Svetlana Alpers, 'The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art'
In: map. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, 1-03 - 1-04.
Svetlana Alpers, from the Art of Describing,
Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
It the case of maps it seems obvious that the intended function of the image had something to do with the kind of knowledge or information it conveyed and the kind of accuracy that was desirable. According to whether it was used to enable a ship to navigate the seas or enter ports, to enable an army to mount a siege, or to enable a state to tax, different kinds of things are demanded. But despite differences in kind it is important not to miss the aura of knowledge possessed by maps as such regardless of the nature or degree of their accuracy. This aura lent a prestige and power to maps as a kind of image. Their making involved possession of a particular kind which must not be underestimated in considering the relationship of art to mapping. We cannot help being amused at the claim made by Braun and Hogenberg that figures were included in their city views to prevent the Turks - whose religion forbade them to use an image with human figures - from using them for their own military ends. But there is no doubt of the jealous care with which the Dutch trading companies guarded their sea charts against competitors. There is a chilling account given to us by Isaac Massa - sometime Dutch contact in Russia - of the difficulty he had in obtaining a map of Moscow. Before giving him the map a Russian protests, 'My life would be in danger if it were known that I have made a drawing of the town of Moscow and had given it to a foreigner. I would be killed as a traitor.' The fear speaks not only to an age-old Russian anxiety about foreigners, but also to a seventeenth-century valuing of knowledge conveyed in map form. It puts great emphasis, in other words, on the value of a picture. Even for the person on the spot, for the traveller in Moscow, the map allowed one to see something that was otherwise invisible. To put it this way is to call attention to what maps have in common with other Dutch pictures at the time - pictures that were associated with, and used to record, what was seen in a microscope, something that was also otherwise invisible. Like lenses, maps were referred to as glasses to bring objects before the eye. To an artist like Jacques de Gheyn, who on occasion made both, the map was the obverse of the drawing of a fly.