UPCOMING EVENTS
Wednesday, April 19, 2023. Behold the Mapmaker: Cartographic Self-Portraits. 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.