that can have sea monsters because on the small ones there's simply not room and then I briefly mentioned one other type of map ammonia which is the zonal map and it shows the world divided into climatic zones the equator was thought to be uninhabitable hot above and below the equator they were temperate zones that were inhabitable and then the polar regions were too cold to be inhabited as well looking now at nautical charts these were practical instruments for navigation so you could find your way somewhere using a nautical chart this is the area depicted on a typical nautical chart will see some non typical nautical charts later but this is the area on a typical nautical chart the Mediterranean Basin including the Holy Land and the east and some of the Atlantic basically and here is such a nautical chart it takes a moment to orient oneself but I've indicated Spain on the left there the red sea is helpfully in red and that the green branch like thing in northern Africa is the Atlas Mountains and we'll zoom in a bit and this this is a heavily decorated nautical chart so the Pikul elements of a nautical chart the sort of framework are the emphasis on coastal features so you can see the place names all along the coast and the system of rum lines which is the network of lines you see rating out from that point in the upper left and the precise function of rum lines is still not entirely clear to us today but it had certainly had something to do with navigation it would be helpful in setting a course again this example is heavily decorated with images of cities and it's precisely this type of heavily illustrated luxury nautical chart that might have sea monsters this one doesn't but it would be one of this nature here we can see again the the heavy decoration the images cities and that's the Alps there the green in red and then I'll quickly show an undecorated nautical chart this one's in the geography and map division in the Madison building and it just shows the essential features of a nautical chart the emphasis on the coast and the network of wrong lines and then looking quickly at the third main type of Medieval and Renaissance map those would be those in maps of manuscripts of Ptolemies geography and it's an entirely different system for representing space than nautical charts Ptolemy used a grid of latitude and longitude which today to us seems like the only way to do things but as we soften the nautical charts there were other options and zooming in on one of the regional maps this is Spain we can see the grid of latitude and longitude along the edges of the map and another important difference is that there's much much more detail in the interior on the nautical chart we had a few images of cities but you can see each one of those dots is a city so a much more complete and detailed view of the interior of the land's and here's Italy just to have a quick look at that so again more detail in interior so at last we get to see monsters on maps and I'll begin with a map ammonia we saw before which is the one of the baddest maps and most of the mappa Mundi as I mentioned are small and schematic and do not have sea monsters but there is a group of larger and much more elaborate world maps produced from the 10th to the 13th centuries that do include illustrations of sea creatures and sea monsters these are the map emoni illustrating manuscripts of the commentary on the apocalypse by BRS le Ivana and this is the Girona manuscript of that work and if we zoom in a little bit in the eastern part of the map we see here a marine chicken which is exactly one of the hybrid creatures that I mentioned before and now moving to the western part of the map the manuscripts damage was a little bit difficult to see but we have a man inside a sea monster and it's difficult to doubt really these not identified but it's difficult to doubt that this is Jonah particularly given his gesture wishes with his hand is held by his mouth he would just he's probably praying calling for help from God and it's quite unusual actually to have Jonah depicted inside the sea monster usually as we see on this pulpit in Ravello he's depicted either exiting from the sea monster or being swallowed by the sea monster just zoom in here he is emerging from the sea monster here's another image we're creatures a bit more whale like with the spout on its head and one more image so here here he is inside the sea monster he is clearly praying for deliverance so that that type of imagery although it's uncommon did exist and will now have a look at another be eros manuscript the san andreas dear Royal manuscript again zooming in we have a siren in the West and from her gesture she seems to be I interpret that as dancing and thus perhaps by implication singing which is what sirens did to sailors they sang to try to lure them to their death and then looking at the western edge of the map we have some sort of vague sea dragon on the left in the middle a man wrestling with two large sea serpents which is reliably identified as a personification of ocean and then on the right a starfish and the location of the starfish on this map accords very well with that ascribed to the creature by the meat of medieval encyclopedist thomas of canton prey who says that the starfish lives in the western ocean the map was made in the 13th century after 1248 and thus not long after thomas finished his book and it seems likely that the starfish in the western ocean represents the influence of thomas since there was not an earlier source that ascribes that location to the creature and thus we have here an example of a cartographer making use of the most recent information about sea monsters in the creation of his map we may not think that the starfish is particularly realistic but he was doing the best he could this is the world map in the Manchester manuscript of the a toises commentary in the apocalypse and unfortunately the it's difficult to get that much contrast of the image because it's black on dark blue but has a remarkable group of sea creatures in the southeastern part of the circumcision that is the part most distant from Europe the most exotic realm of the world as far as Europeans were concerned we have a large siren grabbing a sea serpent with our hand while the fish nibble zat her tail and a long sea serpent with a feline head is eating the fish which is nibbling on the siren and these chains of animals biting each other are not uncommon in medieval art but I know of no similar group in any other be artists map or indeed in any other medieval map I've seen so this group of monsters shows that the artists who made this map was free to innovate rather than just copying the sea monsters on an earlier map of this group the map also clearly demonstrates the savagery of the outer Oshin and it's monsters moving on from the out of smap's this is a mappa Mundi made in about 1180 and it presents a striking vision of the circular disc of the earth divided into climatic zones cold at the poles hot at the equator surrounded by an enormous serpentine monster which is devouring its own tail and beyond it in the ocean there are four hybrid sea monsters with human heads and fishy bodies and Tails the monster encircling the world is intended to represent the biblical Leviathan in the outer ocean on this mappa Mundi the sea monsters are not only encircle and thus contain the earth but also dominate the image visually the details of the Earth's climatic zones seem insignificant compared to the presence of these enormous monsters the Church of st. Martin in Zillah Switzerland which dates from the mid 12th century has a ceiling that consists of 153 painted panels depicting scenes from the Bible and from the life of st. Martin in each of the four corners of the ceiling there is an angel holding two trumpets clearly inspired by st. John's vision of four angels standing on the four corners of the earth in Revelation 7:1 further the water depicted along the four edges of the composition is certainly intended to represent the circum fluent ocean so that the ceiling will though not a map in the modern sense of the word is an image of the world as a stage for the playing out of Christian history and the ocean surrounding the earth in the ceiling at Zyliss abounds with sea monsters including a particularly large number of hybrid creatures so here we have an aquatic stag being bitten by while it's hard to be sure maybe an aquatic lion and here we have what's more clearly an aquatic lion eating and aquatic chicken if you see the large tail thereof the chicken and an aquatic elephant probably intended to represent a walrus but it's difficult to be sure and this ceiling at Zyliss the sea monster certainly indicate that the edges of the world are full of exotic wonders and dangers and they may also allude to the diversity and fullness of God's creation we'll move on now to sea monsters on nautical charts on the nautical chart of 1367 by the Pitts sigani brothers there are two ships in a North Atlantic near the western edge of the map one of the ships is being attacked by a huge octopus which is pulling a sailor over the side while a flying dragon carries away another of the Mariners and a legend explains that while these ships were going to port dragons and octopuses came and carried away men from the ship and bore them into the sea and left the ships empty I have not been able to determine the source of the story about the flying dragons but we can identify the likely source of the octopuses attacking the ships Thomas of Canton pray in his encyclopedia titled on the nature of things says that the arms of the polyp or octopus are so strong that they can pull a mariner from a ship into the sea and then eat him thus the Pitts sigani brothers took some of their information about sea monsters directly or indirectly from a scientific source the encyclopedia of Thomas of Canton prey which was completed about a century before they made their map the information about this the information about and the images of the sea monsters on the pizza Gunny map vividly illustrate the perceived dangers of navigation in the Atlantic here we have another nautical chart the Catalan atlas made on my Orca in 1375 it is one of the most elaborately decorated nautical charts that survives today there is a beautiful siren in the Indian Ocean and this distant and exotic ocean is a common venue for sea monsters on maps and then in the Persian and Persian Gulf rather there are two naked men in the water gathering what seemed to be colored rocks and - well - 'the sea monsters swim away from them a legend to the northwest explains that these men are pearl divers and says that they use magic spells to keep the sea monsters away if they do not say the spells the sea monsters will eat them so this represents an unusual case in which humans have some control over and protection from sea monsters here we have a nautical chart by mithya de Villa d'Este as made in 1413 as a whaling scene in the North Atlantic that is the earliest I know of on any map zoom in a little bit here we can see the British Isles there to the lower right so the whaling scene is to the northwest of that zooming in a little bit more and rotating we see that the ship has fixed its anchor in the whale and there are two men in a small boat near the whale but it's not clear that they're doing anything in connection with the whale and the long legend below the scene falls naturally into two parts as I indicate in this slide the first part goes the sea is called the ocean sea and there are found great fish which sailors take to be small islands and take up their quarters on these fish and the sailors land on these islands and make fires and cause such heat that the fish feels it and sets itself in motion and they have no time to get on board and are lost and then the second part and those who know this land on the said fish and their make thongs of its back and make fast the head of the ship's anchor and then this way they Flay the skin off of it where if they make good ropes for their ships and of this skin are made good coverings for haystacks so the first part of the legend recounts the myth of the whale mistaken for an island well the second part conveys very practical information about the use that can be made of the skin of a whale this combination of myth and practical information suggests that the cartographer was combining material from different sources and that he certainly had no first-hand with a whale this is the anonymous so-called Genoese map of 1457 zooming in on the Indian Ocean which again was a common venue for the depiction of exotic monsters one of the monsters are the one on the left is a composite see hog Pig with a fish's tail off the eastern coast of Africa we also have a siren and here a fish with a human face and a large red spiky crest on its head legend explains that this is a Sarah this monster is said to attack the ships of India usually breaking them immediately but this crest can get stuck in the ship's wood and as a result the creature unable to escape kills itself in in eastern Indian Ocean there is an imposing creature with a humanoid head and upper body but with large horns and ears and red wing-like membranes joining its outstretched arms to his torso and a fish-like tail the legend says that the creature sprang out of the water and attacks and cows pasturing on the shore and then was captured and mounted and exhibited in Venice in other locations the ultimate source of this monster is a book about the by the Italian writer poggio broccolini written between 1438 and 1450 - which describes a very similar monster that attacked some women by the seashore and was killed and exhibited in Ferrara here we see an illustration of that monster which is clearly very similar to that on the map this is another case in which although the monster on the map seems like something that the cartographer invented in fact he took it from a book that he thought was accurate the cartographer was depicting what he thought was real is that fantastic as it appears to us this is the catalanist insane map of about 1460 it's unusual because it's anonymous cartographer has used run lines and information from nautical charts but set them in a circular mappa Mundi format on this map there are three sirens in the Indian Ocean as the text explains one is half woman half fish one is half woman half bird and one is half woman half horse the half woman half fish whole that Simon holds a mirror symbolically indicating beauty but also vanity we zoom in a bit this map reveals an interesting aspect of the painting of sea monsters on maps we can see a faint rectangle rectangular border around each of the sirens and it's clear that the first artist who is drawing the wavy lines representing the sea left a blank space in the pattern of waves which was filled in by a second artist a sea monster specialist moving on now to some Ptolemaic maps this is a latin manuscript told me this geography which was made in florence in approximately fourteen fifty five to sixty and it contains a truly remarkable number and variety of sea monsters in fact the richest collection of sea monsters in any one manuscript that i've encountered the monsters are noteworthy because no sea monsters appear in any other of the 53 surviving manuscripts have told me told me its geography that have maps and we can see here a siren in the upper right here we have two sirens of quite different natures in the upper and lower registers and then towards the left and aquatic dog and at the top and aquatic rabbit and at the bottom another aquatic pig of which we saw an example before the great number and variety of sea monsters on the maps in this manuscript suggest that they were part of the original contract of commission for the manuscript that is the sea monsters were in all likelihood and extra cost option chosen for inclusion by the person who was paying for the creation of the manuscript so it took time and and skilled to paint these sea monsters and it was something that was paid for in all likelihood this is piri Rice's map of 1513 paradise was a Turkish ship captain and cartographer who lived from about 1472 1555 in a text on the map he says that he made it by combining information from 20 different maps including leavel map by Mundi Arabic Maps Portuguese nautical charts and a map by Christopher Columbus no less here is a detail of the scene with the whale on the map which is another illustration of the story of the whale mistaken for an island the legend confirms that in this case the image illustrates the story of Saint Brendan the legend runs it is said that in ancient times a priest by the name of Saint Brendan sailed through the seven seas he is said to have landed on this fish thought it was dry land and lit a fire on this fish when the back of the fish began to burn it plunged into the sea the people reembarked in their boats and fled to the ship this event is not reported by the Portuguese infidels it was taken by taken from the ancient mappa Mundi so in fact this image on Peter Rice's map on Turkish map is the earliest surviving representation of the story of st. Brendan on a map and although the cartographer says that he well the cartographer says that he used earlier maps as a source there must have been earlier Western depictions of the scene on maps but they don't survive moving on now to the sea monsters of the Renaissance the transition from the monsters of the Middle Ages to those of the Renaissance can be seen with remarkable clarity in two important maps on permanent display here at the Library of Congress this is Martin Volta Miller's world map of 1507 the first to apply the name America to the new world it does not include any images of sea monsters but it does have several texts about sea monsters in the Indian Ocean these texts come from medieval sources and quite naturally describe the monsters as dangerous so that they would be understood as hazards to navigation they would discourage navigation in the Indian Ocean this on the other hand is vaulting Lois Carter marina of 1516 produced just nine years later on this map Volta Miller has abandoned the medieval texts about sea monsters from his 1507 map but illustrates one sea monster off the southern tip of Africa this is an image of King Manuel of Portugal riding a sea monster and in artistic terms it is the first truly Renaissance image of a sea monster on a map the monster is drawn in three dimensions and is shown as being in motion in contrast to most medieval sea monsters but this is also a Renaissance image in another sense while the sea monsters on vault similar 1507 map are dangerous and would thus discourage navigation the image on the Carter Mina shows a human being controlling a sea monster and thus boldly proclaims human mastery over the dangers of the sea and by extension dominion over the oceans themselves the ocean is no longer thus so much a place of danger as an element that can be conquered by humans and across which trade can be conducted these two maps and their sea monsters made just 9 years apart reflect a transition from the medieval to a Renaissance conception of the ocean this is Olaus Magnus carter marina of 1539 this happens to be a 1572 printing of the map Olaus Magnus was a Swedish historian and geographer who lived from about 1492 1557 in this map of Scandinavia and the Norwegian Sea in the North Sea was published in 1539 and in 1555 he published a book called the history of the northern peoples this applies more detail about some of the creatures depicted on this map zooming in a bit we can see that the Norwegian Sea is densely populated with a great variety of sea creatures and sea monsters the images of the monsters on this map are quite original and they were by far the most influential images such images of the 16th century we'll see evidence of their influence shortly zooming in to see a few examples and I quote here the descriptive text from his book this for this whale he says thus powder or Leviathan is 300 feet long in order to destroy sailors it often rises high above the yardarms of vessels and spurts forth the waves it's it has sucked into the tubes above its head another very similar creature and he explains it sometimes it is not satisfied with doing mischief to a ship merely by showering water on it it throws itself onto a ship's prow or stern and presses on until the vessel sinks down and become submerged or fiercely overturns it with its back or tail as if the craft were some small dish describing two more very similar sea monsters he says that voyagers to India confirmed the enormous size of these brutes and say that the sound of shouting and trumpets repels and disperses them so this is another case where we have some advice about how to try to repel sea monsters if in case you're attacked by them and that's evidently a trumpet there on the stern of the ship rather than a gun and here we have an image of the zipi as' which is eating a seal while it itself is being not on by another sea monster and that a las manga says the sophia's has a ghastly head like that of an owl a back that is tapering or rather raised into the form of a sword and a sharply pointed beak and here we have a classic image of sea monster on a map which I showed earlier and a lost Magnus says it's a serpent of gigantic bulk at least 200 feet long and 20 feet thick that frequents the cliffs and hollows of the sea coast near Bergen it assaults ships rearing itself on high like a pillar seizes men and devours them a colleague of mine luigi diana has given an interesting explanation of the many sea monsters in the norwegian sea on a las Magnus's map he suggests that they were intended to scare away the fishermen of other nations leaving the abundant catch to scandinavian fishermen if this suggestion is correct it represents a unique use of sea monsters for economic motives this is Gerard Mercator terrestrial globe of 1541 one of the most important of the sixteenth century and this is a sea monster from that globe it may look familiar because Mercator took the sea monsters on that globe from Olas Magnus's map which had been published just two years earlier so if we set them side-by-side again the major difference is that the reverse left to right but they can really be no doubt about the source and looking at another sea monster from the globe again Mercator has removed the ship from the image but in all other respects it's very similar and so this globe not only provides evidence for the influence of our lost Magnus's map but also shows Mercator z-- interest in using the most recent sources available to him for the sea creatures on his maps and globes this is a manuscript map from 1546 it's anonymous it was made in France by ended by a member of the so called Dieppe school of cartography it contains a large and diverse collection of sea monsters including the first realistic whaling seen on any map the first saw fish on the map but also a sea dragon that seems based on medieval imagery so it's quite a various collection this is a detail of the North North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Labrador and we see five men in a small boat harpooning a whale we are no doubt to understand that they came from the ship nearby zoom in a little bit to judge from their clothes they are probably Basque and the Basque tradition of whaling goes back to the 11th century the whale has two harpoons sticking from its back and quite curiously seems to have wings and also what looks like a large moustache the moustache has no doubt the cartographers attempt to portray baleen in which the Basques commonly referred to as barb a stable aina or beards of the whale although the whaling scene has some fantastic elements some fanciful elements even the mustache represents an interest in making the depiction of the whale accurate and the whaling scene is much more realistic than the scene on Mae Theodore validus this map of 1413 that we saw earlier here we see the soft fish off the eastern coast of South America zoom in a bit given its location it seems likely the cartographers source was either the description in the 1535 Edition of Gonzales Fernando viedos general history of the new world in which the creature is presented as a great novelty or else an illustrated manuscript of OVA tous book 4 there there is one surviving manuscript that of the of that work that does have an illustration of a saw fish which we see here on the same map from 1546 west of Java minor there is a beautiful sea dragon zoom in a little bit here which is quite similar to some of the medieval images of the sea monster that swallowed Jonah given the variety of sea monsters on this map it seems likely that the anonymous cartographer had a strong interest in this subject and had collected examples from his map from several sources here we have an image of part of Gerrard Mercator famous world map of 1569 whose title translates as new and improved description of the world for the use of navigators the large map is best known for being the first to make practical use of a projection that came to bear marketers name the projection is advantageous because on a map made with it a course on a constant compass bearing is represented by a straight line the sea monsters on the map which have never been studied reveal one of the sources that Mercator was using they come from a book about see creatures by Pierre Bellon that was published 16 years before the map here we see the a whale in the Pacific rather ominously surrounded by ships and if we set it beside the image from the loans book but there really can't be much doubt about the fact that Mercator was making use of that book we have a sea serpent in the South Atlantic and again setting the two side-by-side there can really be not much doubt a Mercator source and one more and we have Neptune riding a seahorse in South Pacific and here Mercator has added Neptune but it's clear where he got the image of the seahorse on his 1541 globe that we looked at earlier Mercator borrowed his whales from a las Magnus's map which had been published as two years earlier and on his 1569 map he copied a sea monster from Pierre Belen's book which was published 16 years earlier in both cases Mercator made use of some of the most recent works available to him about sea creatures in the middle of the 16th century there are rows of fashion for whimsical sea monsters on maps this fashion represents a shift in the role of cartographic sea monsters from being indications of the dangers of the ocean and also displays of knowledge by the cartographer which also served a decorative purpose to being more purely decorative many of these monsters are the result of combining parts of different creatures which was a common technique used in any invention of monstrous monsters while others seem to be the products of the cartographers whimsy so here we see a defiant sea creature with a human face and even a mustache here a haunting image of a sea creature that seems to be suffering sometimes it's hard to come up with names for them so I called a marine pig-dog and sort of an old man of the sea but at a tremendous size and with quite intimidating fingernails early image of windsurfing from a map here at the Library of Congress and this creature which I showed at the beginning it's an extravagant composite based on a whale because it's spouting but it spouts through no less than five elephants trunks and has the head of a bird so if the ocean was gradually becoming less dangerous to sailors in the late 16th century it was still a realm where exotic creations of the imagination could be projected in 1592 johannes van de atacama designed a map of canada in the north atlantic which he titled nova Frankia from the point of view of sea monsters the map is of interest for striking contrasts it reveals in the Atlantic it has some fantastic depictions of whales to derive probably indirectly from Olaus Magnus while near the lower edge of the map there is an inset scene that shows naked and half-naked men possibly basked to judge from their helmets and boats throwing spears or harpoons into one whale while others fliends a whale further up the beach in fact the realistic whaling inset is copied from a plate published in 1582 the two whales in this inset look entirely different from and are much more lifelike then the whale like creatures in the Atlantic thus this map uses two different iconographic ultra ditions of whales one older and essentially mythical the other more recent and realistic here you can see them both together they the fantastic whales in the Atlantic and the more realistic ones in the inset in 1621 an aureus philoponus published an account of the Benedictine missionaries who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage to the Americas the book is part history in part fantasy and contains curious illustrations including this map of the North Atlantic we see here again a representation of st. Brendan mistaking a whale for an island and in this case his men are celebrating Mass on the whales back the whale is clearly inspired by the those of holas Magnus's map and thus in the 17th century not only Olaus Magnus is Seamonsters but also the the myth of st. Brendan still had a hold on people's imagination yet the age of sea monsters on maps was beginning to come to an end just four years later a very different and much more pragmatic and realistic map with images of whales was published here we have Thomas edges map of Greenland which by which name he actually means Spitsbergen this confusion of names was common in the 17th century the map was made in 1625 and has been yets of the arctic whale fishery around its edges although the images are in a very simplistic artistic style they are remarkable as they illustrate all the methods involved in catching and processing a whale and so this map shows the captain of a whaling ship both where to go and the fundamental steps of how to do his job so we see here are pooling the whale towing the dead whale to a ship flensing the whale removing the blubber landing the blubber and cutting it up boiling filtering and barreling the blubber cleaning and scraping the whale fins as they're called above ie the baleen and the the baleen of whales was used in corsets hoop skirts and buggy whips at the time we have seen depictions of whaling in earlier maps but I would suggest it in this map Thomas edge shows the whale in a different light here the mighty Leviathan is perceived as an object of economic exploitation and has lost much of its monstrosity the different images of whales on the item's map of 1592 some fantastic and others realistic together with the contrasting images of whales on Phillip onassis 16:21 map and Thomas edges map clearly show that the late 16th and early 17th century was a time of transition for sea monsters on maps as the 17th century progressed and his navigational technology improved sea monsters became less and less common on maps and this chapter of the history of the illustration of sea creatures gradually closed but rather than end on that sad note I'll finish with images of three my favourite sea monsters three of the aquatic Marvel's that appeared on maps during the centuries that cartographic sea monsters held sway this first is a potent image of the danger of the sea from the ceiling at Zyliss Switzerland this composite monster has the head of a dog the torso of a man and the tail of a fish and demonstrates total control over his poor human victim the second is another composite sea creature this one of pure whimsy in a book of maps from 1572 we see the head of an elephant the body of a bird and impressive spikes jutting from its back so again pure fantasy and the third shows a huge sea monster preparing to bite the stern of a galley in Mediterranean while sailors try to fend it off with Spears to this otherwise dire scene a note of humor is added by the creatures enormous and elegantly curved eyelashes mm-hmm thank you very much any we have time for a few questions sure yes not that I've seen not that I've seen yet one might think so but I haven't seen any evidence of that there are I've seen a number of Japanese maps that have sea monsters for example but for this study I can find my attention to two European maps so there are there are some Islamic maps a few that have sea monsters some Japanese maps so that's perhaps an area for a future study hmm my focus was finding the sources of the creatures on the maps and not so much finding where those creatures on the maps ended up and it's a complicated question because we there aren't many cases where we could be certain that the creature came from a map and not from a book that was a source of the image on the map yeah yeah it's a good question for the early maps in many cases I was not able to determine the sources because you know so many somewhat material from that period just no longer exists and so when I wasn't able to find the source for a monster in a earlier book or manuscript it could have come from from a story from a sea captain that's possible but I in general I would say that the people making the maps didn't have much contact they were probably in a monastery and thus were probably not frequently having conversations with sea captains mm-hm yes 1546 it's in the UK I'm forgetting the name of the library I'm in Manchester John yes in the book I go into that it towards the end of the towards the end of the book I talk about that a little bit there are some sea monsters on maps that come from Andrzej Yvette's book about the new world and they're very distinctive and part of that is to vet curiously rejected traditional literary Western literary accounts of monsters but came up with his own so he's very scornful of other accounts of monsters yeah and yet invented his own and some of his do appear yes near the new world take one more question yes a I don't know of a case of that nature and in this in the case of that image it's an the woman is actually an illustration of bold fortune and there were books of emblems that have very similar images with the woman holding this sort of scarf above her head so in that case I suspect it was one of those emblem books that sir that provided the image rather than a painting but it's hard to be sure hey thank you again Chet for a wonderful Chet's book is available for purchase at the entrance and I'm sure he'll sign a lot of graphic for you and I'd also like to remind you those who are interested in keeping up with the coogy programs to register over on this table the Traverse will help you if there are any questions that you have thank you again for attending thank you this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 90,161

Keywords: Library of Congress, Renaissance (Art Period/Movement)

Id: iUvMr86UZq4

Length: 53min 17sec (3197 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2014