Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy by Genevieve Carlton (review)

Wordly Consumers is a small book with big ambitions. Setting aside the imperial patrons who tend to dominate studies of fifteenth and sixteenth-century map production, Carlton seeks the ordinary people who bought printed maps. She finds them in empire-less Italy, where “a non-patronage-based market for maps [appeared] for the first time” (9). As printing lowered prices, the labouring and mercantile classes could and evidently did purchase world maps, landscapes, regional and city views, and navigation charts. Who were these people, what maps did they prefer, and what did they do with their new purchases? To identify the buyers and understand their choices, Carlton works through a range of evidence: inventories and advice books, chiefly, but also architecture treatises, diaries, poems, and letters.

Chapter one, “Capturing the World on Paper,” emphasizes the fact that early mapmakers were artists by profession; for consumers and producers, maps were one artistic genre among many. This aesthetic observation suits Carlton’s argument that, despite expectations of realism and accuracy, sixteenth-century cartography remained “largely a work of the imagination” (50). The recovery of Ptolemy’s grid did not “erase the particular Christian symbolic meaning” (39) associated with medieval mappaemundi, for encouragements to Christian interpretation could be included in new, experimental projections. This point is a first step in Carlton’s over-arching argument that printed maps were fundamentally ambiguous, and that ambiguity was key to their appeal.

Chapter two, “The Commerce of Cartography,” is chiefly a case study of “the only known source of its kind” (64), an inventory of the print shop owned by artist and mapmaker Francesco Rosselli, the first in Europe to sell maps commercially. From the inventory, Carlton recovers the types and numbers of maps on hand and their prices. She can thus set Rosselli’s maps in the context of similarly priced consumer items — notably “religious images and art prints” (71) and small books such as psalters, grammars, and chivalric romances — to propose a shared buying public.

Chapter three, “A Buyer’s Market” focuses on Venice and, more briefly, Florence, where household inventories allow Carlton some quantitative and anecdotal harvesting. Fascinating results arise: why, for example, did Venetians not purchase or display maps of Venice, although “Venice was one of the most popular cities mapped in the sixteenth century” (84–5)? Both Venetians and Florentines preferred to buy world views; and map owners in both cities usually possessed other images (especially devotional ones) alongside maps.

The final three chapters consider different aspects of consumption: what were people buying, when they purchased maps? Chapter four, “A World Unknown to the Ancients” considers the attraction of novelty for consumers. Producers, recognizing this, placed the word prominently on prints. Another draw for consumers was “The Power of Knowledge” that maps promised. Chapter five shows that cartographic knowledge was not for hoarding. Rather, one hung maps in semi-public parts of the home for guests to admire; or one visited them, as tourists travelled to Fra Mauro’s world map in San Michele (Murano). Maps served as memory palaces to “use. . . after travels,” or became tools of the imagination, to construct “places the viewer would likely never see” (134). In short, many reasons drove consumption (141). In map display as in the domestic display of art, buyers asserted their persons through their purchases.

The Renaissance was obsessed with conversazione and I waited impatiently for Carlton to draw conversation into her analysis. In fact, chapter six: “Making an Impression,” opens with a not-quite-overheard conversation about maps. After visiting Marin Sanuto’s home, Federico da Porto enthused in a letter about the world map he had seen. Cartographic interiors such as Sanuto’s were highly intentional spaces; as Giulio Mancini advised, “the display of art would shape how others view[ed] the collector” (148). Carlton underlines Mancini’s point by analyzing fifty inventories of Venetian reception-halls that contained maps. She infers that Renaissance printed...