The Incredible Modernity of Orbis Terrarum Maps

When we look at a medieval planisphere, like the beautiful Mappa Mundi kept at Hereford in England or Ebstorf in Germany, or even the more sophisticated Fra’ Mauro’s map, the first thing that strikes us about it is the very archaic and imprecise appearance, not respectful of what for us is familiarly the image of the continents and seas that make up the earth’s surface. What makes these globes even more eccentric is their sometimes exaggeratedly geometric shape, made of half and quarter circles, which are often populated by mysterious animals and mythological monsters, and represented on a kind of plate that strongly recalls our mistaken belief that men of the Middle Ages believed in a flat earth.

However, if we look more carefully at these kinds of representations of the world, we might perhaps notice some features of surprising modernity. Among the most paradoxical aspects of the world we live in today, in fact, which we habitually call global, is the difficulty we still have in considering the world as a unity. In the medieval Orbis-Terrarum maps the most striking thing is their conceptual effort in representing and conceptualizing the earth globally. In most of these representations the observer is given a universal and unitary conception of the earth. The physiognomy of this is obviously very different from how we know it today, but the lucidity of its global representation, which like every planisphere is a conceptual abstraction, remains surprising.

Certainly their representation of the world reflects a theological vision of reality, for these instruments responded to different needs from those we have today, but they certainly share with modern planispheres the fact that they wanted to embrace the entire surface of the earth, while at the same time trying to respond to the needs of their time, which were essentially of eschatological nature. When we look at one of these representations of the earth’s surface in the future, let us remember that it is precisely in their theological universalism that are the foundations of the modern concept of a global world. [David Salomoni]