THE ART OF MARGINALIA
Sáenz-López Pérez, Sandra. Marginalia in cARTography. Madison, WI: Chazen Museum
of Art-University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014. 85 pages, softbound/online PDF, illus, bibliography.
ISBN: 978–0-9914859-0-1. See footnote below for source of a free copy.
Reviewed by Leah Michelle Thomas
C
artography remains a marginalized art form as
Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez conveys in her catalog
for the exhibition Marginalia in cARTography. She
curated this exhibition at the Chazen Museum of Art in
Madison, Wisconsin, on display from 28 February through
18 May 2014.1 Pérez, an art historian, was a Postdoctoral
Researcher at the Research Center for the Humanities and
Social Sciences at the Spanish National Research Council.
She was also appointed David Woodward Memorial
Fellow in the History of Cartography for 2012–2013.
The Chazen Museum of Art offers the catalog online for
download in both low- and high-resolution PDF files.
This review is based on the high-resolution PDF file. The
convenient feature of built-in links within the PDF file allows the reader to go directly to the forty-four plates as
they are referenced. The plates follow approximately thirty-three pages of text, excluding the introductory material
and the bibliography. The catalog includes fourteen maps
and other images within the text. Russell Panczenko,
Director of the Chazen Museum of Art, and Matthew
Edney, Director of the History of Cartography Project,
contributed individual prologues. Of significance, Pérez
dedicates this catalog to David Woodward (1942–2004),
editor of the seminal Art and Cartography: Six Historical
Essays (1987). This dedication, aside from the catalog’s
title, immediately connects art and cartography. More specifically, this catalog defines and considers marginalia as
art and marginalia’s significance to cartography.
Pérez introduces marginalia with its nineteenth-century
etymology and clearly states that for the exhibition marginalia refers to images in maps. She insightfully analyzes marginalia in cartography to illumine how marginalia informs
maps and performs as an essential component to read maps.
She constructs a narrative of marginalia beginning with annotations and maps as marginalia to illustrate the evolution of marginalia in maps. In her transition from marginalia in illuminated manuscripts to maps, she provides the
example of a T-O map as marginalia in Isidore of Seville’s
(ca. 560–636) Etymologies (plate 3). Furthermore, a distinction between cartographer and artist did not exist until later
when cartography was perceived as a science rather than as
an art in the early fifteenth century with the rediscovery of
Ptolemy’s Geography (2nd century CE) and Gerard Mercator’s
(1512–1594) mathematical applications to cartography. At
the same time, Pérez argues that maps continued to be art
but were evaluated through a scientific lens. Her emphasis
on marginalia in maps supports this claim because of the
“aesthetic sense” that marginalia allots to maps (6).
Pérez reviews maps chronologically to reveal the
changes in marginalia in maps. These changes range from
the migration of marginalia from maps as marginalia, to
marginalia of maps, to the centralization of marginalia in
maps. In the section “A Geocentric Universe and a Tripartite
World,” she includes the Psalter Map (ca. 1265) (fig. 2),
with its eastern monstrous marginalia, to discuss the tripartite world. In her next section “’Miss America and her sisters’ at the Four Corners of the Map,” Sebastian Münster’s
(1488–1552) Typus Cosmographicus Universalis (1537)
(plate 9) shows the transformation of the tripartite model
in the map’s portrayal of America. In these examples she describes the marginalia, especially the relationship between
cannibalism and monstrous peoples in both Asia and
America, which she suggests is to be “explained again by
the identification of both East and West Indies” (11). Such
marginalia communicated continental and cultural hierarchies. Abraham Ortelius’s (1527–1598) title page to his
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The Art of Marginalia
atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) (plate 13) and Johann
Christoph Weigel’s (1654–1725) Atlas portatilis (ca. 1740)
(plate 19) position Europe at the top as superior to the other continents. In her section “’Because this space was empty,
and lifelike pictures of exotic things almost always please
scholars,’” maps incorporated ethnographic and exotic imagery in empty space as exemplified in Jodocus Hondius’s
(1563–1612) America (1619), originally published in 1606
and reissued by Hondius’s widow Coletta van den Keere
(1565–1629) in 1619 (plate 21). In “Maps, a World of
Knowledge,” Pérez’s fourth section, she elaborates on the
ethnographic framing of maps such as those by Willem
Janszoon Blaeu (1571–1638) (plate 27) and Frederick de
Wit (1630–1706) (plate 23). Suggesting that maps represented knowledge through an emphasis on science as John
Speed’s (1552–1629) A New and Accurate Map of the World
(1627) shows (plate 28), she asserts that although maps
claimed accuracy, many were “still rooted in the ancient tradition that persisted in the Middle Ages” (24).
In her section “Titles in Cartouches: An Image Is Worth
a Thousand Words,” she posits the cartouche as narrative,
a concept predominately from G.N.G. Clarke. She historicizes the term cartouche, which comes from the “Italian cartoccio, meaning a roll or twist of paper” (29). Accordingly,
cartouches began to appear on maps in the sixteenth century. Imagery used in cartouches focuses on power dynamics between peoples and nations as well as other cultural aspects. She contrasts Native Americans and the French in the
title cartouche on The Partie Occidentale du Canada ou de la
Nouvelle France by Vincenzo Maria Coronelli (1688) (plate
35). While Native Americans and the French appear to coexist in this cartouche, she avers this image manifests social
stratification accentuated by a smaller-scale cartouche that
exhibits cannibalism. She continues to illustrate the narrative function of the cartouche by tracing popular imagery
in cartouches such as ruins and national and international conflicts. Lastly, in this section she addresses the use of
blank space to encourage colonization.
In her final section “Reaching for the Edges and
Mapping Us,” she concludes that marginalia maps “us.”
She elucidates, “In the blank spaces on maps there is
room for imagination, and that is where men have relegated all that, whether worshiped or feared, is unknown,
all that is not familiar” (36). This statement relates cartographers’ use of “empty space” to the display of the
exotic, to the encouragement of colonization, and to the
mapping of “us.” Hence, marginalia in maps reflects the
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cultural imagination at play in mapping. Pérez features
The Man of Commerce (1889) by A.F. McKay, a map that
centralizes marginalia by resituating marginalia as the
map (plate 42). She concludes with the satirical A True
and Undistorted Map of the U.S.A. Made in Wisconsin
(1952) by Les Williams that renders Wisconsin the largest
part of the United States with pictorial representations of
Wisconsin’s natural features, recreational activities, cultural aspects, and natural and manufactured resources. This
satirical depiction of Wisconsin and the centralization of
marginalia highlight the subjectivity and art of maps.
Marginalia in cARTography evinces marginalia’s functions not only to inform maps but also to reflect “us.”
Through the mapping of “others,” whether as monstrous
or as ethnographic objects, Pérez exposes how maps map
“us.” Related, she implicitly imparts that cartographers
have mapped themselves and their cultures throughout
time. For mapping “others” unveils much, if not more,
about the one doing the mapping. In this way, Pérez’s exhibition catalog redefines marginalia as art and contributes
to scholarship on maps as art. Her expansive chronological exploration offers a wider perspective on marginalia in
cartography to delineate the richness and complexity of
this art that has always said more about “us” than “others.”
—Leah Thomas, a member of the Washington Map Society, is
former Senior Maps Cataloger and Cataloging Coordinator at
The Library of Virginia. She was Program Chair for the 2014
Alan & Nathalie Voorhees Lecture on the History of Cartography. She recently earned her PhD in the interdisciplinary program Media, Art, & Text at Virginia Commonwealth University
(VCU), where she studied the intersection between cartography
and literature of the long eighteenth century. She is now editor of
British Virginia Maps, a sub-series of British Virginia, edited
by Dr. Joshua Eckhardt at VCU. Her areas of interests include
the relationship among cartography, literature, and art, as well
as early cartography of the Americas. She reviewed Journeys
Beyond the Neatline: Expanding the Boundaries of Cartography in this journal’s issue 81 (Fall 2011).
(ENDNOTES)
1 For information about the exhibition, go to http://www.
chazen.wisc.edu/visit/events-calendar/event/marginalia-incartography/. For the exhibition catalog, go to http://www.
chazen.wisc.edu/about/multimedia-center/publications/.