Semblance of Sovereignty: Cartographic Possession in Map Cartouches and Atlas Frontispieces of Early Modern Europe

Maps always present an interpretation of reality and always carry distortions, some of which are consciously or unconsciously ideological. The geographicity of mapping, which involves an intertwining of both science and art, is a vehicle for spatialized/spatializing interpretations of an actual spatiality, and as such is a catalyst for enacting further spatial productions on the basis of the capacity of maps to project themselves “into the landscape.” The scientific pretensions of mapping serve to veil the character of their projective enactment. Maps always entail virtual embodiment, that is, maps realize one possibility out of many, even in the most mathematically “accurate” of spatial relations. Thus, if the imaginative involves both embodied schema and virtual embodiments, we cannot dismiss the role of the geography of imagination in a dialectical relation with the geography of perception, of the actual. The symbolic function of cartouches and frontispieces provides an imagineering context of constructing reality on the basis of the symbolization.

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