Véronique Plesch – The Cartographic Impulse

For a child educated in French schools, a plastic map of France was the indispensable companion of geography lessons. Tracing the contours of the “Hexagon”—as the country is often called—served as the foundation for studying its topography, river systems, and industries. This simple tool forever imprinted the country’s shape on my mind. I vividly remember these assignments: I adored plotting information on the map, devising visual ways to translate data, and have often regretted not keeping mine. Thus, it was with great delight that, upon starting these musings, I discovered these objects are still available. I found one for a mere €5.40 on the website of the venerable Maison Empereur in Marseilles, an ironmonger in business since 1827. In addition to perforations for plotting major cities, this version features incised lines for the principal rivers and outlines indicating the various départements and their numbers.

Maps are a constant presence in our daily lives, yet we seldom reflect on how they rest upon conventions. They are abstractions—diagrammatic visual systems designed to help us orient ourselves and make sense of the world we inhabit. But while maps are indispensable practical tools, they are equally profound reflections of human constructs: political, social, psychological, and imaginary.

From its very beginnings, cartography was driven by the desire to comprehend the world around us. Around the turn of the millennium, German archaeoastronomer Michael Rappenglück suggested that prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in southwestern France might chart the night sky, identifying specific constellations in clusters of painted dots. Compelling as Rappenglück’s theory is, it remains contested. What is clear, however, is that the urge to map the movement of the stars and sun inspired monumental undertakings. In Neolithic Carnac, for example, more than 3,000 megalithic menhirs (standing stones) are aligned along an east–west axis. These stones take possession of the landscape and impose human order upon it, actively engaging with the sun by charting its course across the sky.

At Lascaux and Carnac (as well as Stonehenge), physical entities—paint on a wall or stones set in the earth—attempt to grasp an elusive spatial reality. In each case, a change in scale occurs: the environment is re-presented at a reduced ratio. This brings to mind the famous micro-fiction by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, “Del rigor en la ciencia” (“On Rigor in Science”), which describes an empire whose cartographers construct a map at a 1:1 scale. The story illustrates how the relationship between map and territory always involves loss; while eliminating scale reduction might preserve complete detail, a map the exact size of its territory is entirely useless. Further underscoring the illusory nature of cartography, Borges framed his text as a pseudo-quotation from a seventeenth-century travelogue by one “Suárez Miranda.” The scholarly precision of this bogus citation (Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658), coupled with terms like rigor and science in the title, reveals that every map is ultimately a fiction—a point driven home by the fact that Borges originally published the piece in 1946 under the pseudonym B. Lynch Davis.

Symbolic and Experiential Mapping

The early medieval archbishop and scholar Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) described the earth in his Etymologiae (also known as the Origines). In Book XIV, “The Earth and Its Parts,” he writes that “[t]he earth is placed in the central region of the world,” explaining:

The globe (orbis) derives its name from the roundness of the circle, because it resembles a wheel; hence a small wheel is called a “small disk” (orbiculus). Indeed, the Ocean that flows around it on all sides encompasses its furthest reaches in a circle. It is divided into three parts, one of which is called Asia, the second Europe, the third Africa. […] [T]wo of them, Europe and Africa, occupy half of the globe, Asia the other half by itself. But the former pair are divided into two regions, because from the Ocean the Mediterranean enters in between them and separates them.

Isidore’s map became known as a “T and O map,” shown here in the text’s first printed edition. Just as the Etymologiae categorizes knowledge, this diagrammatic layout uses basic geometry—a circle divided into three parts (obviously alluding to the Trinity). Oriented with East at the top and North to the left, Asia occupies the upper hemisphere, with Europe on the lower left, and Africa on the right. The diagram organizes geography alongside sacred history, inscribing the names of Noah’s three sons: Sem, Japheth, and Cham. Positioning the eldest, Sem, at the top aligns spatial hierarchy with the sun’s daily movement from East to West.

Isidore’s map thus establishes correspondences between space and time—linking the history of humanity to the daily course of the sun—functioning as a cognitive prompt to structure memory and contemplation. Similarly, medieval devotional practice forged links between personal experience and complex theological doctrines like salvation history. This experiential dimension of cartography is vividly illustrated in early guidebooks to sacred sites, such as the Sacro Monte in Varallo, Italy. The woodcut illustration for the Guida per ben visitare la nova Gerusalemme nel Sacro Monte di Varallo (Guide to Visit Well the New Jerusalem in the Sacro Monte of Varallo) offers an instructional itinerary rather than an objective topographical map. At the bottom of the print, four pilgrims with walking sticks are welcomed by an angel before ascending a steep, winding path. Letters guide the visitor to specific chapels housing three-dimensional representations of Christ’s Passion (see Varallo’s website). The map thus functions dynamically across space and time, serving as a physical guide to climbing a mountain that acts as a surrogate for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land—hence the site’s designation as la nova Gerusalemme (the New Jerusalem). As the viewer moves simultaneously through geography, memory, and devotional narrative, a double transposition occurs: the Sacro Monte represents the Holy Land, while the woodcut and guidebook transpose that reduced sacred topography onto the page.

But pilgrimage was the ancestor of tourism, and the map of Rome in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry displays major ancient and Christian landmarks, along with the Tiber River—sites that, for someone who had made the journey, acted as mnemonic triggers. In this sumptuous showcase for the artistry of the Limbourg brothers, the city is contained within a circle; after all, it is the caput mundi (the head of the world). Just as a mountain in the Alps could stand for the Holy Land, here the Eternal City stands for the world.

Mapping National Identity

Jean de Berry was the brother of the king of France and lived through the cataclysmic times of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). The genealogical chronicle A tous nobles (named after its incipit, “to all the nobles”) narrates the deeds of French monarchs, deploying cartography in the service of political agendas, with land becoming a symbol of national identity. As Camille Serchuk notes, the book was designed to affirm “French dynastic legitimacy and continuity” and “the French kings’ unique connection to and authority over French territory.” In one page from the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the text (among at least sixty-three surviving copies), we see a map of France oriented to the southeast and bounded by major waterways, including the Meuse, Rhône, Saône, Gironde, Seine, and Loire rivers, alongside the Breton and Flemish seas. The green band across the center is not a river, but rather the “genealogical vine” that threads through the manuscript. As it weaves across the map, it physically anchors the royal bloodline directly to the land itself.

As Serchuk argues, this map “smooths over” the recent devastation of the war to convey a “unified, bountiful, and independent French kingdom.” It is a polemical assertion of French nationhood, allegiance to the crown, and the dynastic legitimacy of a contested soil. Eschewing geographical precision, the map plots forty-five icons representing towns and regions to convey order. Revealingly, Paris is placed near the center, drawn significantly larger to signify its privileged status. Within its city walls, one recognizes crucial landmarks: the Sainte-Chapelle (housing the relic of the Crown of Thorns), the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the fortress of the Bastille, and the bridges spanning the Seine. The surrounding rivers and seas isolate the realm into a pristine island, visually reinforcing the symbolism of the surrounding region, the Île-de-France—in fact, Paris is France.

War is also the backdrop for the history written by the Jesuit scholar Famiano Strada (1572–1649), De Bello Belgico (“On the Low Countries’ War”), which recounts the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) and the revolt of the Seventeen Provinces against Spanish Habsburg rule. Featuring a frontispiece that depicts the Low Countries as the Leo Belgicus (the Belgian Lion), the work transforms cartographic boundaries into a roaring beast. Here, the map ceases to be a passive record of physical territory; it becomes an ideological emblem of military might, resistance, and emerging national sovereignty.

Borders as we know them today are often surprisingly recent. Modern nation-states like Italy and Germany have existed only since the 19th century, while the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 redrew the geopolitical landscape overnight into formerly independent nations. Historical narratives and shifting powers are indeed readily visible in maps. Between 1971 and his death in 1994, the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti produced over 150 Mappe (Maps), large embroidered tapestries executed by Afghan women, in which national flags fill the contours of each country, physically documenting the volatile nature of global borders across two decades

Some maps are truly iconic, their contours standing as a shorthand for the state itself, as is the case for the French hexagon, or the Italian boot. Others might not be as widely known globally, but they are to the citizens of that country. I love this cheese platter that friends gifted me, designed by Roberto Niederer (1928–88) for his company Glasi Hergiswil. The thick poured-glass platter contains the outline of Switzerland, and within the country, circles allude to the distinctive holes of the cheese known to the world as Swiss (in fact, Emmental).

Psychological Mapping

Just as maps can define physical political borders or convey ideas about a country, they can also chart intangible internal landscapes. In her novel Clélie, 17th-century French author Madeleine de Scudéry included La Carte de Tendre, which maps the emotional terrain of love. Using the visual language of rivers, villages, and seas, the map charts the precarious paths of affection. One navigates down the River of Estime, traverses villages like Billet-doux (Love Letter) and Sincérité, and risks a fall into the Lac d’Indifférence (Lake of Indifference) or the Mer d’Inimitié (Sea of Enmity). Translating psychological states into physical geography, the map provides a visual guide for navigating social relationships, where spatial movement captures the temporal development of amorous pursuits.

Sometimes the world envisioned by an author is so complex that publications require maps to help orient the reader, and this is nowhere truer than in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. This visionary poem takes us alongside the poet through the three realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, each defined by a complex topography. Thus, from very early on, the text was accompanied by diagrams and maps, with countless artists taking up the challenge—some as famous as Sandro Botticelli. I cannot resist including this image by Michelangelo Caetani (1804–1882), an Italian nobleman, politician, and Dante scholar, who used the then-new medium of chromolithography to illustrate his volume La materia della Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri dichiarata in VI tavole (The Substance of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy Described in VI Plates).

Whether navigating the emotional labyrinths of Scudéry or the ineffable realms of the Dantean afterlife, the very presence of maps proves that the cartographic impulse is nothing but an attempt to give shape to what is fundamentally unmappable and thus to make sense of it. English Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington turned cartography inward to navigate trauma and mental distress. Her Map of Down Below accompanied a short memoir titled Down Below, in which she recounts her harrowing time in an asylum in Spain. The map charts the unspeakable, combining spatial layout with enigmatic personal iconography. The letters and numbers identifying the various sites confer on the map a pseudo-documentary quality: we find a cemetery, several houses, a garden, a bower, an orchard, Carrington’s room, a place labeled “Radiography,” and a library, among others. Linked by an alley and a road that suggest movement, these sites trace Carrington’s journey through madness (a state celebrated within the Surrealist ethos) while affording imagined movement through space despite her confinement. I am reminded of how maps invite “armchair travel,” as Vincent van Gogh poignantly expressed to his brother Theo in 1888: “Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.”

Grayson Perry’s A Map of Days is, according to the artist, a “self-portrait as a fortified town.” At its very center, there’s a little figure next to an inscription that reads “Sense of Self” and the road around it is variously named “Spiritual Side,” “Creative Side,” “Bright Side,” and “Dark Side.” We see streets with names like “Intuition” or “Subjectivity,” but also “Nepotism.” Buildings bear signs such as “Reptilian Brain” or “Lazy.” There’s a park named “Bravado,” a field called “Tradition,” and a river named “Imagination.” For Perry, whose fascination with cartography began in childhood, maps are “symptomatic of our desire to make sense of the unpredictable and irrational in our lives.”

Mapping Change

Maps exist at the intersection of space and time: they capture a moment in history—hence Boetti’s series documenting shifting geopolitical borders. A single map can also allude to change over time. I always joke that the map I show my students when teaching the “Barbarian” invasions looks like a plate of spaghetti! The crisscrossing arrows illustrate the extraordinary distances these tribes traveled over the course of the centuries that preceded the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Maps can capture the disastrous effects of climate change, rendering visible what is currently happening and predicting the scale of what is to come. Over past decades, Maya Lin has produced numerous works charting environmental degradation, notably in her series on endangered waterways (such as her installation Interrupted River: Penobscot, which I mentioned in an earlier essay for the MAJ, addressing the dams that altered the river’s ecosystem). Currently on view at Colby is another work in this series, her wall sculpture Pin River—Kissimmee (2008), in which steel pins render the river. Also on view is a marble sculpture that tracks the damage over time, mapping the diminishing layers of the Arctic Ocean’s ice cap across several decades, from 1980 to 2013. The sculpture is compelling in itself, but the way it is lit adds a trenchant dimension: its outer contour, which corresponds to the earliest date, casts a dark shadow endowed with a paradoxical materiality, born from what has been forever lost. Although marble is a fitting surrogate for ice, it also possesses a solidity that enters into a thought-provoking dialogue with the fragility of melting ice as the climate warms. Its tubular base further evokes the core samples drilled by scientists to explore the earth. Lin’s choice of materials establishes a dialogue between rock and ice that finds a poignant echo in the realities of global warming, as glaciers collapse and mountains crumble when the permafrost holding together their stone thaws.

Lin’s sculpture offers a fitting conclusion to an essay that—as my “Musings” tend to be—rests on a sampling of works I am particularly fond of. Yet across these disparate examples, whether prehistoric sites, medieval manuscripts, early modern books, contemporary art, or even everyday objects, we observe the fundamental imperatives of the cartographic impulse: shaping belief, organizing cognition, and structuring human experience.

 

References

“A Map of Days, 2013, Sir Grayson Perry RA (b. 1960)” RA. Accessed 1 September 2026.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “On Exactitude in Science.” In Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, 325. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. First published as “Del rigor en la ciencia” (under the pseudonym B. Lynch Suarez) in Los Anales de Buenos Aires 1.3 (1946).

Carrington, Leonora. “Down Below,” VVV 4 (1944): 70–86.

Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Book XIV, ch. 2, sec. 1.

Plesch, Véronique. “A Pilgrim’s Progress: Guidebooks to the New Jerusalem in Varallo.” Art on Paper 6.2 (Nov.–Dec. 2001): 50–57.

Serchuk, Camille. “Picturing France in the Fifteenth Century: The Map in BNF MS Fr. 4991.” Imago Mundi: The Interrnational Journal for the History of Cartography 58.2 (2006):133–49.

Van Gogh, Vincent. The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Vol. 2. London: Thames and Hudson, 1958. Quote appears in letter 506 (written from Arles), p. 605.

 

PS: See the current exhibition at the Zentralbibliothek, Zurich, Switzerland, Fantastical Maps from Legendary Stories.