Sea Monsters in Medieval and Renaissance Maps

Chet van Duzer (The British Library 2013), 144 pp. including 115 color plates

The sea monsters in mappaemundi, charts, and printed maps are too often grouped
as archaic forms rather than tools to map the uncharted and unknown. Chet van
Duzer elegantly illustrates the vital place they occupied in early modern
cartographers’ craft to mark unknown dangers and fill blank spaces, but also orient
viewers to the coasts of an expanding globe. As much as providing cartographers
decorative forms to He surveys how monsters register the “diversity or fullness of
God’s creation” (28) and orient viewers to oceans with “geographic significance”
(50) from ancient mosaics to illuminated manuscripts and engraved maps. Van
Duzer focuses on the re-use and survival a wide range of imagery of the monstrous
as among “the cartographer’s best friends” (12-3), as the iconography that served to
frame the known world’s boundaries came to be tools to address cartographers’
audiences, from medieval manuscripts to Renaissance globes, filling unknown
spaces, or marking encounters with the unknown. The high quality photographic
reproductions throughout this study communicate the joy of reading vivid
creatures, often overlooked as map signs, and their places in modern maps’ designs.

While mappers often relegated monsters to the edges of the world, van Duzer shows
how their survival evidences shifting notions of oceanic space. The richly illustrated
survey fascinatingly links the survival of cartographic imagery from the ancient
world to its recovery in the Renaissance as motivated by changes in map use and
map readership, but as always illustrating a clear cartographical intent, which, if
these medieval forms helped grasp the dangers of the unknown, after being
marginalized in much humanist geography, reached new audiences in engraved
maps. Rather than seeing the sea monsters in manuscripts and printed maps as
different beasts, whose survival was mediated in sea charts, van Duzer suggests they
must be valued for their shifting role as orientating tools and pleasurable forms they
retained for new audineces. He surveys how monsters on the edge of the medieval
world to maps orient viewers to Africa’s coasts, the north seas in Olaus Magnus’
1536 map, as sawfish off of south America by 1546, or, as leviathans off the mythical
Java la Grande--all markers of mapped space (96ff). If such imagery reflects
dependence on marine charts, maps of oceans borrowed the availability of credible
images from printed works of natural history by the mid-sixteenth century, as
mapmakers used works of of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1535), Rondelet
(1554), or Conrad Gesner (1558). The first humanist mappers shunned sea
monsters, the inclusion of waters in globes led to the rise of sea monsters combine
wonders with actual reportage to attract readers in a growing market of maps: the
multiplication of sea monsters off the fjords of Abraham Ortelius’ ca. 1590 map of
Iceland, based on a map dedicated to Frederick II, gave a home to the monsters
Olaus Magnus had located in northern Europe.

As the emptiness of oceans provided a new canvas for sea monsters and appealed to
viewer’s curiosity, van Duzer detects shifting attitudes to sea monsters among
Renaissance cartographers to mediate the unknown. The mapmaker monk Fra
Mauro disdained such creatures as worthy of mapping c. 1450, and they remained
absent from printed editions of Ptolemaic world maps, but Waldseemüller’s 1507
world map; cartographers from the 1530s create a “new Renaissance imagery of
sea monsters” to map far-off seas van Duzer surveys in synoptic catalogues of the
iconography of walruses and whales. The ecclesiastic refugee from Reformation
Sweden, Olaus Magnus, created a detailed 1539 wall-map of northern Europe
provided a copious inventory of identified sea monsters, recycled in the margins of
Ortelius’ 1564 engraved wall-map of Europe; sea monsters proliferate in Gastaldi’s
1561 Cosmographia that met expectations for the comprehensiveness of mapped
space; their life-like detail is borrowed from books of natural history or marvels
(107). Rather than focus on the arrival of actual objects form voyages, van Duzer’s
often interprets images as if they were a residue of “objective” encounters—leading
him to call sea turtles “flying turtles” (98-100)—and included sites of whaling.

This elegant genealogy of the survival of sea monsters is based on close examination
of a broad iconography and illuminates the art of the early modern cartographer.
As they lost admonitory functions to caution against travel, sea monsters retained
their diversity but came to designate and locate encounters with the wondrous. The
sea monster was an increasingly valued aesthetic element of the map, in such
demand that by 1546 “a gifted sea monster specialist” contributed to a map, and a
1550 globe possibly made for Henry II (97); their inclusion in polar projections of
the northern seas or southern hemisphere parallel the growing claims of maps to
chart the known world, before disappearing from maps by 1600 with the
domestication of oceans. Their iconographic circulation of their imagery is
catalogued by van Duzer in synoptic surveys of the ‘careers’ of animals from the
walrus to the whimsical, or whales that approach naturalistic observations. (How
such monsters processed unknown animals awaits further research.)

Van Duzer communicates the continued delight in the sea monster in this expansive
study. If readers might dismiss sea monsters as cartographical artifacts inherited
biblical myths, van Duzer appreciates their multiple roles as place-markers that
derive from experiences to unlikely ways of investing value in the map and in
helping viewers confront the disorienting—and difficult to map—open-ness of
oceanic expanse, which only disappear as the seas were dominated by commercial
trade routes. The survival of the sea monster repeatedly rewards careful re-reading.

--Daniel Brownstein
University of California, Berkeley