Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Jan 2016
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Location
413 Hamilton Hall, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
January 28, 6:10–8:00 pm
413 Hamilton
Elizabeth Horodowich (New Mexico State University)
The World Seen from Venice: Representing America in Early Modern Printed Maps
Very few Venetians traveled to the Americas in the sixteenth century, but Venetian cartographers produced more maps of the New World than mapmakers in almost any other European city, often by sequestering cartographic knowledge from otherwise secretive Spanish and Portuguese maps that allowed them to depict the most up-to-date news about global travel and exploration. These Venetian armchair travelers, especially the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi, profoundly influenced Northern European mapmakers in their wake, including cartographers such as Abraham Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator. In mapping the New World, these Venetian mapmakers regularly made specific arguments about the Americas: namely, that the New World represented an arena of luxurious wealth and ethnographic contrast, as well as one of self-reflection and compatibility. In particular, Venetian maps of the New World regularly inserted a series of toponyms onto their maps to demonstrate Venetian participation in the “discovery” of the New World. By examining the imagery and toponyms of sixteenth-century Venetian maps of the Americas, we shall see how Venetian mapmakers played a crucial but traditionally unrecognized role in the invention of America, not as a colonial power, but through the collection, production, and dissemination of cartographic knowledge about the New World.
Elizabeth Horodowich is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. Her research focuses on the history of Venice, and most recently, Venice in cross-cultural and global history. Her forthcoming publications include Imagining the New World in Renaissance Italy (edited with Lia Markey, Cambridge University Press 2016), and The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination in the Age of Encounters (Cambridge University Press, 2017).