Fra Mauro’s Mappamundi, 1459, from Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi
Historically significant because:
Mauro’s map, oriented with south at the top, and dense with drawings and text, represents the transition from medieval mapping, which presented as much Christian dogma as geography, to the scientific mapping of the age of discovery.
But on a more personal level:
In the novel A Mapmaker’s Dream, James Cowan imagines the attempt of Fra Mauro, an actual fifteenth-century cartographer, to draw what he hopes will be a definitive map of the word, based not only on existing maps but on the stories of travelers from around the world. He learns that there are an infinite number of ways to depict reality. As the magnitude of this realization settles in, he writes, “My map absorbs me with what it does not reveal.” Later, despite or because of his efforts to be comprehensive, he tells us, “I am left with a sense of existing in an unfathomable void, surrounded by blankness.”
