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Spain  Cartography  Ricardo Padrón Already the theater has become a map, on which the distance between London and Rome, Valladolid and Ghent, is scarcely a finger’s width. Ya la comedia es un mapa donde no un dedo distante verás a Londres y a Roma a Valladolid y a Gante. —Miguel de Cervantes1 With these lines, Cervantes acknowledges that a novel cultural force—the theater—had emerged in seventeenth-­ century Spain and that its power relied in part upon its ability to transport its audience far and wide on the wings of imagination. What might be less clear is that the figure used to trope the theater—cartography—was no less novel and no less powerful. Two hundred years before the time of Cervantes, maps were hard to come by in Europe. Although people, then as always, conceptualized and represented space and territory, they were not accustomed to having ready-­ made printed maps at their disposal and may not have conceptualized space in ways that maps tend to encourage. Rarely were maps used outside the limited contexts of ecclesiastical learning, Mediterranean navigation , and pilgrimage. By the time Cervantes wrote El rufián dichoso (ca. 1615) the printing press had allowed maps to penetrate a range of activities, including governance, commerce , warfare, and even the teaching of the faith.2 They had become not only commonplace but influential, representing knowledge, helping shape reality, and even giving form to the imagination.The now-­plentiful maps were also a different type, built upon novel principles that supported a new way of conceptualizing space itself. The Crown of Castile and León soon recognized the usefulness of maps and charts for the enterprises of governance , commerce, and territorial expansion. Not long after the discovery of new lands on the far shores of the Atlantic in 1508, the Crown moved to control the production and dissemination of nautical charts by establishing the office of pilot major at the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, the institution it had established to regulate its trade with the Indies. The pilot major oversaw a team of official cosmographers who maintained an official maritime chart of the world, the padrón general, from which charts were produced and into which new discoveries were incorporated . The Crown hired Fernando Colón, illegitimate son of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, to carry out surveys and produce a collection of official maps of its Iberian possessions . Steeped in the lessons of Ptolemy’s Geographia, a prestigious second-­ century treatise from which the European Renaissance had learned to build maps using a grid of latitude and longitude as well as a systematic projection, the people in charge of these enterprises wrestled with the limitations of their own art and also with the very different ways of representing space that came naturally to the less learned pilots whodrewcharts and the now-­forgotten individuals whoworked with Colón and othercosmographers.3 In theirattempt toestablish a single cartographic idiom, to control access and enforce the useof nautical charts, and to compile them as an up-­ to-­ date map of the world, mapmakers in Seville attempted to adapt the portolan chart of the late Middle Ages to the new geometrically rationalized cartography. In doing so, they were plagued by the inadequacies of Ptolemy’s projections; their inability to measure longitude, particularly at sea; and their lack of understanding of magnetic variation. The pilots had their own ideas about how to get a ship where it was going, conceptualizing space in terms of distances traveled, compass directions , and coastal landmarks. Colón, meanwhile, encountered the landlubbercounterpart of this same tradition. His project seems to have produced only a rough manuscript entitled Descripción y cosmografía de España (1517). It maps out the Crown’s Iberian kingdoms through written itineraries that attest to an obsession with distance, direction, and embodied movement akin to that of the pilots, untranslatable into Ptolemy’s abstract terms of latitude and longitude. Throughout the Iberian world, the same pattern repeated itself: ambitious, forward-­ looking projects stumbled over the inadequacies of their own techniques, the immaturity of the institutional arrangements designed to advance them, and the persistence of embodied spatialities that had little to do with the new abstract cartography. During the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the new cartography became hegemonic, its Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque 26 major centers of production shifted from the Mediterranean to northern Europe.The Spanish Habsburgs, particularly Philip II...

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