Speaker: Chet Van Duzer, Library of Congress Philip Lee Phillips Society 2023 Fellow, and Board Member, The Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester

Summary: The lives of early modern cartographers are poorly documented compared with those of contemporary writers and painters, yet a source for insights into the lives of cartographers—the self-portraits that they sometimes include in their maps—is largely unexplored. These self-portraits are an important part of the social history of cartography, of how cartographers chose to present themselves; they also function as visual signatures, guarantees of quality, and expressions of pride. In this talk I will examine some of the more striking and evocative cartographic self-portraits from the earliest surviving case in the fourteenth century to examples from pictorial maps of the twentieth century.

Bio: Chet Van Duzer is a leading historian of cartography and a board member of the Lazarus Project at the University of Rochester, which brings multispectral imaging to cultural institutions around the world. He has published extensively on medieval and Renaissance maps; his recent books include Henricus Martellus’s World Map at Yale (c. 1491): Multispectral Imaging, Sources, and Influence, published by Springer in 2019, and Martin Waldseemüller’s Carta marina of 1516: Study and Transcription of the Long Legends, published by Springer in 2020. His book Frames that Speak: Cartouches on Early Modern Maps is forthcoming from Brill.

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEsce2qrTIuE9UaIyywYxnokP4gCE7SrCt7

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.