Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance ItalyThough the practical value of maps during the sixteenth century is well documented, their personal and cultural importance has been relatively underexamined. In Worldly Consumers, Genevieve Carlton explores the growing availability of maps to private consumers during the Italian Renaissance and shows how map acquisition and display became central tools for constructing personal identity and impressing one’s peers. Drawing on a variety of sixteenth-century sources, including household inventories, epigrams, dedications, catalogs, travel books, and advice manuals, Worldly Consumers studies how individuals displayed different maps in their homes as deliberate acts of self-fashioning. One citizen decorated with maps of Bruges, Holland, Flanders, and Amsterdam to remind visitors of his military prowess, for example, while another hung maps of cities where his ancestors fought or governed, in homage to his auspicious family history. Renaissance Italians turned domestic spaces into a microcosm of larger geographical places to craft cosmopolitan, erudite identities for themselves, creating a new class of consumers who drew cultural capital from maps of the time. |
Contents
Finding the Consumers of SixteenthCentury Maps | 1 |
The Visual Tradition and Mapmaking | 21 |
Printing Price and Francesco Rosselli | 51 |
Map Ownership in Venice and Florence 1460 1630 | 75 |
The Demand for Cartographic Novelty | 100 |
Education and Curiosity in Cartographic Prints | 118 |
The Display of Maps in SixteenthCentury Italian Homes | 143 |
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Common terms and phrases
Appresso argued artistic ASF MdP ASV GdP ASV MND atlases Benedetto Bordon Bertelli buyers carta Cartografic century maps Chicago Press city maps city views classical conosciuta consumers contained culture David Woodward de’Barbari depictions displaying maps Early Modern engraved Europe European Renaissance fifteenth Fiorani Florence Florentine Francesco Rosselli Gastaldi genres geographical Giacomo Gastaldi Giovanni Girolamo Ruscelli Hispaniola History of Cartography household inventories Ibid included indicates island Italy Karrow knowledge lire listed locations Magini manuscript map of Venice map ownership mapmakers Maps as Prints market for maps Mauro's medieval mappaemundi mondo navigational charts notaries number of maps paese paesi painted Paolo Forlani popular portego portolan charts portraits printed maps produced Ptolemy Ptolemy’s Ptolemy's Geography quadro regional maps religious images Rome Rosaccio sixteenth century soldi Stato territory tion Tolomeo Tooley universale descrittione University of Chicago University Press Untitled Map Venice viewers visual world maps