Charting the World

Mexico City claims to have more museums than any other city in the world, and I have visited many of them.  And the museums are constantly holding special exhibits, so that no matter how many times I return, there is always something new to see.

Now, during the pandemic, some museums have remained closed, and most of those that are open have not had special exhibits.  Searching on the internet, however, I did find one museum, the Franz Mayer Museum, with a show that sounded interesting.  

The Franz Mayer Museum has the largest collection of decorative arts in Latin America.  Franz Mayer was a German financier who moved to Mexico in 1905 and eventually became a Mexican citizen.  He amassed an enormous collection of objects with an emphasis on Mexican decorative arts from the colonial era through the 19th century.  He donated his collection to the Mexican people, and in 1986 a museum was opened in an 18th century building which once housed a monastery and hospital.

I have visited the museum before, but looking through my blog archive, I realize that I have never written a post about its permanent collection.  That will have to wait for another time, because this post is about their current special exhibit entitled "Trazar el Mundo"... "Charting the World".

Like most museums, only a fraction of the collection is on permanent display.  This exhibit brings together 66 items from the cartographic collection of antique maps, globes, atlases, compasses, and other instruments which were used to map the world.  It may sound boring to some, but even as a child I loved looking at maps.  I found it fascinating to examine these old maps and see how geographers of centuries past depicted the world.

One of the oldest maps in the exhibit is this one by an unknown cartographer.  Florida, Cuba, the coast of Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula are all recognizable.  However, the maker of this map was making a wild guess when he connected a river flowing into the Atlantic in Virginia with another river (the Mississippi?) flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Abraham Ortellius from Antwerp, Belgium, was the creator of the first modern atlas.  This page from the 1579 edition of his work shows part of the colony of New Spain, present day Mexico.  One clearly identifiable feature is Mexico's largest lake, Lake Chapala, which is labeled in Latin as "Chapalicvm Mare".

 

This map of the New World is the work of the Dutchman Joan Blaue, one of the most important mapmakers of the 17th century.  This map dates from between 1620 and 1645. Blaue was noted for surrounding his maps with panels of illustrations.  In this case there are images of native peoples along the sides, and along the top drawings of the major cities of the New World.

The cities shown include Cartagena, Colombia; Mexico City; Cuzco, Peru; and Potosí, Bolivia.

 

This map was published around 1550 in Basel, Switzerland, by the German cartographer Sebastian Munster.  It is based on the maps of the ancient mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy.

The convention of showing faces blowing the winds goes back to the Romans who believed that heads of wind inhabited the sky.

This map of the world, also by Sebastian Munster, shows in its illustrations the belief that the oceans were inhabited by sea monsters.

The Dutch mapmaker Michael Mercator (grandson of Gerardus Mercator, who gave us the Mercator projection often used in maps today) did this map of the New World between 1610 and 1630.  

In this map the southern tip of South America, the island known as Tierra del Fuego, is shown as being connected to the Terra Australis, the unknown southern land.  The concept of Terra Australis was not based on any observation or knowledge of the continent of Antarctica, but in the belief that the land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced out by land in the south.

This leather-bound atlas was published in the 1700s in Augsburg, Germany, by Georg Matthaus Seutter.

This map of North America was also done by Seutter.   On the eastern coast, towns of the English colonies such as Jamestown, Philadelphia, New York and Plymouth appear.  Inland, the Ohio River is shown flowing from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River.  However the west coast is less accurate.  California is shown as an island!  I guess he hypothesized that the Gulf of California that separates Baja California from the Mexican coast extended all the way up.

This map published in Paris in 1808 by Jean-Claude Dezauche approaches modern accuracy.  Recent explorations by Captain James Cook are reflected with the inclusion of places such as Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the coast of Antarctica.