The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy
Painted Cartographic Cycles in Social and Intellectual Context

This well-illustrated study investigates the symbolic dimensions of painted maps as products of ambitious early modern European courts.

Mark Rosen (Author)

9781107067035, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 November 2014

318 pages, 91 b/w illus. 8 colour illus.
26.1 x 18.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.81 kg

'Mark Rosen's The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy: Painted Cartographic Cycles in Social and Intellectual Context struck us as the most original, most thoughtfully grounded in theory, best researched, and most beautifully written of the manuscripts.' Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Prize Committee

How did maps of the distant reaches of the world communicate to the public in an era when exploration of those territories was still ongoing and knowledge about them remained incomplete? And why did Renaissance rulers frequently commission large-scale painted maps of those territories when they knew that they would soon be proven obsolete by newer, more accurate information? The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy addresses these questions by bridging the disciplines of art history and the histories of science, cartography, and geography to closely examine surviving Italian painted maps that were commissioned during a period better known for its printed maps and atlases. Challenging the belief that maps are strictly neutral or technical markers of geographic progress, this well-illustrated study investigates the symbolic and propagandistic dimensions of these painted maps as products of the competitive and ambitious European court culture that produced them.

1. A lost world: maps as decoration before the sixteenth century
2. Wonders unknown to the ancients: maps as decoration in the early to mid sixteenth century
3. The Medici Guardaroba and its role in the Florentine cosmos
4. 'All the things of heaven and earth together': the Guardaroba program
5. Manufacturing a universe: the Medici Guardaroba and its cosmographers
6. The maps of the Medici Guardaroba
7. The Guardaroba and the late cinquecento map-cycle competition
Appendix: the curriculum of Don Stefano Buonsignori.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], European history [HBJD], History of art / art & design styles [AC]