ROME, CARTOGRAPHY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF SPACE

From the human gaze to the map of the world

Cartography was never, in Rome, a mere technique of representation: it was the language of power, an instrument of faith, a battlefield of science. This itinerary covers in six stops the places where Rome learned to describe itself — and where that description always coincided with an act of possession. It starts from the terrace of Castel Sant'Angelo, the reference point for all the great Renaissance and Baroque views of the city. It passes through Palazzo Farnese, where the Farnese Atlas and the vault painted by Annibale Carracci show the porous boundary between cosmography, painting and science. It enters the Biblioteca Angelica — the first public library in Europe — which holds atlases by Ptolemy, Ortelius and Mercator. It measures the Clementine Meridian of Santa Maria degli Angeli, forty-five metres of brass in the floor built to verify the Gregorian calendar reform. It observes the astronomical tower of the Collegio Romano, from which the Jesuits determined longitudes to correct the maps of their missionaries in China and Japan. It arrives finally at the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican: the most explicit monument ever built to cartography as an act of universal government.