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

Genevieve Carlton sets out to reconstruct the consumption of maps in sixteenth-century Italy, in particular, Venice and Florence. Expanding on much of the foundational works of J. B. Harley and David Woodward, she provides an outstanding analysis of these maps and other archival source material such as household inventories. Turning from Harley’s politically focused contextualization of maps and embracing Woodward’s culturally broader approach on the aesthetic and symbolic nature of maps, Carlton forges a path for future projects.

She reminds her readers that the demand for maps needs to be contextualized within the consumption of all print culture and that the desire to acquire maps emerged from their ability not only to provoke wonder and amazement, but also to provide for the map owner a means to fashion one’s identity as a cultured and erudite member of society. Carlton ably presents a method to measure the consumer demand for maps, and it is this investigation of that demand, and her analysis of both the method and her findings, that take up the bulk of this work.

In Chapter 1, Carlton addresses the close connections between sixteenth-century maps and the artistic tradition of which they were a part and by which they were influenced. In this study of the production and consumption of Renaissance maps, she warns readers against creating “an ahistorical boundary between art and cartography” (28). Just as contemporaries praised Renaissance artists for the realism of their works, sixteenth-century maps participated in this achievement and were similarly applauded as mirrors of the world. Artists and mapmakers, however, embraced a form of representation (imitare) that intended to present the best version of, say, Isabella d’Este or the city of Venice, even if that meant presenting a more youthful image or straightening a street or moving less desirable neighborhoods to the margins. These mirrors still carried great symbolic power.

Chapter 2 provides an analysis of map production through an examination of the shop inventory of the sixteenth-century cosmographer, engraver, and printer Francesco Rosselli. With printing technology, maps became a popular commodity well within reach of all levels of society, but as Carlton explains, this technology did not necessarily mean that the best and most up-to-date information was presented in print. Financial concerns led many mapmakers to tout their works as the “true” description, but with either no date or a new date or a new author, the same plate copying out-of-date material was now an authoritative piece for an unsuspecting buyer. Carlton expands on the novelty of maps in Chapter 4 and suggests mapmakers attracted consumers by declaring their maps new, corrected, enlarged, or modern. Consumers were drawn repeatedly to these modern maps corresponding to current events and recent discoveries, or even representations of the world in four parts, works symbolic of the triumph of sixteenth-century geographical knowledge. Contextualizing this map production in the wider consumer culture, Carlton suggests that these buyers were motivated by the more accommodating price, the draw of the new technology, the “currency” of the maps being modern (i.e., not drawn from classical authority), and the possession of an object that would provide the owner with “cultural capital.”

Expanding upon her presentation of information from some household inventories in Chapter 2, Carlton examined more than three thousand inventories from Venice (1500–1630) and Florence (1464–1530) for Chapter 3. She presents her findings on the presence of world, regional, city, navigational, and landscape maps found in these inventories, and while the time frame for Florence is more limited, she has observed that world and landscape maps were most in demand and that in Venice more than 10 percent of the population included maps in their inventories. She reminds the reader that the actual number of maps is likely underreported, because notaries primarily recorded maps that...