Whatever their pretensions as works of art, the earliest landscape paintings, and a great many since, are fundamentally visual records of the world. Some are only loosely related to topography and location and merely catalogue local objects, but most have placed emphasis on the form and structure of locations. As artists became more concerned with expressing the exact structure of locations, some paintings have come to form maps. This article explores those paintings that border on the crafts of cartography and illustration, and maps that aspire to become works of art.
The very earliest landscape paintings, such as some of the remarkable frescoes at Thera, Greece, dating from before 1627 BCE, have loose spatial organisation.
In this view of the Akrotiri River, birds, beasts and plants found along its course are placed decoratively rather than topographically, forming an inventory of what you could have expected to find there. The river itself appears in plan, as if seen from vertically overhead, in a sophisticated projection for the time. The objects themselves are portrayed from the side, almost as symbols might appear on a modern map. However these birds, beasts and plants are not mere symbols: most are depicted in detail, using two or more different colours to give them form.
The site at Thera contains an even more remarkable painting known as the Flotilla Fresco. Although these frescoes have been dated to before a catastrophic volcanic explosion in about 1627 BC destroyed the local (and most of the Minoan) civilisation, it isn’t known whether the frescoes are of similar dates.
Looking in more detail at this fresco reveals that it depicts local topography fairly accurately, showing a flotilla of boats setting off from one town, and crossing to another.
There appears to be considerable accuracy in the depiction of buildings and people in the towns, rather than the more symbolic objects shown in the Akrotiri River.
The later making of maps was an activity that frequently overlapped with artistic rendering of landscapes. Early mappa mundi depictions of the medieval world usually lacked painterly embellishment, but more local maps were more commonly based on painted and entirely imaginary aerial views.
The most famous artistic mapmaker was the polymath Leonardo da Vinci. His finely detailed Plan of Imola from 1502 (above) was made in his advisory role to a succession of the great courts of Italy. It’s the first map to adopt this imaginary bird’s eye view, and dates from when Leonardo was military engineer to Cesare Borgia.
Below is Leonardo’s Topographic View of the Countryside around the Plain of Arezzo and the Val di Chiana from the same year. This provides an overview of the area, with carefully painted miniatures signifying its towns and cities, another tradition which extends to modern mapmaking.
The next highly topographic painting has a problem with dates and attribution, in that it’s usually attributed to Joachim Patinir, who died in 1524, a year before the The Battle of Pavia took place, and this painting is normally dated to about 1530.
Largely forgotten now, this battle between the Spanish-Imperial and French armies outside the city walls of Pavia, Italy, resulted in a resounding defeat of the French. There are significant differences between this painting and one by Ruprecht Heller (1529), which also attempts to place the armies and events in their topographic context.
In 1547, Nicholas Vallard or a contributor painted what’s believed to be the first map of Australia, then termed the East Coast of Jave la Grande, shown here shown in a much later print. Against a labelled outline of the coast, as far as it was known then, is a catalogue of people, their dwellings, beasts, and aquatic creatures that the artist thought might be found there.
The objects shown are integrated into a view with a consistent projection, and scaled to provide a sense of perspective. However they’re clearly out of proportion to the coastline. This visual information is supplemented by panoramas running along the left and right edges of the map.
Of the two views that he painted of his adopted home town Toledo, El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) made one to display both a topographic view and an inset map of the city. View and Plan of Toledo (1610-4) is by no means the only painting to show a paper map, but is unusual for providing such help in relating the map to the ground it depicts.
During the centuries of exploration, discovery and subsequent empire-building, the work of professional cartographers was often supplemented by more painterly views. Joan Vinckeboons (1617–70), who is known for his map-making rather than as an artist, made many landscape views of the new lands using pen and watercolour, such as this of Havana, Cuba (c 1639). These were later published in collections, and converted into more conventional plans and charts.
In both World Wars, agents working behind enemy lines posed as painters in order to create landscape drawings and paintings, which were then used to generate maps of the disposition of heavy guns and other military features. Many cartographers have also turned maps into aerial views and published them as engravings and other prints. Topographic views are also standard in the repertoire of illustrators, and remain very popular in books for both adults and children, covering history, geography, and of course travel guides.